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Trinidad and Tobago authorities have recently opened several investigations into suspected human traffickers, including Chinese nationals who allegedly targeted Venezuelan women and remitted the proceeds back home, a senior police official told ACAMS moneylaundering.com.

At least 35 suspected instances of human trafficking have triggered investigations in Trinidad and Tobago after the Caribbean jurisdiction adopted a law against the crime in 2011, but have yet to secure their first conviction, David West, director of the country’s Police Complaints Authority, told attendees of the ACAMS AML and Financial Crime Conference—Caribbean in Miami on Tuesday.

Police raided three neighborhoods near the capital, Port of Spain, in February, charging two Chinese nationals with holding Venezuelans for sexual exploitation, and the following month charged a third Chinese national and his 23-year-old Venezuelan girlfriend with operating a brothel out of a rented home in Trinidad, the larger and more populated of the two islands.

West did not cite those suspects by name but noted that police have recently focused on Chinese individuals suspected of running front companies and exploiting women from Latin America, including Venezuela, who were trafficked across a six-mile stretch of ocean into Trinidad with the help of complicit police.

The victims generally arrived in Trinidad seeking to work at one of the casinos or restaurants. They were instead forced into prostitution, said West, and saw virtually all of their earnings confiscated by their captors.

The Chinese nationals suspected of running those enterprises usually kept their proceeds in bulk cash at their properties and converted portions of the funds into U.S. dollars at local exchange houses, West told moneylaundering.com after his panel concluded.

Cash was then deposited at banks after being broken into smaller sums to avoid reporting thresholds, or otherwise remitted to China through money services businesses, said West, who did not name the firms or institutions involved.

The Chinese nationals leading the schemes held passports from Venezuela and multiple Caribbean nations that they obtained through citizenship-by-investment programs, said West, who attributed Trinidad and Tobago’s lack of convictions against the crime to date to a historically inefficient court system.

“It’s a problem that we hope to rectify soon.”

The $100 controversy

Despite the public emphasis on trafficking at industry conferences, authorities throughout the Caribbean have only recently begun targeting the crime in earnest, said Tanya McCartney, chief executive of the Bahamas Financial Services Board, an industry and regional group, during a separate panel at the conference.

“It’s not necessarily something that has been on our radar screen,” she said. “For us, this is an emerging theme.”

The U.S. State Department’s latest annual report on global human trafficking categorizes most Caribbean countries as “Tier 2,” meaning they have taken some steps, but not enough to be viewed as sufficiently combating the problem.

One of those Tier 2 countries is Trinidad & Tobago, which the report praises for investigating three potentially complicit police officers but criticizes for not securing a single conviction in the eight years since the jurisdiction adopted the Trafficking in Persons Act.

Human trafficking has also played a role in Trinidad and Tobago’s decision to replace its largest currency denomination, the $100 banknote, which equates to about $15 in the U.S.

A three-week window for exchanging old for newly issued $100 banknotes made from polymer began Monday, with the older version becoming invalid on Jan. 1.

Alvin Hilaire, head of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, attributed the decision to revamp the $100 bill to concerns over durability, but also to unspecified concerns over national security.

“The Central Bank was approached,” Hilaire said in a press conference Monday. “There are many things that we don’t know and many things we don’t need to know, but we are rising to the call.”

West, the police director, confirmed those reasons at the ACAMS conference in Miami on Tuesday, telling the audience that the conversion to new bills is designed to squeeze suspected front companies and other cash-intensive firms involved in illicit activity.

“That [policy change] will allow for cases like this,” West said in reference to investigations of suspected human traffickers from China. “They’re trying to catch those persons who have unexplained wealth, [or] unexplained cash in their mattress.”

Those comments were met with a wave of whispers among the audience, which consisted mostly of Caribbean-based compliance professionals. In a follow-up email to moneylaundering.com, West wrote that ridding Trinidad and Tobago of “dirty money” was a goal of the initiative.

“From my point of view it is a good move, because it forces people to explain where they got the money from when they bring in large amounts,” West wrote in the email.

Contact Daniel Bethencourt at dbethencourt@acams.org