Some fake sellers take your crypto and never ship what you ordered, or phishing sites that look like real marketplaces but steal your login info. But once you start doing illegal things, like buying drugs or stolen credit cards, that’s when you’re breaking the law. For sellers, it’s often about making money while staying off the radar. Others are looking for stolen data, hacking services, or even banned books and political content.
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The market in firearms appears to attract extra attention from law enforcement, as does the selling of other weapons such as certain types of knives and blades. Markets such as AlphaBay Market have hosted a significant share of the commercial fraud market, featuring carding, counterfeiting and many related services. To list on a market, a vendor may have undergone an application process via referral, proof of reputation from another market or given a cash deposit to the market. Following Operation Onymous, there was a substantial increase in PGP support from vendors, with PGP use on two marketplaces near 90%.
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There’s a basketball court or corner hoop everywhere you look in Venezuela, a reflection of the country’s love for the game — its most successful team sport on the international stage for decades. In March of this year, García Rivas was sanctioned by the Canadian government for his links to human rights violations. The police official did not respond to questions from journalists on his connections to the Pioneros del Ávila. Social security documents obtained by OCCRP show that she has been an official with the Bolivarian National Police since 2023. Department of Treasury for his role in “repression of the Venezuelan people and denial of their citizens’ rights to a free and fair election.” He was also identified by the United Nations as part of the chain of command responsible for torture and mistreatment of prisoners in El Helicoide. The people locked up inside El Helicoide know that basketball games are taking place above them, but cannot hear them through the facility’s concrete walls, according to a family member of one of the prisoners, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.
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- At 31, Marcos is running a business as a high-level bachaquero — a person who works like an ant — with wealthy clients who can still buy food that doesn't get to the supermarkets.
- Apart from the dark web markets that are operating online today, some raided platforms influenced many markets.
- Venezuela has witnessed numerous reversals of the flow of contraband oil from within and outside its own borders.
- A number of studies suggest that markets such as Silk Road may have helped users reduce the harm caused by illicit drug use, particularly compared with street-based drug marketplaces.
- Some of the owners were placed on trial and even jailed, while others escaped the country, having safely squirreled money away in Switzerland and other secrecy havens.
“There was still an idea that illegal mining was fought by going into the field and destroying some dredges,” Rajão said. While gold laundering was rife inside the chilled DTVMs’ offices, public authorities were still focused on destroying machinery in garimpos deep into the forest. DTVMs used to have small offices close to the gold-producing sites, especially in Itaituba. Although they can operate within the legal framework, many don’t follow environmental regulations and open their mines in forbidden areas, like Indigenous territories. Today, however, garimpos’ owners run large enterprises that spend millions of dollars in backhoes and bulldozers, leaving behind devastating environmental impacts. Garimpos, which account for about one-third of Brazil’s gold production, are a simplified mining practice not subjected to the same strict environmental requirements as large-scale mines.
Figure 1: Major Economic Collapses, Post-1900
These were serious but more significantly, US President Donald Trump imposed secondary sanctions on PDVSA a year later, subjecting any othercountry or company that did business with PDVSA to US sanctions. The ‘maximum pressure’ campaign involved recognising congressman Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president and imposing sanctions on Venezuela and its national oil company, PDVSA. This was already the 15th largest economic crisis in modern history and the largest outside war, revolution or state collapse. Over the next four years, as inflation torched what was left of domestic industry, an untold number of businesses were forced to close and millions of Venezuelans left the country.
In April 2015, an investigation conducted by El Universo, a newspaper in Ecuador, and the Miami-based El Nuevo Herald, exposed dozens of companies that made transfers to Ecuador in exchange for fake exports to Venezuela. However, the law differentiates between private and public companies and includes exemptions for public companies and government employees. In November 2014, the Venezuelan government revised the Anti-Corruption Law and created a new law enforcement organization to combat corruption. The revision includes roughly 900 types of offenses that can be prosecuted as “organized crime.” One legal expert noted such a broad mandate gives the government too much power.
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Not by chance, Brazil historically exported more gold than it produced, indicating part of the metal was coming from undeclared areas. However, according to sources heard by Mongabay, the Flygold criminal organization is not an isolated case. Even global supply chain data platforms like Panjiva have a hard time in tracking these shipments. However, the journalists who authored the investigation said the country’s figures “have gaps that prevent a precise analysis.”
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Within five years, the government’s income had increased sixfold. Since 2014, nearly eight million Venezuelan refugees have fled to neighboring countries and beyond, where some governments have granted them temporary residency. However, the economy grew by 5 percent in 2023, and the government forecasts it will reach 8 percent in 2024.
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The money supply was regularly expanded by 20-30% per month, pushing Venezuela into a hyperinflationary spiral. The fiscal deficit widened to record levels as taxes and the oil industry collapsed. Even as GDP contracted for the third and fourth consecutive year (by a colossal 17% in 2016 and 16% in 2017), Maduro refused to rationalise economic policy. It was all for nothing, as the country defaulted on its debt a few years later anyway. Due to the aggressively pro-cyclical fiscal policy during the prior decade, the government was highly indebted and did not have meaningful savings.
Venezuelans involved in the permuta market held fortunes at the lender worth at least 500 million Swiss francs, according to leaked banking data analyzed by journalists as part of the Suisse Secrets project. Credit Suisse employee Francisco “Pancho” Illarramendi led a team at the bank to develop currency trading mechanisms that would later become instrumental to the permuta market. Well before he was sanctioned, González was a key player in the complicated bond-based parallel market that sprang out of Venezuela’s attempts at currency control in the early 2000s. A U.S. Treasury Department sanctions notice calls him a testaferro, a financial front man hiding money for corrupt Venezuelan politicians. Law enforcement agencies actively monitor these markets and can track users despite anonymity measures.
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- Read more about the project, where the data came from, and what it means.
- Brazilian gasoline could bring in even higher margins, with reports stating that smuggled Brazilian fuel was selling as high as $4 to $6 a liter in Bolívar state and was primarily used to run machinery needed for illegal gold mining.
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- The economist told OCCRP that if the total value of government bonds issued between 2003 and 2010 was around $70 billion, intermediaries like the casas de bolsa would have earned around $10-12 billion.
The FinCEN Files show public money pouring from the collapsing country. “Why did they generate such huge opportunities for just a few people? His lawyers claimed that financial instruments issued by the bank to dump Venezuelan government debt, called “credit linked notes,” were used by Illarramendi and a co-conspirator. Illarramendi later set up hedge funds for wealthy investors, but ran afoul of U.S. law enforcement, which accused him of orchestrating a $700-million Ponzi scheme through the very same offshore currency-exchange system he’d helped create. Between 1994 and 2004, Illarramendi led a team at Credit Suisse in developing currency arbitrage mechanisms that, according to his lawyers, would later “set the standard” for cross-currency transactions across the permuta market.
Venezuela, already under sanctions from the US, is expected to get added to a global watchdog’s “gray list” for not making sufficient progress to stem illicit financial flows. This has sparked rumours the government is not admitting it cannot control the economy. A last report on shortages by the government revealed 22.4 percent of essential goods are not in stock. And as Venezuela printed more money to fund social programmes, the bolivar was further devalued. Police and the national guard were deployed in a brutal crackdown to try and arrest illegal vendors.
