How does one even expect to use €20M of physical paper cash? You're going to get scrutiny from the government and/or financial institutions if you try to deposit it into a bank. I guess you'd "launder" it somehow, but does that even work anymore? Major purchases with cash put a giant government bullseye on your back these days. That is if you could actually make those purchases. I'd imagine most major purchases that someone legitimate might make (like buying a house or a car or a private jet) cannot be done with physical cash. Does the local Mercedes dealership really accept a suitcase full of cash? Even if you were to use it for all of your normal routine spending like groceries, you'd never go through €20M in your entire lifetime. So, career-fraudsters, I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?
It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}.
There are entire areas of shops in some cities where no-one goes in but the business has a healthy turnover.
There are lots of other methods too but those are trade secrets. "I could tell you but" etc. Easy 'big bang' methods like houses Rolls-Royces and art no longer work easily in most jurisdictions (oddly, apparently still in Oz from other comments). I miss the days when you could walk ito a bank with a shopping bag full of bundles of notes, I've done that - fun.
In your opinion, what fraction of the small restaurants in a typical city are engaging in money laundering at this scale? And if weighted by volume, what fraction?
I think it's not so much restaurants, as the setup and operation costs are higher, but countertop takeaways I think. I'm not aware of any data but I'd guess from conversations & experience it was just a fraction - single percents? But I have no clue really.
For a good ML operation you need agility: easy quick and cheap to set up & teardown and move - hence takeaways, hand carwashes etc.
Money laundering conviction to tech worker sounds like a great story, I'm sure plenty more than just me would love to hear more about your background if you were willing to share.
Here in Australia real estate transactions aren't covered by the national AML/CTF act. You can currently buy Australian real estate with millions of dollars stuffed into a duffle bag, and the realtor you gave it to is under no obligation to report who they got it from. You'd still need to declare your real estate assets for taxation purposes though. Our government has been so slow to fix this problem. There are new rules coming into effect in 2026. Long overdue. I've heard estimates from people working on AML in the banking industry that around 15% of Australian real estate transactions involve some form of money laundering.
I'd assume the same way they collected that much cash. Illegal deals. You want to bribe someone? use cash. Buy something of high value, put low value on the books but pay the rest in tax free cash? This is pure guess work
You buy groceries and fake papers and a beater car registered to your fake identity. The point isn't to be rich. The point is that you can have a modest retirement while being off the grid. It's basically an insurance police that might let you have a life and freedom if the state wants to take those away, which of course is why the state goes so hard trying to prevent it.
I could live my whole life with cash easily if I rented instead of owned.
I dunno about Eurozone, but I bought some land from my US county recently, and they told me I could provide a cashier's check or come with about $50,000 in cash. I went ahead and paid my bank fees to get a cashier's check.
Good question. In Switzerland you could buy real estate with cash until very recently.
You could also open a front, say a barbershop or a restaurant, though convincing authorities you earned a million or more through that could be a stretch.
Local dealerships will take cash but if you show up with enough of it (even a very large down payment amount), it's not uncommon that the person you try to give it to isn't sure they are allowed to accept it and will disappear to run it up the chain to get permission.
Go on lots of vacations, booking modest hotels within your legitimate means but then live it up going to all the expensive restaurants/etc you desire. Unless you've got somebody following you keeping track of what you do, nobody would figure it out.
You'll probably never get through 20M like this but you should have plenty of fun.
What is that responding to? The problem is how to safely spend/clean that much cash. You're describing how to accumulate cash, which makes the problem (in the parent comment) harder.
If the idea is to claim to be an escort that only accepts cash, and then report already-possessed cash as income, while also depositing into a bank, then that could have been phrased more clearly. As it stands, it says to actually be as escort and get more money that you have to launder.
Plus, there has got to be more critical information -- left out of the comment -- on how to get such a scheme to work. I highly doubt that most countries have left a massive hole in their anti-money-laundering systems that allows a person to simply claim to have massive transactions in cash with no (or easily fakeable) documentation.
Haha there's an episode of Better Call Saul where nerdy, middle-aged Dan is noticed by the authorities as spending far more than he earns, and he explains it away as being an escort for rich fetishists who like seeing him sit on pies.
I'd be happy just paying groceries with cash for the rest of my life tbh. Although I can imagine a lack of grocery shopping on anyone's bank account would be suspicious. But moving to a country where nobody knows you / nobody cares would be an option too. Of course, then you get the challenge of moving 20 million in cash abroad...
why? i never pay with card except for online purchases. i withdraw cash from an ATM. pretty much my whole withdrawal history on my bank account is ATM, rent and utilities and almost nothing else.
I think the point you're replying to still stands, it's just moved "up" a level: If someone cared to look into the financial history of someone with no grocery store payments on their credit card (why are they looking into this person's spending history? Maybe because they're suspected of embezzling a lot of cash, I don't know!), found no credit card payments, looked further and found not enough ATM withdrawals to account for the amount of groceries the person presumably would've needed, the suspicion is still the same. The "investigators" just had to take it a step further.
I doubt the person you're replying to thinks not a single person in the world pays cash at the grocery store, but I think it's reasonable to think that a lot of people do use credit cards at the grocery store (for points/rewards OR for actual credit; not to mention the convenience of not needing to have the cash on hand).
Lack of data is also a data point, and could be considered suspicious if most "normal law abiding" profiles produce data. Imagine you're the IRS and you see 1,000 people living in the same neighborhood, with comparable lifestyle profiles. 999 of them report similar incomes and have similar banking/investment profiles, but 1 of them reports drastically lower income and has little-to-no banking presence. Who are you going to apply more scrutiny to? Not saying it's fair, but I know an outlier when I see one.
There's still quite a gap between "suspicious" and "probable cause". Just having a large amount of cash isn't by itself illegal. You could easily have enough cash to live on for quite a while having inherited it or earned it decades ago, etc.
There is a gap, but in my country, the AML regime is concerned with the bar of "reasonable to suspect" rather than "probable cause". This is the only way you could catch any laundering of any sophistication.
What even is the goal of such a speculative dragnet based endeavor? Instilling fear?
