ICYMI: Attorney General Alan Wilson demands accountability from Chinese messaging app WeChat about fentanyl trafficking, money laundering

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – Attorney General Alan Wilson and five bipartisan attorneys general today demanded accountability from WeChat over concerns that the Chinese messaging app is a key enabler of fentanyl trafficking and illegal money laundering in the United States. Fentanyl has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States.  

“WeChat has become a digital safe haven for fentanyl traffickers and money launderers, and they know it,” said Attorney General Wilson. “This Chinese-owned app is helping cartels push poison into our communities and move blood money across the globe. Enough is enough. If WeChat won’t shut down these criminal operations on their platform, we’ll use every legal tool available to expose them and stop them. South Carolina will not stand by while American lives are destroyed for profit.”

WeChat is a messaging and payment app used by over a billion people in China and over 19 million people in the United States, including in South Carolina. Several law enforcement and financial crime investigations have revealed that WeChat allows for fentanyl traffickers to communicate about how to launder the money from fentanyl and other drug sales. WeChat is encrypted, so traffickers use the app to move millions of dollars in cash from the United States through a complicated set of transactions to China, and then to Mexico, where the bulk of fentanyl is produced.  

In South Carolina and in the United States, it’s illegal to launder drug money. The attorneys general are demanding that WeChat provide specific answers to the states in the next 30 days about what steps WeChat is taking to stop this dangerous and unlawful activity from taking place on their platform.  

Across the country, WeChat has played a key role in several criminal prosecutions targeting fentanyl trafficking operations, including:  

• The 2021 conviction of money launderer Xizhi Li for running a transnational criminal ring using WeChat to move bulk cash between Chinese financial operations and drug cartels.  
• Operation Chem Capture, a 2023 incident where eight companies and 12 people were indicted for using apps, including WeChat, to sell the chemicals used to make fentanyl.  
• Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel and Chinese money laundering organizations use WeChat to launder the proceeds of fentanyl sales in the United States.  
• Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested and charged three members of an international money laundering ring in South Carolina for allegedly using WeChat to launder money from fentanyl sales. 

Yet, despite this pattern of misuse, WeChat has not taken any action to address the issues in its app that facilitate fentanyl trafficking and money laundering.  

North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, and New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin joined together on this letter to WeChat.  

You can read the letter here.

You can watch the press conference here.