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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

How would that be different that doing this on any eComm platform?

I don't understand what's unique about doing it through Turo.

It's not all that unique, it's just that "daily car rentals" are pretty amorphous. Similar to how the car wash was the go-to money launder on Breaking Bad.

If you have some other eComm platform telling T-shirts or whatever, sure there could be fake orders but it wouldn't be all that hard to track down that these THINGS were never sent/made. But anything involving a service...well, it's much harder to prove that those things DIDN'T happen.

> It's not all that unique, it's just that "daily car rentals" are pretty amorphous

It’s also tough to verify an actual transaction happened. With most e-commerce, the equivalent would involve shipping around boxes of rocks to generate tracking numbers.

Car wash flow is slightly different right? Because it is a cash heavy business - in that case the "laundering" happens through cooking the books to make the business seem more successful (with more cash inflows) than it actually has. That cash comes from some illicit activity with different parties than the car wash and slowly supplements the main income from running the legitimate business. In the turo example, unless I am misunderstanding, the drug dealer or whoever is providing an illicit service asks for payment through a car rental? And so now your customers have knowledge and participation in the laundering scheme.

"Your customer" might just be you.

To do that I would need to get the money into the banking system though right? At which point it has to be already laundered. Otherwise auditors will notice unexplained large cash influxes. I don't think you can rent a turo car in cash.

Yea, that's interesting re: audit trail of rental. They technically have the person take a picture of the odometer before/after, but I'm unsure they force.

I'm a big Turo user (love renting sports cars off there for weekend corner carving), but I forget if it's required.

Right, but if it's your car (the dealer) you're presumably still using it, so you can easily give the "renter" multiple odometer pictures.

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