Treasury Dept. empowers banks to crack down on cartels, illegal immigrant labor

The Trump administration is arming the nation’s local banks with sweeping new powers to share customer surveillance video and cyber data to hunt down cartel financiers and illegal immigration fraud rings, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday.The move comes as payroll tax fraud schemes accounted for a staggering $2.5 billion in suspicious banking activity in 2025, he told a group of bankers in Houston.Bessent tied the massive financial exploitation directly to the border crisis, blaming years of “unchecked illegal immigration under the Biden administration” that have allowed criminal gangs to move dirty money through the US financial system.The crackdown builds on a recent Treasury policy advisory urging banks to report suspicious activity to the authorities.Banks can now swap video surveillance footage and cyber data, such as IP addresses, among one another, Bessent said.The idea is that collaborating on suspicious cases will empower them to bring cases to the feds.Treasury highlighted specific fraud indicators such as instances when an account adds new pay recipients, then transfers massive sums to them.

Other examples include login activity from geographically distant places or multiple accounts using similar identifying information.The data-sharing powers are based on the Patriot Act — Section 314(b), specifically — according to Bessent.“Americans lose hundreds of billions of dollars to fraud each year,” he told a group of Houston bankers.“At Treasury, we follow the money, and we know financial institutions are often the first to see suspicious activity in real time.They need the tools to act quickly and share information that can help stop fraud before it spreads.”Last week, Treasury’s elite Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, issued an advisory targeting the underground economy that fuels the border crisis.The document urged banks to take initial steps to crack down on illegal immigrant labor by reporting specific “...