Enough of those "one in a thousand" cases are going to be legitimate people with oddball reasons to do what they do, and the minority of those who shoot back will still be enough that you'll get your guys killed faster than you find real headline grabbing criminals. Sure you'll roll up a bunch of petty dealers (these will be most of the people who shoot back) and you'll slander all the innocents but this sort of big dick of the law dragnet based stuff isn't an effective use of resources. It makes two people hate you for every useful idiot it makes respect you.
Reminding everyone that none of this is voluntary and it all hinges on violence is highly counterproductive generally. If the goal is to get everyone to goose step in line and pay their taxes doing positive things to legitimize the government is a far better use of resources. Build a bridge or renovate a port or something.
The idea of paying cash doesn't hold up when you account for changes in the currency notes over time. What would you do with a suitcase full of 1990s hundred dollar notes? Eventually they go out of circulation and using them looks highly suspicious. A casino tried giving me one and I asked them to swap it.
I’d probably “dig it up from my backyard because I’m a newly minted metal detector hobbyist” or something. If the bills were marked though I think your point is solid, it’s hard to make bad money clean.
Find some millionaire to pay you your own money for a job or something, give them 10%? I guess you still need to launder the money somehow.
Now I want to know how people can turn illegal cash millions into clean laundered money in 2024.
The TV show seemed fairly incoherent in its treatment of money laundering. They're explicit about the mechanics, sort of: the idea is that Marty shows up in a rural area with a big bag of cash and he needs to make it appear legitimate - and he does this by taking ownership stakes in local businesses. So far so good.
What you'd actually want, in that kind of setup, is to hand the active owner of the business you just partnered with a big bag of cash, see that distributed into the flow of legitimate income from the business, and then have it returned to you as dividends or whatever on your ownership stake.
But in the show, the goal is to then book a bunch of fake expenses against the business. So:
1. Purchase ownership stake in a hotel, for cash. The cash doesn't need to be legitimate. Money is transferred from you to the active owner.
2. Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.
3. Now you have a piddling amount of legitimate money from the hotel, and a big bag of illegitimate cash that you still haven't laundered.
We've skipped the step where you hand the owner some of your illegitimate cash under the table and then the owner gives it back to you above the table, which is the part of money laundering that launders the money. If you want to embezzle from a running business while making your expenses look like business expenses, you can just do that; you don't need to start with a pile of illegitimate cash.
The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses.
eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the shell trades companies (carpentry, plumbing, labor hire) can report that money as legitimate washed income from the hotel.
I don’t understand the scheme you are describing. If you have a hotel/bar and you falsely inflate the customer income then you are done. The previously illegitimate cash is now legitimate.
Why would you want to complicate it more with the fake rennovation works? Especially when a hotel is so much easier. You can just put fake guests on the book. (Or report longer stays for your real guests.)
With the renovation business you have to somehow cook up bills for the “new” materials and the workforce. So many more things the authorities could check there and thus so many more chances to slip up and get caught.
Without getting into the nitty gritty of trace back forensic accounting the added layer is akin to why people use proxy relay's in networking, diffusing cash outwards through layered shell companies makes the origin point(s) less visibly "hot".
The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).
Also, as noted by SilasX in a peer comment the books for the fake work can include higher than normal payments for "supplies" to cartel owned suppliers .. yet another (fake but) documented trail to explain income and profits.
As the pooled money grows larger it's increasingly better documented.
It's literally a full time occupation to generate a mountainous pyramid of a paper trail to "explain" a million or so a week.
> The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).
You might note that this scheme doesn't involve you owning the hotel to any degree. You only need to own the plumbing business. That's the opposite of the situation on the show.
Control of the hotel is required - that's the cash business that fabricates fake customers and orders non existent repair and upgrade work.
The work is billed by fake (or better, partially fake) contractors who do no work but charge for time, labor and supplies.
It's a funnel with many cash casual customer locations inflate their intake and spend the excess on illusionary busywork "performed" by the next tier in the pyramid.
The entire paper tiger is controlled by the same entity .. who likely firewall and partition sections away (eg: the part that Marty did in Ozark (I read the synopsis) would be the cash flow in and a good number of lower level shell companies that he indirectly controlled) from each other and only are connected in a legal way to the upper layers that have documentation for their inputs from below.
Control of the hotel is required in a sense. Ownership isn't. It's actually much better for you if you come to an informal agreement with the owner of the hotel than if you take a legal ownership stake.
First, they haven't obfuscated that; it's not present at all.
Second, your first step is that your hotel falsely inflates customer income. Then you follow up with some pointless additional steps. But if you can falsely inflate customer income, your job as a money launderer is already done. There are no additional steps. Spending revenue from your company on spurious invoices from another company is how you'd pay a bribe, not launder money.
As I recall, the scale was eight million dollars in one month.
I'm with you that a sleepy rural hotel can't handle that.
However, charging fraudulent expenses to the same sleepy rural hotel can't fix that problem. (It aggravates it!) The hotel can't spend more money than it has. And if you can make it look like the hotel has enough money to suit your needs, your job is already done. Fake expenses don't help.
After a long time spent on various dramas related to this initial problem, the show addresses it by having Marty found a casino, which seems plausible.
>Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.
As I understand the show, they were buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises, and that step was getting the money laundered to the client.
That would make sense, but I don't think it's ever mentioned.
It is specifically mentioned that Marty books expenses that he hasn't actually incurred, notionally buying things that he never receives, which will stand up to an audit much more poorly than "buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises" would.
There’s the scene where Marty takes rooms at the Blue Cat Lodge off the market for renovations, against Rachel’s objections that he wait for the off season, suggesting real stuff is actually being done to them. Then later she confronts him over paying ridiculous prices related for said renovations. (Where she also threatens to report him.) His cartel contact Del is mentioned as running a construction and remodeling business.
Yes, he does real renovations. But he notes to his wife that he's purchased X square feet of carpet at $Y per square foot, while accounting for it as XXX square feet at $YYY per foot. (Both figures much higher than the reality.)
The difference between $YYY and $Y is money that was claimed to change hands, but never did, and the difference between XXX and X is carpeting that Marty has recorded himself purchasing, but not actually purchased.
