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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

That's one way, another popular way (in Denmark at least) is to buy winning lottery tickets with dirty money and then legally cash them. Since it is not unreasonable for a person who has very little income to buy a lottery ticket, it won't be suspecious if they drive flash cars, etc.

Alternatively, if you need to launder money continuously, you can bet on sports, but buy more than one ticket, so that no matter what who wins you will have a winning ticket from which you can claim your recent money, should anybody ask.

Disclaimer: none of the above should be taken as legal advice or used for illegal purposes.

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How do you find somebody to sell you a lottery ticket that won a lot of money ? And somebody who also trusts you ? Or do you buy a ton of tickets and do essentially the same thing as with sport betting ?

I guess places that sell lottery tickets aren't as strict when it comes to KYC laws (if there are any to begin with)

In the US the lotto tickets are frequently sold at self-service vending machines which take cash and cash only, so the level of KYC compliance is roughly zero.

I would think it's more the other way round, the guy who has a winning lottery ticket asks around in a pub "hey, I want my money now, who would want to buy this?" and the barman just might know.

Lottery's rate of return is worse than in sports betting, so buying a ton of tickets is probably not good business.

IDK. Imaging you just won big, $1M or 1M Euros. First of all I'd keep quiet about it, but even if I bragged, there's no way I'd take, let's say, $1.5M cash from some shady people when the money can be counterfeit, or they might just shoot me for the winning ticket. Then there's the problem of explaining to the tax authorities where I got my $1.5M from. I assume they take your TaxID/SSN when winnings are paid, so I couldn't say that it was lottery winnings.

I'd think the lottery tickets we speak of here are smaller than $1M. Danish and other Nordic lottery markets are different from U.S. so that there are somewhat more "medium size" wins, but no truly huge tens-of-millions-€ jackpots. Denmark and other Nordic countries have state monopoly betting companies (though they do then also operate a multi-country Viking Lotto and participate in Eurojackpot.)

The latter: Buy a lot of tickets (which aren't tracked transactions, so there's no saying how much dirty money you spent), and lose N% of it to the "house". Take your winnings (and if you buy scratch tickets, you should be relatively statistically safe) and it's "clean".

Of course, I've read that the scratch tickets systems are often flawed, and with some you can calculate if it's a winner by examining the serial numbers. That means you have various ways to cheat the system to give you better odds, but the reference I just found to that is a wired article, so take with salt. Pretty believable though.

http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/ (anecdotes about laundering and odds being beaten are past the 50% mark, but the whole article is worth a read)

In most of the US states the expected value of your winnings is less than 50 cents for every dollar you spend. That's a steep price for ML.

On the other hand, the "lost" income goes to schools and roads so it's kind of like just paying tax on the income.

Ehh... I wouldn't be too sure about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

The Danish scratch tickets are 60%, but you can go much better with sports.

Mobster Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Gang did in fact do this in Massachusetts in the early nineties. The papers reported it at face value, I guess for fear of libel suits.

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