How Correspondent Banking Can Enable Sanctions Evasion

The Bank of America account ending in 0252 was not what you might expect.

It did not belong to a person or a business. In fact, the money did not belong to any single entity.

The account had funds pooled from countless customers of Zhejiang Chouzhou Commercial Bank, a regional lender in the eastern Chinese city of Yiwu.

And among Chouzhou Bank’s customers were Russian front companies that had burrowed into the global financial system as part of a sprawling effort to evade Western sanctions, a New York Times analysis of thousands of financial documents and bank transactions found.

Chouzhou Bank provides what are known as correspondent services, a common banking practice that allows local banks to offer international services across many currencies to customers without opening branches abroad.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/business/correspondent-banking-russia-sanctions-evasion.html