If he was buying the carpeting from a cartel-owned supplier, he'd just pay the inflated prices that he's so proud of booking without paying. Instead, he's buying real services from a real third party, and then booking fake expenses for unclear reasons.
Start a car rental company by buying a bunch of luxury cars. Drive two or three yourself, and let your friends and family drive them. Once the cash is clean, sell them and close the business.
All you need to do is make sure you have an actual phone number that someone can call to rent a car, and make sure your prices are outrageous. Give the job of answering the phone to your sister's kid, or your girlfriend.
> "Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives"
I know lots of people who live very nice lives ($300-750k/year spend) using nothing but cash and never showing ID.
There are a million ways to convert it to crypto, and a million ways to convert crypto to many of the other things one might want to use: gift cards, airline miles, etc.
Same goes for gold. There are lots of shops in many countries that will buy gold for cash. Many countries still have hotels that accept cash.
You can pay for a surprising amount of things in cash. One friend of mine simply has a rich buddy buy his cars and insurance, and he gives him paper cash each year for the sum of payments+insurance.
Many landlords are happy to accept cash, especially if you are willing to pay a year in advance.
Why do you think someone with that much money would be driving a car that's titled and plated in their own name?
I can, but I won't. The state doesn't like it, because it bypasses the points at which they control the system (largely without due process) and I don't wish to make their jobs any easier for them.
In most countries I think you'd need to know someone with crypto who could use the cash and do a swap. The website localbitcoins that used to sort that is closed. Cambodia has cash to crypto dealers on the street if you are over that way.
Get an auto dealers license and buy a bunch of used cars, one at a time in cash, and sell them for less than you paid. But not too cheap to get other dealers upset and report you.
Be a promotor or promotion company, sell VIP tables at big event or music festival for 20,000 euro each, 9 out of 10 clients don’t show up (because they don’t exist and you made them up)
Do it all summer, our economy is big enough to support this
So the suggestion is that uh... the former fraud chief of the Spanish police... become a highly connected event promotor... with access to high profile clients who will actually spend 20,000 euro for a concert ticket... which we inexplicably demand and receive IN CASH... in exchange for VIP tables at high profile events that we magically have access to... while supplying 20,000 worth of services to the one VIP that did attend... and then repeat this how many times? While forging receipts for cash payments, which will sustain scrutiny from a cursory audit?
Is there a missing /s? Like this is neither easy nor a plausible way to get away with financial fraud.
the answer was how to launder it, not how the fraud chief could launder it
but either way, the answer is yes, and yes, and no sarcasm
first, the investigation is never going to happen. but okay, lets play auditor
the auditor is like “wow you paid your taxes on time and properly, but I hate that you have made money, so lets check the receipts”
“hmmm, big cash, who are these clients?”
“What!? you didn't do KYC on a transaction of 20,000 euro cash, 1,000 times!? ah but the parties were in Luxembourg and Austria and Monaco where such cash transaction limits don't exist, well Monaco’s is 30,000 euro per transaction, sorry for the inconvenience, on behalf of the King of Spain I apologize for our hubris in thinking this had anything to do with our ridiculous AML regime”
I'd forgotten Europe has €500 notes, whereas in the US everyone now gets to deal with $100 bill spam.
Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family of of 4.
I bough and sold a flat in Spain around 2004 and it was standard then for part of the payment to be in cash for tax avoidance purposes. This was all done officially through regular Spanish lawyers and estate agents.
The real root of the attitude should be "We don't accept transactions that would produce more than 20 USD in change." However the average person is an idiot so it's easier for them to just say they don't take 50s/100s. I guess arguably there's a greater incentive to try to use lesser bills to make larger ones, but that's what the watermarks and security strips are supposed to prevent.
It's always a lie though. You can't realistically start a register out with less than $100 of change for a few hour shift. Maybe $50 for really short shift or if there's a manager with safe access who can reload it.
Yes I found this strange coming from Ireland where (during the Celtic Tiger at least!) the minimum I ever seemed to get from cash machines was 50 euros.
Dystopian future here we come! Cashless seems cool until you realise one day they decide to turn off your access to money, or tax you more based on your spending pattern. The possibilities for abuse are endless so it WILL be abused.
Don't start me. Besides that, there's the fact that card-only is giving free rein to the boards of MasterCard and Visa to decide what's effectively legal; it's already the case in the adult industry, where the card companies have enacted rules for performers, production and distributors. No agree, no money. What happens if the next CEO is an evangelical Christian?
And of course cashless makes it hell on those without bank accounts, like the homeless and immigrants, those who rely on informal employment, and the general outskirts of society. There are prepaid cards, but they require ID checks and often fees which they can hardly afford. That will make many rely on informal banking from loan-shark types.
And last, the banks see everything. I worked for a bank. I definitely don't want those people to have all the data that matters on everyone.
How on earth is requiring card payments discriminatory? Providing cash payment options is absolutely not free and implies extra risk on behalf of the business.
Refusing to take part in the banking system is not worth penalizing businesses for. Let the free market work.
The reality is that cards can impose very high fees and businesses spread that cost out onto card AND cash payers. Card companies stipulate in the contract with the business that they CAN NOT charge extra for card transactions to cover the fees. That is why you see businesses offering discounts if you use cash.
This is a strawman. The homeless schizophrenic is clearly not capable of caring for themselves, so their inability to participate in society should not impose restrictions on all businesses.
The problem you cite is not solved by requiring businesses to accept cash—it is solved by removing the homeless schizophrenic from the depravity of the street.
Many people at the margin don't have bank accounts. Not only schizophrenics, but undocumented immigrants or the homeless. There are a lot of undocumented immigrants and homeless.
Also; this is factually false. There are thousands and thousands of people who are citizens, legal residents with legal ID, and not fugitives, who cannot obtain bank accounts or bank cards.
There is a secret blacklist shared among the banks that cause them to deny or automatically close accounts held by certain people. They are not required to service anyone.
Do you not see the dangerous failure modes of allowing private companies to point and click cause someone to become persona non grata without due process? They also happily do so at the request of the state, again with no requirement of criminal wrongdoing or burden of proof, and no due process.
