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. Law enforcement and financial intelligence practitioners show what a real CMLO case looks like — and why standard tooling can’t resolve it.
CMLOs now serve as critical infrastructure for drug trafficking networks, Southeast Asian fraud factories, and crypto-denominated illicit markets. The threat has shifted from a secondary concern to one of the defining challenges in global financial crime — operating at a scale that rivals any other money laundering network in the world. This session goes inside a real CMLO investigation with the practitioners who ran it.
What Was Covered
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How CMLOs Are Actually Structured
The layering, nominee networks, and 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.
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Where Investigations Stall
The exact points where beneficial ownership tracing breaks down, drawn from the typologies investigators are seeing in the field — including real case patterns from Europol operations.
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The Intelligence Gap in Standard Tooling
Why list-based screening and conventional AML platforms fail to surface CMLO exposure — and what class of data actually closes the gap.
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How to Efficiently Map Ownership Across 250+ Jurisdictions
A live look at tracing ownership using real data, and how it changes what an investigator can prove in court or in a SAR.
Who Should Watch
This session was built for the financial crime and law enforcement community working on the hardest end of the problem:
- Financial intelligence units and AML investigators at banks and financial institutions
- Law enforcement agencies working organised crime, money laundering, and asset recovery
- Compliance teams managing correspondent banking, trade finance, and high-risk jurisdiction exposure
- Sanctions and financial crime analysts responsible for CMLO typology research
- Risk officers at crypto platforms and payment providers with exposure to Chinese-language laundering networks
Need to trace ownership across Chinese and cross-border registries?
See how Sayari surfaces the corporate structures behind CMLO networks — across 250+ jurisdictions including foreign-language registries.
Request a Demo
Adrian Searle
Senior Advisor & RUSI Senior Associate Fellow | Former Director, NECC & UKFIU, National Crime Agency
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. He built the NCA’s data-sharing partnership with UK banks, launched its largest operation against global money laundering, and worked with the technology sector to counter scam-centre activity in South East Asia. Previously Head of Security and Data Risk at NatWest and Head of Incident Management at the National Cyber Security Centre.
Jorge Angulo Lopez
Police Officer, Money Laundering Brigade (UDEF) | Cuerpo Nacional de Policía
Assigned to the Central Unit for Economic and Fiscal Crime (UDEF), Jorge 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. From April 2025 to April 2026 he served at Europol headquarters as a Seconded National Expert, training law enforcement agencies across Europe on Chinese organised crime and underground banking.
Rob Williams
Solutions Analyst | Sayari
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.
Claudio Di Gregorio
Host & Moderator, Account Director | Sayari
Host and interviewer, drawing out the operational detail of a real CMLO investigation. Account Director at Sayari.