Chams Money Laundering Organization

Editorial illustration: Chams Money Laundering Organization

Original editorial illustration of financial records and linked exchange-house façades; nodes are conceptual and do not depict documented transactions.

Chams Money Laundering Organization is the network designated by the U.S. Treasury in April 2019 under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. Treasury also identified the organization and Kassem Chams as a network affiliated with Hezbollah under the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act. According to Treasury, the organization moved drug proceeds for named trafficking groups, while DEA assessed that a large portion of its proceeds passed through Lebanon and also benefited Hezbollah.

Network and sanctions

OFAC designated the organization as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker and separately identified it as a Hezbollah-affiliated network. In the same action, it identified Kassem Chams and designated his money service business, Chams Exchange. The organization is the network described in that action; the exchange is a named business, and Chams is a named individual. These related subjects should retain their separate identities and legal descriptions.

Treasury said Chams Exchange operated under a Central Bank of Lebanon license and supervision despite long-standing U.S. suspicions that it was a significant third-party laundering operation. A license is a regulatory fact, not a Treasury endorsement of its transactions; the allegation is Treasury’s stated assessment. The release dates the Kingpin Act network designation and Hezbollah-affiliated-network identification to April 11, 2019.

Geographical reach

Treasury named ten countries in its account of Chams’s money movements: Australia, Colombia, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Spain, Venezuela, France, Brazil and the United States. It located Chams Exchange in Chtaura, Lebanon, and identified Kassem Chams as its owner. The country list describes the alleged reach of the financial service; it does not identify a specific route, volume or Hezbollah beneficiary for each country.

Network and sanctions

Treasury said the organization moved tens of millions of dollars a month for designated narcotics traffickers, naming La Oficina de Envigado in Colombia and Ayman Said Joumaa. It reported movement of money among countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. DEA, as described in the Treasury release, determined that a large portion of drug proceeds was laundered through Lebanon and that the activity also benefited Hezbollah. The release gives no transaction-by-transaction allocation of the monthly total to Hezbollah.

Customers and overlapping networks

The two customers expressly named were La Oficina de Envigado and Ayman Said Joumaa. Treasury separately noted that foreign trafficking groups, including Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, relied on La Oficina operatives. That describes a relationship between La Oficina and Sinaloa. It does not make Sinaloa an expressly identified direct customer of Chams or show that every La Oficina transaction passed through the exchange.

Settlement services

A 2020 Foundation for Defense of Democracies study described Chams Exchange as an important partner of a Europe-based Hezbollah network and a major intermediary for offsetting payments. The authors attributed that description to French court records. In such settlement arrangements, obligations among intermediaries can be balanced without every payment following a single matching bank-transfer chain. FDD’s account adds a proposed explanation of the exchange’s financial role; it does not provide a published transaction ledger allocating the organization’s monthly flow to Hezbollah.

Response

Chams contested central parts of the account. In a statement reported by L’Orient-Le Jour on 13 April 2019, he denied financial ties to Hezbollah and a relationship with Joumaa, and challenged the scale of the activity attributed to his business. The allegations and his response form a disputed record; the sanctions announcement was not an admission by Chams or a criminal verdict resolving those disputes.

Investigative and financial measures

Treasury placed the action within a joint effort with DEA’s Project Cassandra. It named DEA’s Special Operations Division Counter Narco-Terrorism Operations Center, New Jersey Division and Office of Global Enforcement, with assistance from FinCEN. The announced measures required covered assets to be blocked and reported to OFAC and generally prohibited U.S.-connected dealings involving blocked property. These were financial restrictions, not sentences imposed on the network’s members or customers.

Research interpretations

Ottolenghi and Zweig interpreted the April 2019 action as the first use of the amended Hezbollah-financing legislation after its passage and argued for targeting a wider set of business partners. Their analysis described commissions as one way Hezbollah could benefit from financial facilitation. It did not publish a Chams commission schedule or a calculation of the amount Hezbollah received.

Noam Binstok, Orna Mizrahi and Esteban Klor’s May 2026 INSS analysis explains how trade and hawala settlement can work together in decentralized financing networks. Hawala involves intermediaries settling balances, sometimes separately from the sender’s original payment. This framework helps explain why investigators examine exchange businesses, commercial partners and shared customers together. It does not establish that the Chams organization used every mechanism discussed or fill the gaps in the 2019 announcement’s transaction detail.

Network and sanctions

The two separate actions matter: the narcotics designation concerns the laundering network, while the affiliated-network identification states the agency’s Hezbollah connection. Neither should be expanded into a claim that every client, transfer or participant was a Hezbollah member. The Treasury release is an agency sanctions account; it is not presented here as a criminal verdict against the organization.

See also

• Hezbollah Business Affairs Component
• Lebanese Canadian Bank

References

Legal and sanctions status as of 17 October 2026.