From mobile phones in Miami to T-shirts in Los Angeles, drug organizations are finding ways to convert illicit U.S. dollars into pesos for cartels in Mexico and South America.

Long gone are the days when it was easy to walk into a bank with a bag of drug-related cash to be deposited. With strict federal reporting requirements for cash deposits over $10,000 and sophisticated money laundering monitoring systems, new methods had to be found to pay the drug kingpins.