re: Let's talk money laundering

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bogus charities

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Starting a GoFundMe comes to mind.

In theory it's easy, in practice is extremely difficult. At some point there are just too many third party documents running around.

If you have $3M in cash and you are reporting that you are only making $60,000 a year. You have to live like you are only making $60,000 a year and then there is the risk of keeping $3M in cash.

If you are only reporting $60k and you live in a $400k house, own two luxury cars, etc, etc then you run the risk of putting yourself on the radar.

The key is to make sure you have the cash in an extremely safe place and live modest and don't spend it on things that will raise any questions.

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You have to go into it knowing you're going to still lose a cut to Uncle Sam. If you accept that, your life is much less stressful.

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If you accept that, then why launder the money at all? Just deposit it in the bank, claim it as income and pay taxes on it.

Couldnt you just really buy a bunch of ATMs, stuff them full of the "dirty" cash and get "clean" cash in your bank account?

Also a bank isn’t required to report deposits of less than 10k.

You can open up accounts at 5 different small banks and deposit 5-7 grand every couple weeks and it won’t be reported. This would work for amounts of 1-3 million. Large amounts it would be tough because of time and a massive change in lifestyle would draw red flags

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Also a bank isn’t required to report deposits of less than 10k.

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True.

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You can open up accounts at 5 different small banks and deposit 5-7 grand every couple weeks and it won’t be reported

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You can but I know someone whom was told the bank didn't want their business anymore. They opened up another account elsewhere and are now more careful.

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about laundering it. I would get several safe deposit boxes and spread the money around. In multiple states at that.

I would buy a few houses on contract in Florida and put money into them fixing them up and then rent them out.

Pay everything in cash and just have an awesome life doing nothing but fishing/hunting and traveling the country/world sightseeing, skiing, and fishing/hunting.

I haven’t seen one suggestion here yet that wouldn’t be easy as frick to discover

I think real estate is a good one. You have to have the proven income to purchase a house, but you could buy homes in poor condition, legitimately, pay to fix them up with cash, and then rent or sell them.

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How hard is it to launder money? It's a different issue if you have a constant stream of illegal money coming in (like the two movie/tv references above) but what if you just had a one-time large sum to deal with?

If it's a lower amount, say $3 million, you could safely just live on the cash paying daily expenses such as groceries, gas, etc., for years. Higher amounts become problematic.

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One time amount isn't that difficult to launder - although that depends on the size. Using your example of $20MM would be more difficult if you wanted to launder it quickly.


The other thing to keep in mind is it also depends on what country you are trying to launder funds through. The US for example has fairly robust anti-money laundering (AML) regulations for the Banks that make it a little more difficult than most other countries.


There is actually a lot of public information on how to launder money - federal and state bank regulators and DOJ regularly release schemes that they have busted at various banks. A common scheme for laundering money includes setting up a shell company in an offshore location and use funds to perform a cash purchase of real estate as the real estate industry has lower AML regulations than the banks do (although make sure you pay attention to which US counties you purchase real estate in as FinCEN has specific Geographic Targeting Orders on certain US counties where the they have increased regulations on cash real estate purchases). Once you have the real estate, use it as collateral for a loan and put funds in various bank accounts (across multiple banks and jurisdictions). From there you can either begin developing the real estate you purchased or rent it out. Also for bonus point begin paying yourself a paycheck through the real estate as well (through the shell company you created). At that point you have essentially laundered your funds, and provided quite a bit of distance between the current state of the funds and its origin.

For more fun you can get more complicated through the use of cryptocurrencies, foreign exchange transactions, etc.