HOW A MIRROR SWAP WORKS

The above chart, introduced in court, shows how cash from Mexican drug cartels was moved to Chinese money laundering organizations. Xianbing Gan, a money laundering broker in Mexico, had a bank account in China. An associate in the United States collected cash from cartel drug sales, removed an equal amount from a bank account in China and deposited it in Gan’s Chinese account to get around the U.S. banking system and try to avoid detection, according to prosecutors, in what’s called a mirror swap. A second swap was then done in Mexico to complete the money laundering and try to make the illegal drug proceeds look like a legitimate business transaction.