North Korea Laundered Money in US Banks to Avoid Sanctions

North Korea has been laundering money in banks throughout the United States to avoid international sanctions, according to a new report which sourced confidential documents from financial institutions, NBC News reported.

The documents showed groups associated with North Korea allegedly illegally transferred more than $174.8 million through shell companies with the help of Chinese companies to JPMorgan Chase, the Bank of New York Mellon, and other U.S. banks.

The information is a part of the "FinCEN Files" which came from a leak of suspicious activity reports known as SARs, received by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within the Treasury Department.

"As FinCEN has stated previously, the unauthorized disclosure of SARs is a crime that can impact the national security of the United States, compromise law enforcement investigations, and threaten the safety and security of the institutions and individuals who file such reports," the agency told NBC News.

The federal government has turned up its sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom while Pyongyang attempted to develop its nuclear and missile program.

Some wire transfers from companies with dubious ownership were transmitted just days apart in some cases. The transfers had no obvious commercial purposes, according to NBC News.

Eric Lorber, a former official with the Treasury Department during the Trump administration who worked on sanctions against North Korea, said "taken as a whole, you have what really, frankly, looks like a concerted attack by the North Koreans to access the U.S. financial system over an extended period of time through multiple different avenues in ways that were fairly sophisticated."

"The documents you have in front of you, I think, help explain why the North Koreans have been so successful at sanction evasion," Hugh Griffiths, former head of a UN Panel of Experts who tracked Pyongyang's efforts to dodge sanctions, told the network.

Griffiths added, "What you have is gold dust, because so few journalists, or investigators generally, get access to banking internal compliance documentation."

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