Speaking of international connections:
A story in the Wall Street Journal last year covered a clever money laundering scheme by the Colombian drug cartel:

All banking transactions greater than $10k must be reported by banks to the US government. It drops to $2k in ATM transactions. So the cartel's dealers in NYC opened up about 100 ATM accounts in different names, then had runners deposit a little less than $2k in each at about 11 p.m. every night. Between 15 and 30 minutes later, runners in Colombia would access those ATM accounts locally and withdraw the exact amounts. The transactions were just below the government reporting threshold. And because the money went in and out so quickly, so close to midnight, the banks didn't even record them.