, the narrators explain the difficulty of transporting money into and out of the US because of its physical size. The drug trade is a cash business, as they say, so if you sell a lot of drugs, you end up with a lot of cash.
Tracking the cash was one of the first things that US narcotics agents did, and way back in the 1960s, then president Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act, which required all banks to report transactions over $10,000. And from that moment, money laundering was born. The attempts by the drug trade to try to hide the origins of their money eventually resulted in the creation of the Financial Action Task Force in 1989. During what was then the first Group of Seven meeting in Paris in 1989, international standards were created to combat international financial crimes such as money laundering. After 9/11, the mandate of FATF was extended to combat terrorism financing.