US Treasury Targets Chinese Money Laundering Networks

The US Department of the Treasury has convened a FinCEN Exchange bringing together global financial institutions, US federal law enforcement agencies and Treasury officials to strengthen efforts to identify and dismantle sophisticated money laundering networks. The Immediate Release, dated 19 December 2025, underscores the growing regulatory and enforcement focus on Chinese money laundering networks and their role in facilitating transnational organised crime.

The Exchange focused on denying individual Chinese money launderers access to the US and global financial systems. FinCEN highlighted that these actors are a significant threat to the integrity of the financial system, regularly laundering proceeds on behalf of transnational criminal organisations, including Mexico-based drug cartels. The Treasury confirmed it will continue engagement with the People’s Republic of China to address illicit finance risks, signalling that financial crime enforcement remains a geopolitical as well as regulatory priority.

FinCEN disclosed that since publishing its Chinese Money Laundering Networks Advisory and Financial Trend Analysis in August, it has received more than 500 Suspicious Activity Reports linked to the advisory. These reports covered approximately $7.1 billion in suspected illicit transactions between December 2018 and November 2025. The scale and duration of the activity reinforce regulatory concerns that these networks are entrenched, adaptive and capable of exploiting weaknesses across the international financial system.

A central theme of the Exchange was the critical role of financial institutions in detecting and disrupting complex money laundering typologies. FinCEN provided targeted financial intelligence to participating firms and emphasised the importance of high-quality Bank Secrecy Act reporting. The message to industry was clear: banks and other regulated entities are uniquely positioned to identify networked activity and must continue to enhance the depth, consistency and analytical value of their suspicious activity reporting.

The FinCEN Exchange programme, established in 2017 and codified under the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, reflects a sustained shift towards intelligence-led, public-private collaboration. For compliance teams, the latest Exchange reinforces expectations around proactive engagement, typology awareness and the strategic use of data to identify high-impact financial crime threats. As enforcement agencies increasingly focus on network-based risk rather than isolated transactions, firms should expect continued scrutiny of how effectively they contribute to collective efforts to disrupt large-scale money laundering operations.

Read the press release here.