U.S. Department of Justice and Chilean prosecutors have cracked open a massive network of illegally mined contraband with the help of an unlikely informant—the criminal mastermind himself.
According to Bloomberg, Harold Vilches, a 23-year-old Chilean gold smuggler, was responsible for trafficking $80 million of the precious metal before flipping for the Feds.
And the insight he gave was priceless.
The global demand for gold is so high that, despite efforts to regulate the industry, the illicit gold market outstrips the legal one. In fact, the amount of illegal gold entering the U.S. from South America was nearly double the amount of legal ones last year year, the non-profit watchdog group Verite reports.
Vilches started his smuggling network from scratch, using his business savvy and a little help from the Internet along the way. The crafty millennial taught himself to make gold ingots on YouTube and found his supplier via Google.
His tale is an unbelievable one, which even the Chilean investigators who caught him admit. “I thought there was someone behind him, always,” one prosecutor told Bloomberg. After failing to catch any bigger fish, investigators now believe Vilches was the kingpin of a smuggling network that smuggled from Chile to Miami.
Read the full story on Bloomberg here.
—RealClearLife
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