Wyoming's Modern Day Outlaws
It has never been easier to create a shell company to attempt to defraud the government, launder money from illicit activities, or hide assets. And if you’re a criminal looking to set up a shell company, you want to incorporate that business in Wyoming. Between the state’s low filing fees, lenient regulations and high degree of privacy, Wyoming now outcompetes Delaware for the most corporate registrations per capita.
In recent years Wyoming has become a hotbed for anonymous shell companies and opaque corporate structures. Unlike other states, Wyoming offers a class of LLC that does not require disclosure of member or manager names in public filings, making it one of the most attractive states for business owners looking for anonymity.
Plus, there’s the convenience. The incorporation process of a Wyoming LLC can be completed remotely in a matter of minutes, and only one member is required. And importantly, that member can be of any nationality. This allows for foreign nationals and adversarial nation state actors to easily set up legitimate-looking business enterprises in the U.S. The result has been a flood of new entities being formed under a veil of secrecy, often for nefarious purposes including fraud, money laundering, and shielding assets from taxes or regulatory scrutiny.
The mechanics of this system rely on the growth of professional registered agents—often law firms or incorporation services that list their own addresses as the official headquarters for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of companies. In one Cheyenne, WY office building, over 2,000 businesses were registered to a single suite, managed by a company that offered “confidential incorporation” services.
Through registered agents, companies often list fake office addresses, misstate business purposes, or provide misleading information about their structure and operations. The problem is compounded by the fact that Wyoming’s lax requirements are marketed as a feature, not a bug. Websites promote the state as an ideal destination for "privacy-focused" businesses, promising that owners’ names will never appear in public databases and that out-of-state and international individuals can easily create companies within minutes.
One logical outcome from this opaque structure is identity theft. Criminals know how valuable a Wyoming address is to creating a shell company, making Wyoming residents attractive identity theft targets. One Wyoming county assessor uncovered the extent of the problem last year. Tara Berg, the assessor from Fremont County, WY, sent out more than 200 business verification letters to addresses to confirm business associations, and from those got 20 responses from homeowners saying their addresses were used without permission—that’s 10 percent.
According to reporting from the Cowboy State Daily, Berg’s investigation revealed an escalating trend of outside corporations listed to a single address in Lander, WY which now has over 550 different businesses registered to it .The actual homeowner and registered agent at the property told Berg’s staff that he could not provide any information about any of the businesses associated with his address, of which none were actually his or located there. He referred to his business arrangement as a “side hustle.”
When the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was first passed in 2020, it threatened the anonymity offered by Wyoming by requiring owners to file a Beneficial Owner Report with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) that listed identifying information of all owners and officers connected to a business. But a March 2025 court ruling significantly scaled back the CTA for U.S. companies, restoring much of the privacy advantage for Wyoming LLCs.
The other two states that have so-called “business friendly” reporting structures are Delaware and Nevada, but both require more transparency that Wyoming. Delaware allows businesses to file for an LLC without disclosing owner names, but it does collect and publish, through annual reports, the names of the businesses’ corporate directors and officers. Nevada requires that businesses name managers and managing members or directors in initial filing and annual reports.
An outlier in corporate transparency, by contrast, is New York, which recently passed a law requiring that LLCs filing in the state report their beneficial-owner structure to the state starting Jan 1, 2026. This puts New York in the company of only one other jurisdiction—Washington, DC—in having a state beneficial ownership registry. Three other states—California, Maryland and Massachusetts— have introduced legislation aimed at creating statewide beneficial ownership registries. No other state has.
The impact of Wyoming’s opaque reporting structure is enormous, with drug trafficking, identity theft and COVID-19 fraud among them. For example, the Sinaloa Cartel, a major U.S. narcotics trafficking organization, used a network of shell companies incorporated in Wyoming to launder over 16 million dollars in illicit bulk cash in 2023. These Wyoming entities helped move drug proceeds into U.S.-based bank accounts, facilitating purchases of assets like aircraft, vehicles and more, before transferring funds to Mexico.
Sheridan, WY is home to 19,235 people, and over 16,000 corporations. One Sheridan, WY storefront houses the registered agent firm, Registered Agents Inc., which serves as the home of more than 266,000 companies. Companies registered with Registered Agents, Inc. are listed in a half-dozen criminal indictments of people across the country who allegedly stole millions in COVID relief payments from the federal government. Hundreds more companies that together received tens of millions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans share the same Sheridan address: 30 N. Gould St. Some of these appear to be legitimate firms, but dozens, like the Alo Group, have little trace of aboveboard business.
According to a 2024 report in Wired magazine, which relied on the accounts of several former employees of Registered Agents, Inc., the firm maintained a practice of listing fictional names of people on corporate filings. The Wired story said that six allegedly fake names were listed as officers for 887 of businesses registered to the Sheridan office at 30 N. Gould St. Last year, companies registered at the address were linked to a suspected North Korean money-laundering network and a separate cyber sabotage campaign targeting journalists around the world.
Despite growing scrutiny, reform has been slow. Attempts to strengthen beneficial ownership reporting and empower regulators have been met with political resistance, often framed as a defense of business freedom and state sovereignty. This past spring, the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee formed a business fraud working group which drafted four pieces of legislation that will be up for consideration later this year.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray urged the committee in March 2025 to take the topic up in the off-season months between sessions. Gray’s office dissolved three Wyoming entities flagged as instruments of North Korea by the Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier this year.
It’s vital for Wyoming to tighten up its business reporting structure and require more transparency in beneficial ownership reporting to reverse the troubling trend coming out of the cowboy state. A state-wide beneficial ownership registry, as New York will soon implement and Washington, DC already has, must be part of any reform.
30 N. Gould St, Sheridan, WY. Article first posted on GovIntegrity.