Do you know what a huge amount of labor in your society depends on people who are not legal residents, or don’t have identity documentation?
You don’t want those people to not be able to buy food, or the next time you go and buy vegetables or fruits or chicken breast with your own shiny metal bank card, you might find yourself paying 5x the cost.
Many years ago I got paid a bonus with €500 notes. They were so rare in Spain that people used to call them Bin Ladens (since at the time he hadn't been caught yet).
> Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
My favorite head scratcher is the US penny. It would be so much easier on all involved if we rounded so everything was MOD5 friendly, and just eliminated the penny.
There has been a long-running campaign to get rid of the penny, to the extent that there's a "West Wing" episode that features the campaign. Ironically, Canada got rid of the penny in 2012-2013, after relatively little debate.
Switzerland has 1000 Franc notes which is around 1140 USD. The central bank just decided that the next series will also include the 1k note although the EU doesn't want it (not that they really have a say) and some others are opposed to it as well.
CHF 1000 is worth less than it ever was so the whole claim about it being used for crime is bullshit. People keep cash at home and safety deposit boxes. When we had negative interest rates it made sense to keep some money in cash.
A bigger debate that is coming is the elimination of the 5 rappen coin. The 1 rappen coin was killed a long time ago and the golden colored 5 may soon also go.
My understanding is that Switzerland doesn't require you to declare cash of any amount when arriving.
€1.2million in a briefcase? No problem. 3kg of beef? Serious business.
CHF1000 notes would obviously be very convenient for moving large amounts of cash. If you are the sort of person trying to avoid the tax man's 20-40% taxation or the police's 100% taxation, why care about the CHF exchange rate?
There needs to be a word for when someone does something bad in their own interest, and as a result the wider society degrades far more than the individual profited. Corrupt anti-corruption officials, yes, but also college professors issuing passing grades to customers, er I mean students, news networks that give in to the urge for sensationalism and ideologically driven attention, lawyers who escalate conflict for profit, and so on. The individual act is (relatively) harmless, but over time if left unchecked these acts degrade institutions and eventually society itself (or confidence in society, which is the same thing). These actions cause a society to move from the good nash equilibrium to the other. A healthy society can endure a certain amount of malefactors, has an immune system for them ranging from "stink eye" to "prison", but when the violations gets higher than a certain threshold, across a certain number of industries and institutions, when the immune system starts failing to catch even a fraction of it (or the immune system degrades completely), the host society begins to weaken and the majority of the herd flips from "cooperate" to "defect".
Remember when Greece went broke 10+ years ago? Apparently no one was paying their taxes because they looked around and saw no one paying their taxes. It was a contributing factor because it impaired the nation's ability to get loans because it lowered the government revenue.
This arrest is ridiculous: how is the head of the anti-money-laundering organization supposed to remain an expert in his field if he doesn't practice money laundering himself?
/s
"Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives"
So he doesn’t get arrested after €20M worth of Bitcoin is found in his Bitcoin wallet. Maybe there are better privacy preserving cryptocurrencies.
Not being tech savvy or not wanting to rely on volatile cryptocurrencies are also legitimate explanations for staying all cash. And he may very well have a few crypto wallets too.
Nontrivial to use. Still need to pass it to someone to convert fiat to crypto. Bitcoin is a public ledger, would be even easier to tie to him in some ways.
There has to be a personality test to see if someone is short-sighted enough to take 20 million euros in cash without any plan for how to launder it. Right?!
Seems like every single IT job is littered with personality tests these days but what about government?
How does one even expect to use €20M of physical paper cash? You're going to get scrutiny from the government and/or financial institutions if you try to deposit it into a bank. I guess you'd "launder" it somehow, but does that even work anymore? Major purchases with cash put a giant government bullseye on your back these days. That is if you could actually make those purchases. I'd imagine most major purchases that someone legitimate might make (like buying a house or a car or a private jet) cannot be done with physical cash. Does the local Mercedes dealership really accept a suitcase full of cash? Even if you were to use it for all of your normal routine spending like groceries, you'd never go through €20M in your entire lifetime. So, career-fraudsters, I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?
Convicted ex-money launderer here.
It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}. There are entire areas of shops in some cities where no-one goes in but the business has a healthy turnover.
There are lots of other methods too but those are trade secrets. "I could tell you but" etc. Easy 'big bang' methods like houses Rolls-Royces and art no longer work easily in most jurisdictions (oddly, apparently still in Oz from other comments). I miss the days when you could walk ito a bank with a shopping bag full of bundles of notes, I've done that - fun.
In your opinion, what fraction of the small restaurants in a typical city are engaging in money laundering at this scale? And if weighted by volume, what fraction?
I think it's not so much restaurants, as the setup and operation costs are higher, but countertop takeaways I think. I'm not aware of any data but I'd guess from conversations & experience it was just a fraction - single percents? But I have no clue really. For a good ML operation you need agility: easy quick and cheap to set up & teardown and move - hence takeaways, hand carwashes etc.
Money laundering conviction to tech worker sounds like a great story, I'm sure plenty more than just me would love to hear more about your background if you were willing to share.
They were sorta related, but I'm not saying more.
Here in Australia real estate transactions aren't covered by the national AML/CTF act. You can currently buy Australian real estate with millions of dollars stuffed into a duffle bag, and the realtor you gave it to is under no obligation to report who they got it from. You'd still need to declare your real estate assets for taxation purposes though. Our government has been so slow to fix this problem. There are new rules coming into effect in 2026. Long overdue. I've heard estimates from people working on AML in the banking industry that around 15% of Australian real estate transactions involve some form of money laundering.
In Spain that was basically the case till a decade or two ago. There was a big case "53 guilty in Spain corruption trial" which signalled a change https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/434384/53-guilty-in-Spa...
I'd assume the same way they collected that much cash. Illegal deals. You want to bribe someone? use cash. Buy something of high value, put low value on the books but pay the rest in tax free cash? This is pure guess work
You buy groceries and fake papers and a beater car registered to your fake identity. The point isn't to be rich. The point is that you can have a modest retirement while being off the grid. It's basically an insurance police that might let you have a life and freedom if the state wants to take those away, which of course is why the state goes so hard trying to prevent it.
