Yeah these kinds of articles always have the tendency to exaggerate the scale of what they describe. People have been doing this kind of thing for the past 30-

Yeah these kinds of articles always have the tendency to exaggerate the scale of what they describe. People have been doing this kind of thing for the past 30-40 years, including using a serial number on a dollar bill as a token. None of this is really new except they identified people who want dollars in America (rich Chinese) that are willing to pay a premium for them. This is from 1997 (https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/advisu9.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/advisu9.pd...) when Colombia had capital controls that made accessing dollars very difficult: 1) The Colombian drug cartels export drugs to the United States; 2) Drugs are sold for dollars in the U.S.; 3) A cartel in Colombia enters into a “contract” with the Colombian Black Market Peso Exchanger who is usually in Colombia; 4) The cartel sells its U.S. dollars to the Exchanger’s U.S. agent; 5) Once the U.S. dollars are delivered, the peso exchanger in Colombia deposits the agreed upon equivalent (of U.S. dollars) in Colombian pesos into the cartel’s account in Colombia; (At this point, the cartel representative is out of the picture because he has successfully converted his drug dollars into pesos.) 6) The Colombian Black Market Peso Exchanger now assumes the risk for introducing the laundered drug dollars into the U.S. banking system; this is done through a variety of structured transactions; 7) The Colombian Black Market Peso Exchanger now has a pool of laundered funds in U.S. dollars to sell to Colombian importers who use the dollars to purchase goods, either from the U.S. or from collateral markets; and 8) Finally, these goods are transported to Colombia. And this is still happening on the scale of billions in the LA fashion district, 47th street in Manhattan, electronics distributors in Miami, etc. There are some newer schemes where people involved in healthcare fraud who need cash to pay their "patients"/runners or want money the Medicare fraud investigators can't find will write checks in exchange for cash from drug sales. Essentially it's just being an intermediary for people who want cash and people who want to get rid of cash.