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Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

Hol up, the buyer wanted cash for buying a flat? And no-one saw anything fishy in that?

Really sounds like your family member accidentally helped launder money.

Entire transaction took place in bank - and cash was immediately deposited into bank and never even left bank building. Not entirely sure why it would be a problem or enable anything?

(and obviously, seller wanted cash) (and it is possible that I misunderstood something)

And I would do the same - just to avoid worrying that maybe transfer is not going to arrive or get reverted or something (that is 100% hypothetical, I do own any housing).

So I am mildly unhappy that it gets outlawed.

Last time I had to do something like this I used a "certified check", which in the EU country I live is a mechanism where a bank effectively prints non-anonymous money that can be exchanged physically.

It would have worked just as well in you example transaction where both parties were in a bank. In my example it worked by exchanging this piece of paper while at the notary.

(This is my understanding on how most of the house sales work in Italy)

What you said doesn't make sense. The seller requested the buyer to pull the money out of the bank into cash and then immediately deposited that cash into their bank account. What would be the reason for doing that?

Doesn't make sense unless you've worded what happened incorrectly by accident.

Lower risk (or lower perceived risk) of money transfer not happening or being reverted.

I would be really anxious if I would be selling something worth 80% of my wealth.

Maybe the entire thing was hilariously pointless? But neither buyer nor seller was expert on this stuff.

(unless seller was hiding really well and it was some 6D chess)

This sounds like how you would buy a flat where you didn't want to make a paper trail.

In the real (non-criminal) world you would have a conveyancing solicitor handle it, and he would take care of the contract, the transfer, checking for liens, stamp duty etc.

How do you even know the seller owns the flat when you do everything in cash?

Why involve, trust and pay an extra fee to a 3rd party when you can just use cash? It seems like it's not fishy in this case since it all happened within a bank.

Paper trail was fully present - with notary certifying that transaction took place and updating records in land registration, preparing tax stuff to pay and record.

I expect that they also checked at least basic status of that property and that it had no mortgage, encumbrances etc recorded in the land register.

I bet that bank also recorded that transactions.

It's a perfectly legal way to buy a property in Germany. Of course this gets abused to launder money because you can also buy a house worth a million in cash.

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