“Transnational Crime”

Canada has spent years asking who is interfering inside its borders. Operation Hard Ball raises a harder question: who is using Canada to interfere, intimidate, or operate beyond them?

That is the core of reverse foreign interference. The term is not yet part of Canadian law, but it belongs in Canada’s national-security vocabulary. It describes cases in which transnational criminal, extremist, or digitally enabled networks use Canadian territory, legal protections, diaspora communities, transport routes, immigration systems, or digital space to target people, institutions, or foreign jurisdictions from Canadian soil.

TORONTO – Great Canadian Entertainment, the casino operator whose Richmond, British Columbia flagship sat at the epicenter of the “Vancouver Model” Chinese transnational money laundering scandal, has been ordered to pay $170,000 in monetary penalties by Ontario’s gaming regulator for failing to adequately identify, assess and monitor high-risk patrons and report suspicious activity — including potential money laundering indicators — at its Pickering Casino Resort east of Toronto.

Canada barely checks cargo leaving its Pacific ports, a gap a new report says traffickers exploit to ship methamphetamine to Australia by the tonne.

The paper, released by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, argues that Vancouver and Prince Rupert move enormous volumes of cargo with little of it meaningfully checked and that no single agency is responsible for closing the gap.

Europe’s most dangerous gangs have dramatically expanded their ranks with hundreds of thousands of members running “corporations of crime” in plain sight, an intelligence report has found.

A 54-page dossier from Europol, the police agency, has laid bare the scale of drug trafficking, cyber crime and migrant-smuggling operations across the Continent.

An estimated 400,000 gangsters work for criminal syndicates, a five-fold increase in only two years.

VANCOUVER — The container arrived carrying twenty industrial rolls of paper, and concealed inside ten of them was 520.6 kilograms of opium — the raw material of the Big Circle Boys’ heroin trade that drove Vancouver’s overdose deaths for decades, before fentanyl exploded in the Downtown Eastside around 2012.

h/t handy n handsome

When police approached a stolen SUV near the funeral of a suspected gang member in Vaughan, Ont., in April 2024, they couldn’t have expected it would help the FBI bring down a violent, transnational cocaine empire tied to the Sinaloa cartel.

Inside the 2023 Ford Explorer with heavily tinted windows, officers found Malik Damion Cunningham, an alleged rival gang member and hitman who U.S. prosecutors say had been hired, armed and trained by Ryan Wedding’s sprawling criminal enterprise.

They were wanted men in India. They reached the United States and Canada on student visas and asylum claims, and from quiet addresses in California and British Columbia they rebuilt the criminal empires they had left behind. American and Canadian police are only now catching up.

In December 2023, a businessman in India picked up a video call and found himself looking at one of the most feared crime bosses in the country. The caller did something strange for a man who had spent years avoiding the law. He let his face be seen. Pay, he told the businessman, or die

PHNOM PENH — A new undercover investigation that set out to map Cambodia’s illegal wildlife trade has instead opened a window onto a far larger criminal ecosystem — one in which industrial scam compounds linked to Chinese transnational criminal networks, China-to-Mexico fentanyl and precursor-linked routes, elite Cambodian corruption, global money laundering and the sale of purported vitality products like “tiger penis wine” to Chinese officials converge inside the same casino, port and special-economic-zone corridors.