FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Contact: comms@ncdoj.gov
919-538-2809
RALEIGH – Fentanyl kills about six North Carolinians a day and over 100 Americans a day. Billions of dollars in drug proceeds are laundered each year through an underground banking network that relies heavily on the messaging platform WeChat. Until now, the company has done little to help law enforcement stop it.
That just changed.
Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced today that a bipartisan coalition he led has secured specific, enforceable commitments from WeChat to help American law enforcement disrupt fentanyl-related money laundering on its platform.
“If you want to stop fentanyl, you have to go after the money. That’s what we’ve done with WeChat, a messaging app based in China,” said Attorney General Jeff Jackson. “It wasn’t doing enough to stop money laundering, so we gave them 30 days to respond to our demands and made clear what would happen if they didn’t. They responded. Law enforcement now has tools it didn’t have to go after the money that fuels the fentanyl epidemic.”
In May, Attorney General Jackson led the coalition in sending WeChat a public letter detailing evidence of the platform’s role in facilitating the laundering pipeline and demanding concrete action. He was joined by the Attorneys General of South Carolina, Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kentucky — members of both parties.
WeChat has now made the following commitments:
- Deploy tools to identify and report public and semi-public content matching patterns associated with money laundering and drug trafficking coordination — such as posts advertising broker services or soliciting bulk cash transactions.
- Comply with lawful requests for basic account information – WeChat ID, linked phone number, email address, and metadata – tied to specific law enforcement investigations.
- Respond to emergency and preservation requests from law enforcement within 48 hours.
- Preserve data requested by law enforcement for the duration of the relevant investigation or case.
- Maintain a dedicated law enforcement contact to process requests in a timely manner.
WeChat’s Chinese-based sister app, Weixin, still operates under Chinese data privacy laws and does not currently respond to U.S. law enforcement requests. Since many of the money brokers facilitating these transactions are based in China, closing that gap is the next priority, and the coalition of attorneys general is actively working on it.
A copy of the letter is available here.
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