Exposing the Chinese Money Laundering Networks Behind Global Crime
Over $320 billion in suspicious transactions and more than $100 billion in crypto gets processed by Chinese-language laundering networks in a single year. Chinese money laundering organisations (CMLOs) have become the dominant infrastructure behind global illicit finance.
This expert session shows what a real CMLO case looks like, and why standard tooling can’t resolve it.
The threat from Chinese money laundering organisations has shifted from a secondary concern to one of the defining challenges in global financial crime.
CMLOs now serve as critical infrastructure for drug trafficking networks, Southeast Asian fraud factories, and crypto-denominated illicit markets operating at a scale that rivals any other money laundering network in the world.
Adrian led the UK’s operational response to fraud and economic crime as Director of the National Economic Crime Centre and the UK Financial Intelligence Unit, both housed within the National Crime Agency. There he built a data-sharing partnership with UK banks, launched the NCA’s largest operation against global money laundering, and worked with the technology sector to counter scam-centre activity in South East Asia. He was previously Head of Security and Data Risk at NatWest and Head of Incident Management at the National Cyber Security Centre. He now advises technology and professional services firms on fraud, economic crime, and cyber security.
Jorge joined the Spanish National Police in 2021 after working in the private financial sector, including time at Deloitte. He was assigned to the Money Laundering Brigade within the Central Unit for Economic and Fiscal Crime (UDEF), where he specialises in organised crime and underground banking, with a focus on Chinese criminal organisations. His casework includes the Bazar, Karasu, Hotpot, Porto, and Zinc investigations. He contributes to Europol’s Operational Task Force Horizon on Chinese organised crime and underground banking, and from April 2025 to April 2026 served at Europol headquarters as a Seconded National Expert, training law enforcement agencies across Europe on the subject.
Rob is a Solutions Analyst at Sayari with ten years of experience at the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, specialising in the Arab Middle East, Turkey, and Iran. He brings deep regional expertise to the intersection of open-source intelligence and corporate risk.
Host & interviewer, drawing out the operational detail of a real CMLO investigation. Account Director at Sayari.
How CMLOs are actually structured
The layering, the nominee networks, and the cross-border patterns that let these systems hide in plain sight, and why their links to organised crime and poly-criminality make them so hard to map.
Where investigations stall
The exact points where beneficial ownership tracing breaks down, drawn from the typologies investigators are seeing in the field.
How to efficiently map ownership
A live look at how to do it across 250+ jurisdictions, using real data, and how it changes what an investigator can prove.
By the end, you’ll know who these networks are, how they operate, and where to look, whether you’re in financial intelligence, compliance, or law enforcement.