An illegal mining scheme worth at least R$ 200 million moved cassiterite, the ore from which tin is extracted, out of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Roraima state and the Campos Amazônicos National Park between 2020 and 2025, and the refined metal appears in the supply chains of global companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Disney and PepsiCo. That is the finding of confidential documents from Operation Forja de Hefesto, run by Brazil's Federal Police, and investigations by the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF), obtained by the newspaper O Globo, which opened its series "Ouro Invisivel" (Invisible Gold) on the case this weekend.
At the center of the case is White Solder, a tin smelter headquartered in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, with plants in Manaus and in Ariquemes, Rondônia, which presents itself as one of the world's largest producers. The MPF's criminal complaint, accepted by Federal Judge Mirna Brenda Magalhães Salmázio of the 4th Federal Criminal Court in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, made four companies and six people defendants, among them managing partner Alessandro Saccoman Torrente, the White Solder group itself, the tin producers cooperative Coopertin, and the companies Cataratas Poços Artesianos and TARP Táxi Aéreo. The smelter had already been targeted by the same Federal Police operation in 2023 on suspicion of buying illegally mined ore. According to the investigation, Coopertin issued fake invoices and guides to make the ore look as if it came from mines licensed by the National Mining Agency (ANM): 97.6% of the cooperative's credits over a five-month period went to White Solder, the equivalent of R$ 166.3 million, used to give legal cover to gold and more than 525 tonnes of cassiterite. Accounting records seized by the police registered the outflow of those 525 tonnes between May and August 2021 alone.
From the rainforest to corporate filings
Smelted into ingots at the Rondônia plants, the cassiterite lost the physical traits that could reveal its origin and entered the formal market with clean papers. Prosecutors cross-checked audit reports filed by White Solder itself against the database of the SEC, the U.S. securities regulator, and found that the Brazilian smelter was formally listed as a tin supplier in the filings of companies traded on U.S. stock exchanges. Beyond the tech names, the series cites Starbucks, Caterpillar, Colgate-Palmolive, Victoria's Secret and Levi's. Ten multinationals operating in Brazil were notified in a civil investigation over failures in their environmental and human rights due diligence. The MPF is seeking R$ 1.7 billion in damages for environmental, property and collective moral harm across the whole chain, from extraction to sale, and argues that large buyers must prove the tin they bought came from legitimate sources. Tin solders electronic components, from smartphones to artificial intelligence chips.
Prosecutor André Luiz Porreca, of the MPF office for the Western Amazon, which covers Roraima, Rondônia and Acre, told the newspaper how he arrived at the figure:
"I am asking for these amounts based on similar cases. My criteria were, in short, the gravity of the facts, the sophistication of the criminal scheme, the economic capacity of the offenders and the length of time the illegal activity lasted."
The forest footprint
In the Yanomami territory, Brazil's largest indigenous reserve, mining ran with excavators, suction dredges, aircraft and clandestine airstrips. In Campos Amazônicos National Park, on the border of Amazonas, Rondônia and Mato Grosso states, a 2024 inspection found clandestine camps and degraded areas: Censipam imagery shows 193 hectares of destroyed forest and 15 illegal airstrips inside the park and its buffer zone. Dario Kopenawa, president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, told reporters that demand for cassiterite keeps driving new invasions even after police operations removed wildcat miners from the territory. Federal Police experts also found monazite, ilmenite and columbite in processing waste, sources of rare earths, niobium and tantalum, strategic minerals that the network began to exploit as international demand grew.
White Solder did not respond to requests for comment before publication. Amazon, the retailer, said it has no direct commercial relationship with the smelter and is tightening supplier checks, and Disney said it was not named in the inquiry; lawyers for the other defendants deny any wrongdoing. The smelter held international seals such as the LME Brand from the London Metal Exchange and the endorsement of the Responsible Minerals Initiative, and advertised certifications from clients including Sony and Panasonic, according to Repórter Brasil. The weak point flagged by authorities is traceability: the ANM admitted there is no national system able to track cassiterite from extraction to industry, and the Geological Survey of Brazil said studies like those now starting for gold do not yet exist for the ore.