Chinese American Ex-Employees Sue TD Bank Over Money Laundering Fallout

A group of former Chinese American employees has filed a class-action lawsuit against Toronto-Dominion Bank in the United States, alleging they were unjustly fired after being linked to a major money laundering scandal involving Chinese money brokers and Mexican drug cartels, the Financial Post reported.

In a complaint, the former branch-level workers accuse the bank of “aggressively and disparately” enforcing its anti-money laundering (AML) policies against Chinese and Chinese American staff, particularly at its New York City Chinatown branches, according to the report.

The lawsuit claims TD “leveraged” the national origin and language skills of these employees to build trust and grow business in the Chinese community, only to later use that same connection to cast suspicion on them when U.S. authorities exposed large-scale laundering through the bank, the news outlet said.

The legal action comes in the wake of a massive U.S. enforcement case. In October 2024, TD was fined roughly $3.1 billion and ordered to cap the expansion of its U.S. retail banking business after the U.S. Department of Justice and regulators concluded that the bank failed to properly monitor money laundering activity at its branches.

An investigation by the U.S. government found that networks of Chinese money brokers working with Mexican drug cartels had laundered millions of dollars in illicit proceeds through TD, the Financial Postreported.

According to the lawsuit, TD responded to the government scrutiny by enforcing its AML rules in a way designed to give the “appearance of robust” compliance while disproportionately targeting Chinese and Chinese American staff. The filing alleges that more than 22 employees at the bank’s New York Chinatown branches were fired as a result, and all but one of them were Chinese or Chinese American.

“None of the 22 terminated employees had piles of cash dumped on their desks. None withdrew cash from ATMs at huge multiples of permissible daily limits. None interacted with international drug traffickers,” the complaint says, according to the Financial Post.