I could live my whole life with cash easily if I rented instead of owned.
I dunno about Eurozone, but I bought some land from my US county recently, and they told me I could provide a cashier's check or come with about $50,000 in cash. I went ahead and paid my bank fees to get a cashier's check.
Good question. In Switzerland you could buy real estate with cash until very recently.
You could also open a front, say a barbershop or a restaurant, though convincing authorities you earned a million or more through that could be a stretch.
Can you not, still? It may be reportable under AML rules, but it's still possible?
You are right and it seems I misread the media articles.
Wouldn’t recommend it to GP though because they asked about circumventing AML and this would catch the fraud chief from the article.
Wall insulation?
The best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe not this one though.
And a good fraud chief probably isn't going to tell you what they're looking for. :)
Local dealerships will take cash but if you show up with enough of it (even a very large down payment amount), it's not uncommon that the person you try to give it to isn't sure they are allowed to accept it and will disappear to run it up the chain to get permission.
Isn’t that why it ends up in a wall?
Go on lots of vacations, booking modest hotels within your legitimate means but then live it up going to all the expensive restaurants/etc you desire. Unless you've got somebody following you keeping track of what you do, nobody would figure it out.
You'll probably never get through 20M like this but you should have plenty of fun.
Become a high class escort, where legal. Very high class. Accept only cash.
I dont think people believe a man whore can make that sort of cash.
What is that responding to? The problem is how to safely spend/clean that much cash. You're describing how to accumulate cash, which makes the problem (in the parent comment) harder.
You can put money in the bank as legal income and pay your mortgage with that.
If the idea is to claim to be an escort that only accepts cash, and then report already-possessed cash as income, while also depositing into a bank, then that could have been phrased more clearly. As it stands, it says to actually be as escort and get more money that you have to launder.
Plus, there has got to be more critical information -- left out of the comment -- on how to get such a scheme to work. I highly doubt that most countries have left a massive hole in their anti-money-laundering systems that allows a person to simply claim to have massive transactions in cash with no (or easily fakeable) documentation.
You might have to do the deed occasionally, to sell the ruse. I never said this would be easy.
Plus, have fun convincing the authorities that you, a middle-aged man, are a high-class escort.
Haha there's an episode of Better Call Saul where nerdy, middle-aged Dan is noticed by the authorities as spending far more than he earns, and he explains it away as being an escort for rich fetishists who like seeing him sit on pies.
The articles notes he laundered a portion of the money through crypto and business fraud.
I'd be happy just paying groceries with cash for the rest of my life tbh. Although I can imagine a lack of grocery shopping on anyone's bank account would be suspicious. But moving to a country where nobody knows you / nobody cares would be an option too. Of course, then you get the challenge of moving 20 million in cash abroad...
why? i never pay with card except for online purchases. i withdraw cash from an ATM. pretty much my whole withdrawal history on my bank account is ATM, rent and utilities and almost nothing else.
I think the point you're replying to still stands, it's just moved "up" a level: If someone cared to look into the financial history of someone with no grocery store payments on their credit card (why are they looking into this person's spending history? Maybe because they're suspected of embezzling a lot of cash, I don't know!), found no credit card payments, looked further and found not enough ATM withdrawals to account for the amount of groceries the person presumably would've needed, the suspicion is still the same. The "investigators" just had to take it a step further.
I doubt the person you're replying to thinks not a single person in the world pays cash at the grocery store, but I think it's reasonable to think that a lot of people do use credit cards at the grocery store (for points/rewards OR for actual credit; not to mention the convenience of not needing to have the cash on hand).
Lack of data is also a data point, and could be considered suspicious if most "normal law abiding" profiles produce data. Imagine you're the IRS and you see 1,000 people living in the same neighborhood, with comparable lifestyle profiles. 999 of them report similar incomes and have similar banking/investment profiles, but 1 of them reports drastically lower income and has little-to-no banking presence. Who are you going to apply more scrutiny to? Not saying it's fair, but I know an outlier when I see one.
There's still quite a gap between "suspicious" and "probable cause". Just having a large amount of cash isn't by itself illegal. You could easily have enough cash to live on for quite a while having inherited it or earned it decades ago, etc.
There is a gap, but in my country, the AML regime is concerned with the bar of "reasonable to suspect" rather than "probable cause". This is the only way you could catch any laundering of any sophistication.
What even is the goal of such a speculative dragnet based endeavor? Instilling fear?
Enough of those "one in a thousand" cases are going to be legitimate people with oddball reasons to do what they do, and the minority of those who shoot back will still be enough that you'll get your guys killed faster than you find real headline grabbing criminals. Sure you'll roll up a bunch of petty dealers (these will be most of the people who shoot back) and you'll slander all the innocents but this sort of big dick of the law dragnet based stuff isn't an effective use of resources. It makes two people hate you for every useful idiot it makes respect you.
Reminding everyone that none of this is voluntary and it all hinges on violence is highly counterproductive generally. If the goal is to get everyone to goose step in line and pay their taxes doing positive things to legitimize the government is a far better use of resources. Build a bridge or renovate a port or something.
The idea of paying cash doesn't hold up when you account for changes in the currency notes over time. What would you do with a suitcase full of 1990s hundred dollar notes? Eventually they go out of circulation and using them looks highly suspicious. A casino tried giving me one and I asked them to swap it.
I’d probably “dig it up from my backyard because I’m a newly minted metal detector hobbyist” or something. If the bills were marked though I think your point is solid, it’s hard to make bad money clean.
Find some millionaire to pay you your own money for a job or something, give them 10%? I guess you still need to launder the money somehow.
Now I want to know how people can turn illegal cash millions into clean laundered money in 2024.
Ozarks
The TV show seemed fairly incoherent in its treatment of money laundering. They're explicit about the mechanics, sort of: the idea is that Marty shows up in a rural area with a big bag of cash and he needs to make it appear legitimate - and he does this by taking ownership stakes in local businesses. So far so good.
