Customs Service Targets Money Launderers

The U.S. Customs Service is using a sophisticated new computer analysis of imports and exports to pinpoint inflated prices for items such as salad dressing and cameras that may hide laundered drug profits, Customs Commissioner Carol Hallett said Monday.

Recently, economists at Florida International University showed how U.S.-based trading companies routinely priced items at several times the market rate when declaring the value of products.

“These economists found salad dressing exported at $720 a bottle, instant cameras shipped out at $3,127 each and cut rubies imported for a fraction of the world market price,” said Hallett in a speech to a Federal Bar Assn. conference on money laundering.

Schemes used by money launderers have grown more complex as the United States and other countries have tightened banking industry regulations on cash transactions.

The computerization of international trade and financial transactions has provided criminal networks with an opportunity to disguise illegal profits as legitimate business, Hallett said.

The Customs Service’s aim is to get other countries to help take a big bite out of drug profits funneled through money-laundering schemes, she said.

“The drug trafficker is as addicted to the money as the drug user is to the drugs,” Hallett said. “Once the monetary incentive is gone, so is the criminal.”

Customs will hold a dozen seminars this year to teach bank and government employees in other countries how to detect money laundering.

The Customs Service has also devised a system that allows tipsters who anonymously turn in money-laundering criminals to collect as much as $250,000 in rewards.

Hallet gave the example of a California bank clerk who, over a period of two years, gave information that enabled Customs to recover millions in laundered drug profits.