Teams of private bankers working for powerful banks court wealthy people from distant shores with this sales pitch: Move your cash to our country. We will keep it safe and secret.

That was the modus operandi of UBS, the Swiss banking giant that was forced to admit holding billions of dollars in covert accounts for Americans trying to avoid U.S. taxes.

It is also a tactic used by big American banks to solicit deposits from wealthy citizens in Third World countries, according to tax-evasion experts.

Even as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service crusades against Americans using offshore banks to hide money, these tax experts say, the United States itself serves as a massive haven for international tax cheats.

“We’re the biggest tax haven in the world,” says Robert Goulder, editor-in-chief of U.S.-based Tax Notes International. “People joke about the Cayman Islands. The biggest haven is an island, all right. It’s either Manhattan or Great Britain.”

Jack Blum , a former U.S. Senate investigator and an authority on offshore tax shelters, says U.S. bankers “sell tax evasion to citizens of Central America, the Caribbean, all over Latin America.” The U.S. government hasn’t put a stop to it, Blum says, because bankers and politicians don’t want to stop the flow of foreign cash into the United States.

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Michael Hudson is a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and author of The Monster: How A Gang of Predatory Lenders Fleeced America–and Spawn a Global Crisis.