What you'd actually want, in that kind of setup, is to hand the active owner of the business you just partnered with a big bag of cash, see that distributed into the flow of legitimate income from the business, and then have it returned to you as dividends or whatever on your ownership stake.
But in the show, the goal is to then book a bunch of fake expenses against the business. So:
1. Purchase ownership stake in a hotel, for cash. The cash doesn't need to be legitimate. Money is transferred from you to the active owner.
2. Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.
3. Now you have a piddling amount of legitimate money from the hotel, and a big bag of illegitimate cash that you still haven't laundered.
We've skipped the step where you hand the owner some of your illegitimate cash under the table and then the owner gives it back to you above the table, which is the part of money laundering that launders the money. If you want to embezzle from a running business while making your expenses look like business expenses, you can just do that; you don't need to start with a pile of illegitimate cash.
The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses.
eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the shell trades companies (carpentry, plumbing, labor hire) can report that money as legitimate washed income from the hotel.
There are a number of variations of this.
I don’t understand the scheme you are describing. If you have a hotel/bar and you falsely inflate the customer income then you are done. The previously illegitimate cash is now legitimate.
Why would you want to complicate it more with the fake rennovation works? Especially when a hotel is so much easier. You can just put fake guests on the book. (Or report longer stays for your real guests.)
With the renovation business you have to somehow cook up bills for the “new” materials and the workforce. So many more things the authorities could check there and thus so many more chances to slip up and get caught.
Without getting into the nitty gritty of trace back forensic accounting the added layer is akin to why people use proxy relay's in networking, diffusing cash outwards through layered shell companies makes the origin point(s) less visibly "hot".
The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).
Also, as noted by SilasX in a peer comment the books for the fake work can include higher than normal payments for "supplies" to cartel owned suppliers .. yet another (fake but) documented trail to explain income and profits.
As the pooled money grows larger it's increasingly better documented.
It's literally a full time occupation to generate a mountainous pyramid of a paper trail to "explain" a million or so a week.
> The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).
You might note that this scheme doesn't involve you owning the hotel to any degree. You only need to own the plumbing business. That's the opposite of the situation on the show.
Control of the hotel is required - that's the cash business that fabricates fake customers and orders non existent repair and upgrade work.
The work is billed by fake (or better, partially fake) contractors who do no work but charge for time, labor and supplies.
It's a funnel with many cash casual customer locations inflate their intake and spend the excess on illusionary busywork "performed" by the next tier in the pyramid.
The entire paper tiger is controlled by the same entity .. who likely firewall and partition sections away (eg: the part that Marty did in Ozark (I read the synopsis) would be the cash flow in and a good number of lower level shell companies that he indirectly controlled) from each other and only are connected in a legal way to the upper layers that have documentation for their inputs from below.
Control of the hotel is required in a sense. Ownership isn't. It's actually much better for you if you come to an informal agreement with the owner of the hotel than if you take a legal ownership stake.
Nah I get it. If 100% of a hotel clientele only ever pays in cash, are you really any better off?
That's wrong on two points.
First, they haven't obfuscated that; it's not present at all.
Second, your first step is that your hotel falsely inflates customer income. Then you follow up with some pointless additional steps. But if you can falsely inflate customer income, your job as a money launderer is already done. There are no additional steps. Spending revenue from your company on spurious invoices from another company is how you'd pay a bribe, not launder money.
What was the scale of total income per month to wash again?
You might want to dwell on the bookkeeping scale required to soak up that volume in a diffuse manner and then "legitimitely" consolidate that upwards.
As I recall, the scale was eight million dollars in one month.
I'm with you that a sleepy rural hotel can't handle that.
However, charging fraudulent expenses to the same sleepy rural hotel can't fix that problem. (It aggravates it!) The hotel can't spend more money than it has. And if you can make it look like the hotel has enough money to suit your needs, your job is already done. Fake expenses don't help.
After a long time spent on various dramas related to this initial problem, the show addresses it by having Marty found a casino, which seems plausible.
>Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.
As I understand the show, they were buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises, and that step was getting the money laundered to the client.
That would make sense, but I don't think it's ever mentioned.
It is specifically mentioned that Marty books expenses that he hasn't actually incurred, notionally buying things that he never receives, which will stand up to an audit much more poorly than "buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises" would.
There’s the scene where Marty takes rooms at the Blue Cat Lodge off the market for renovations, against Rachel’s objections that he wait for the off season, suggesting real stuff is actually being done to them. Then later she confronts him over paying ridiculous prices related for said renovations. (Where she also threatens to report him.) His cartel contact Del is mentioned as running a construction and remodeling business.
Yes, he does real renovations. But he notes to his wife that he's purchased X square feet of carpet at $Y per square foot, while accounting for it as XXX square feet at $YYY per foot. (Both figures much higher than the reality.)
The difference between $YYY and $Y is money that was claimed to change hands, but never did, and the difference between XXX and X is carpeting that Marty has recorded himself purchasing, but not actually purchased.
If he was buying the carpeting from a cartel-owned supplier, he'd just pay the inflated prices that he's so proud of booking without paying. Instead, he's buying real services from a real third party, and then booking fake expenses for unclear reasons.
Slowly. Just pay for everything with cash. You can even buy a house with it. Real estates will accept it.
Start a car rental company by buying a bunch of luxury cars. Drive two or three yourself, and let your friends and family drive them. Once the cash is clean, sell them and close the business.
All you need to do is make sure you have an actual phone number that someone can call to rent a car, and make sure your prices are outrageous. Give the job of answering the phone to your sister's kid, or your girlfriend.
This is literally what our Fraud Chief did.
> "Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives"
I know lots of people who live very nice lives ($300-750k/year spend) using nothing but cash and never showing ID.
There are a million ways to convert it to crypto, and a million ways to convert crypto to many of the other things one might want to use: gift cards, airline miles, etc.
Same goes for gold. There are lots of shops in many countries that will buy gold for cash. Many countries still have hotels that accept cash.
You can pay for a surprising amount of things in cash. One friend of mine simply has a rich buddy buy his cars and insurance, and he gives him paper cash each year for the sum of payments+insurance.
Many landlords are happy to accept cash, especially if you are willing to pay a year in advance.
