A U.S. government task force set up to hunt for Russian assets in the United States plans to target real estate transactions with a mandate to not only enforce sanctions but seize property.

The Department of Justice-run unit, dubbed Task Force KleptoCapture, is charged with zeroing in on Russian oligarchs and financial supporters of the Russian government, which invaded neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24. The move adds new enforcement resources to earlier sanctions, which typically freeze or block real estate and other financial transactions by their targets.

"Asset seizures and civil forfeitures of unlawful proceeds — including personal real estate, financial and commercial assets — will be used to deny resources that enable Russian aggression," the DOJ said in a statement.

The unveiling of the unit comes as part of an effort to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who continues to defend his country's invasion of its neighbor state. The force is to include investigators in fields ranging from money laundering to foreign evidence collection and is expected to be staffed by agents from the FBI, Secret Service, IRS and other agencies.

Finding the assets and prosecuting violators will be easier said than done, said Tom Firestone, a former federal prosecutor, and is likely to increase scrutiny of real estate brokers and agents.

Law enforcement probably will look to prosecute not only sanctions dodgers but also facilitators of any illegal transactions they find, especially real estate professionals, said Firestone. He specialized in prosecuting Russian organized crime, including handling real estate tracking and seizure, as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York before working for the Department of Justice in Moscow.

“This puts a real burden on the real estate industry to do really thorough due diligence,” said Firestone. “You don’t want to get caught accepting money from a foreign criminal."

The commissioning of the task force comes on the heels of other restrictions announced after Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Along with earlier banking and trade freezes, the Biden administration on March 3 laid out sanctions against more than 60 individuals identified as oligarchs or their close associates.

In its statement, the Justice Department described Task Force KleptoCapture as responsible for both independently hunting assets tied to foreign crimes and also acting as an enforcement arm of the sanctions, chasing individuals who try to circumvent them.

"Arrests and prosecution will be sought when supported by the facts and the law," the DOJ said in the statement.

That effort may be hindered by the lack of transparency permitted under American real estate rules.

Louise Shelley, founder of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, said that while real estate isn’t the only means by which money is laundered, it’s a significant haven for illicit funds, partly because U.S. rules have long allowed multiple layers of anonymous corporate entities to obscure a property’s true, or beneficial, owners.

“Because of the absence of beneficial ownership rules, we don't know where most of this real estate is,” Shelley added.

Instead, Shelley said, the ubiquity of effectively anonymous ownership through limited liability corporations and shell entities will force investigators to essentially go outside the traditional record-disclosure processes, relying instead on sources including journalistic investigations and even groups like Wikileaks.

A report from Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C., research firm focused on following illicit financial flows, tallied $2.3 billion laundered through U.S real estate assets in 125 cases between 2015 and 2020.

The cases involved assets ranging from steel plants to office parks and condominiums, even a mental health facility. And the report's authors noted its inclusion of only documented cases, acknowledging it probably undercounted the assets.

Proving ownership is also often only the start.

“It’s not enough to say someone is a bad actor or has a bad reputation,” said Firestone. “You have to prove the criminal origin of the money that was used to make that purchase.”

That leaves investigators with a laborious road, paved by the tools of basic police work, including informants, wiretaps, and looking for leaks and slip-ups as they follow long paper trails.

“It’s a lot of hard, tedious work, slogging through documents, trying to get documents from overseas,” Firestone said. “It’ll take time.”