Why do you think someone with that much money would be driving a car that's titled and plated in their own name?
Can you name the top three ways to convert it in to crypto? I don't think there are literally one million ways.
This is one of those "if you don't already know" topics.
The feds cracked down on it earlier this year leading up to the election, but it's back.
Why can't anyone say what it is?
Because it’s just a provocative fiction in their minds.
I can, but I won't. The state doesn't like it, because it bypasses the points at which they control the system (largely without due process) and I don't wish to make their jobs any easier for them.
In most countries I think you'd need to know someone with crypto who could use the cash and do a swap. The website localbitcoins that used to sort that is closed. Cambodia has cash to crypto dealers on the street if you are over that way.
Get an auto dealers license and buy a bunch of used cars, one at a time in cash, and sell them for less than you paid. But not too cheap to get other dealers upset and report you.
Very easy to launder 20M
Be a promotor or promotion company, sell VIP tables at big event or music festival for 20,000 euro each, 9 out of 10 clients don’t show up (because they don’t exist and you made them up)
Do it all summer, our economy is big enough to support this
Your money is now clean from selling VIP tables
Deposit cash, pay taxes, move on
So the suggestion is that uh... the former fraud chief of the Spanish police... become a highly connected event promotor... with access to high profile clients who will actually spend 20,000 euro for a concert ticket... which we inexplicably demand and receive IN CASH... in exchange for VIP tables at high profile events that we magically have access to... while supplying 20,000 worth of services to the one VIP that did attend... and then repeat this how many times? While forging receipts for cash payments, which will sustain scrutiny from a cursory audit?
Is there a missing /s? Like this is neither easy nor a plausible way to get away with financial fraud.
“I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?”
The question wasn’t how the Spanish Anti-Fraud chief would launder.
A number of high-profile acts in the US have had managers convicted for this in connection with drug trafficking and other organized crime.
It’s absolutely plausible.
I’m not sure why you think a cursory audit would reveal that a cash receipt was forged.
The actual truth is not very far from this. He actually had a cab / private ride company. Most of his rides were fake.
How did it go from that to cocaine bust?
TAM?
the answer was how to launder it, not how the fraud chief could launder it
but either way, the answer is yes, and yes, and no sarcasm
first, the investigation is never going to happen. but okay, lets play auditor
the auditor is like “wow you paid your taxes on time and properly, but I hate that you have made money, so lets check the receipts”
“hmmm, big cash, who are these clients?”
“What!? you didn't do KYC on a transaction of 20,000 euro cash, 1,000 times!? ah but the parties were in Luxembourg and Austria and Monaco where such cash transaction limits don't exist, well Monaco’s is 30,000 euro per transaction, sorry for the inconvenience, on behalf of the King of Spain I apologize for our hubris in thinking this had anything to do with our ridiculous AML regime”
You keep calling someone a "Fraud Chief" long enough...
I'd forgotten Europe has €500 notes, whereas in the US everyone now gets to deal with $100 bill spam.
Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family of of 4.
:)
The 500 euro bill hasn’t been produced since 2019.
Apparently 25% of them were in circulation in Spain, despite the Spanish economy being only a fraction of the eurozone.
I bough and sold a flat in Spain around 2004 and it was standard then for part of the payment to be in cash for tax avoidance purposes. This was all done officially through regular Spanish lawyers and estate agents.
In the UK they heavily discourage even the £50 note (roughly €60/$63). We basically only use 5/10/20.
Most shops won't take them and cash machines don't give them out.
Which is pretty odd now given how high inflation got here for the last few years.
Here's an article from 5 years ago saying that £50 notes were widely regarded as just used by criminals.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48993008
The same attitude is present in the US. You can occasionally find signs in stores in the US indicating they won't accept bills larger than $20: https://www.amazon.com/SmartSign-V-shaped-Businesses-Restaur...
The real root of the attitude should be "We don't accept transactions that would produce more than 20 USD in change." However the average person is an idiot so it's easier for them to just say they don't take 50s/100s. I guess arguably there's a greater incentive to try to use lesser bills to make larger ones, but that's what the watermarks and security strips are supposed to prevent.
Citibank ATMs will happily give you $100 bills if you don't specify otherwise. I prefer $20s, as less inconvenient for the store clerks.
It's always a lie though. You can't realistically start a register out with less than $100 of change for a few hour shift. Maybe $50 for really short shift or if there's a manager with safe access who can reload it.
The signs aren't about the amount of change in the register. It's that they'll refuse to take large bills.
Yes I found this strange coming from Ireland where (during the Celtic Tiger at least!) the minimum I ever seemed to get from cash machines was 50 euros.
I don't like it, but I think the long term plan is to eliminate paper money, and with it privacy.
I live in the Netherlands and you can really live 100% cash-free here. A lot of places are card-only, even.
Dystopian future here we come! Cashless seems cool until you realise one day they decide to turn off your access to money, or tax you more based on your spending pattern. The possibilities for abuse are endless so it WILL be abused.
Don't start me. Besides that, there's the fact that card-only is giving free rein to the boards of MasterCard and Visa to decide what's effectively legal; it's already the case in the adult industry, where the card companies have enacted rules for performers, production and distributors. No agree, no money. What happens if the next CEO is an evangelical Christian?
And of course cashless makes it hell on those without bank accounts, like the homeless and immigrants, those who rely on informal employment, and the general outskirts of society. There are prepaid cards, but they require ID checks and often fees which they can hardly afford. That will make many rely on informal banking from loan-shark types.
And last, the banks see everything. I worked for a bank. I definitely don't want those people to have all the data that matters on everyone.
I refuse to patronize places that are card only. Not everyone can use electronic payments.
New York and some other cities actually made it illegal, as it's discriminatory.
How on earth is requiring card payments discriminatory? Providing cash payment options is absolutely not free and implies extra risk on behalf of the business.
Refusing to take part in the banking system is not worth penalizing businesses for. Let the free market work.
The reality is that cards can impose very high fees and businesses spread that cost out onto card AND cash payers. Card companies stipulate in the contract with the business that they CAN NOT charge extra for card transactions to cover the fees. That is why you see businesses offering discounts if you use cash.
The Visa/Mastercard cartel has too much power.
This is a good argument against cards, but does not address GP's claim that card-only payments is discriminatory.
Ever see a homeless schizophrenic? Do you think they have a bank account?
This is a strawman. The homeless schizophrenic is clearly not capable of caring for themselves, so their inability to participate in society should not impose restrictions on all businesses.
The problem you cite is not solved by requiring businesses to accept cash—it is solved by removing the homeless schizophrenic from the depravity of the street.
Many people at the margin don't have bank accounts. Not only schizophrenics, but undocumented immigrants or the homeless. There are a lot of undocumented immigrants and homeless.
It's not possible to get a bank account in the USA if:
1- you are on the secret unaccountable banking blacklist
2- you lack proper identity documentation
3- you are a fugitive from justice
Without a bank account, you can't get a payment card, and, in a cashless world, you can't buy food.
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Because not everyone has access to cards?
Legal residents absolutely 100% all have _access_ to cards, whether they choose to use them is another matter.
Also; this is factually false. There are thousands and thousands of people who are citizens, legal residents with legal ID, and not fugitives, who cannot obtain bank accounts or bank cards.
There is a secret blacklist shared among the banks that cause them to deny or automatically close accounts held by certain people. They are not required to service anyone.
Do you not see the dangerous failure modes of allowing private companies to point and click cause someone to become persona non grata without due process? They also happily do so at the request of the state, again with no requirement of criminal wrongdoing or burden of proof, and no due process.
Do you know what a huge amount of labor in your society depends on people who are not legal residents, or don’t have identity documentation?
You don’t want those people to not be able to buy food, or the next time you go and buy vegetables or fruits or chicken breast with your own shiny metal bank card, you might find yourself paying 5x the cost.
Don't you need to be above a certain age to have a card?
Many years ago I got paid a bonus with €500 notes. They were so rare in Spain that people used to call them Bin Ladens (since at the time he hadn't been caught yet).
> Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
My favorite head scratcher is the US penny. It would be so much easier on all involved if we rounded so everything was MOD5 friendly, and just eliminated the penny.
There has been a long-running campaign to get rid of the penny, to the extent that there's a "West Wing" episode that features the campaign. Ironically, Canada got rid of the penny in 2012-2013, after relatively little debate.
The West Wing episode is what I always think of when I think about the penny, and I almost referenced it myself
And yet we also still have Daytime Saving Light Time.
What is wrong with us?
Canada did it.
So did Australia.
Switzerland has 1000 Franc notes which is around 1140 USD. The central bank just decided that the next series will also include the 1k note although the EU doesn't want it (not that they really have a say) and some others are opposed to it as well.
CHF 1000 is worth less than it ever was so the whole claim about it being used for crime is bullshit. People keep cash at home and safety deposit boxes. When we had negative interest rates it made sense to keep some money in cash.
A bigger debate that is coming is the elimination of the 5 rappen coin. The 1 rappen coin was killed a long time ago and the golden colored 5 may soon also go.
My understanding is that Switzerland doesn't require you to declare cash of any amount when arriving.
€1.2million in a briefcase? No problem. 3kg of beef? Serious business.
CHF1000 notes would obviously be very convenient for moving large amounts of cash. If you are the sort of person trying to avoid the tax man's 20-40% taxation or the police's 100% taxation, why care about the CHF exchange rate?
Jonathan Wild would be proud!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild)
There needs to be a word for when someone does something bad in their own interest, and as a result the wider society degrades far more than the individual profited. Corrupt anti-corruption officials, yes, but also college professors issuing passing grades to customers, er I mean students, news networks that give in to the urge for sensationalism and ideologically driven attention, lawyers who escalate conflict for profit, and so on. The individual act is (relatively) harmless, but over time if left unchecked these acts degrade institutions and eventually society itself (or confidence in society, which is the same thing). These actions cause a society to move from the good nash equilibrium to the other. A healthy society can endure a certain amount of malefactors, has an immune system for them ranging from "stink eye" to "prison", but when the violations gets higher than a certain threshold, across a certain number of industries and institutions, when the immune system starts failing to catch even a fraction of it (or the immune system degrades completely), the host society begins to weaken and the majority of the herd flips from "cooperate" to "defect".
How about "enshittifiers"?
These are positive feedback loops. Perhaps "anti-social runaway" would be a good description.
I believe one standard term is negative sum games. The losers lose more than the winners win.
Remember when Greece went broke 10+ years ago? Apparently no one was paying their taxes because they looked around and saw no one paying their taxes. It was a contributing factor because it impaired the nation's ability to get loans because it lowered the government revenue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
Reminds me of the ending of Street Kings.
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This arrest is ridiculous: how is the head of the anti-money-laundering organization supposed to remain an expert in his field if he doesn't practice money laundering himself? /s
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Why would he use physical currency? Why not a Bitcoin wallet?
Crypto was included in the laundering schemes.
"Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives"
Cash is king. Bitcoin doesn't even come close to it.
Survivorship bias. Those who weren't doing something dumb don't appear in such news stories
Cash is less traceable and easier to use for most criminal applications.
So he doesn’t get arrested after €20M worth of Bitcoin is found in his Bitcoin wallet. Maybe there are better privacy preserving cryptocurrencies.
Not being tech savvy or not wanting to rely on volatile cryptocurrencies are also legitimate explanations for staying all cash. And he may very well have a few crypto wallets too.
Nontrivial to use. Still need to pass it to someone to convert fiat to crypto. Bitcoin is a public ledger, would be even easier to tie to him in some ways.
Trade the entire wallet, that isn’t registered to anyone’s name? Seems easy enough to move money illicitly with crypto
So now at least two people - who I'm going to assume don't have 100% trust in each other - both have the private keys. How is this going to work?
Physical hardware key, so neither party knows it, but possession of it is the authentication.
Essentially crypto can be untraceable like cash or gold, it can be traded off the books, until you ‘launder’ it into someone’s name.
There has to be a personality test to see if someone is short-sighted enough to take 20 million euros in cash without any plan for how to launder it. Right?!
Seems like every single IT job is littered with personality tests these days but what about government?