It's really just about making it harder for law enforcement folks to draw associations by looking directly at the bank accounts of several people they suspect are in cahoots. Or, in some cases, about making it harder to trace specific cash serial numbers or other instruments like cheques.
I recall reading of a crime outfit in Australia that would have the elders in their family take their illicit cash and use it to place an endless stream of bets on poker machines. By law they're required to return some high percentage, say, 75%, of the money put into them (the house keeps the rest). If you gamble tens of thousands in those machines, and you don't care about the losses, you get a reasonable expectation value back out as laundered winnings. In that case you don't even have to own the pub with the pokies, that's just how they work.
Where does the laundering come into it? If the machine pays out in cash and you just walk away with it, you've gone from having a big pile of dirty money to having a slightly smaller pile of dirty money. You could declare that the smaller pile is all gambling winnings (off of a low base), but as soon as that gets audited you have to refer the auditor to the casino's security cameras and there you are spending a lot more than you got back.
You could ask the casino to make a formal declaration that your smaller pile of money is gambling winnings (maybe it's chips!), but why should they lie for you?
And if it is chips, you had to buy chips originally. How do you explain how you afforded those chips?
What's the part of this scheme that works?
If you are not big enough fish or have some bad luck, you can slip through quite easily. The key is to keep it down money wise, spread it across many places and random dates. You can't do big sums alone, hence the grandpas in parent comment.
Basically, small crime these days, at least in Europe, is not punished unless you literally steal from police personnel. And if you do it well you can hide bigger crime in sea of small crime.
Maybe AI could help with some of that, but I see often lack of any interest by police to even care that ie your 700 euro phone was stolen, even if you still know its exact location in specific house. No AI is ever fixing that.
You locate people that have winning tickets and offer them certain percent of money over the prize value. For example, if it's a 10K prize, you offer 12 or 13K. The ticket owner gets dirty money and avoids paying taxes on the prize (so they get 40 or 50% more than they would have got with the ticket). The other side gets clean money.
When dirty politicians get audited they find how "lucky" they are, having won lottery tens of times in a couple years or three. What an statistic oddity, huh? ;)
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2015/12/21/inenglish/14506...
The problem I see with the casino "strategy" is that, as soon as you are audited, your story immediately falls apart. That's a terrible cover. Who needs a defense that can never be penetrated as long as it's never attacked? The idea of laundering is to say something that's difficult to disprove.
> You think taxmen are going to investigate endless hours of video feed from some casino via court order for some 10k win claimed in taxes?
If you have a thousand of them, yes. If you have one, it was a waste of your time and your money to pretend to launder it through slot machines.
Buying the liquor gets a bit fuzzy as to where the money comes from. But the bigger thing is you can have imaginary customers and either drink “their” alcohol, pour it down the drain, or use it for gifts and bribes, all while booking receipts for people who never came into the bar at all.
It’s not that the henchmen spend every ill gotten dollar in the restaurant, it’s that the restaurant looks busy enough for that level of revenue to look even remotely plausible.
Because if you overprice something in a video game someone might buy it anyway. Because who’s to say the price didn’t spike high for some real world or in game event (like a holiday, a new challenge opening, or a voice actor died and everyone wants to dress like their characters). If you can turn the in game currency back and forth to hard currency, then you can sell a $5 item for $500 and walk away with 90-99% of the value (depending if the company charges a transfer fee).
Except the joke there is, you never even have to pay out! Gift cards to various tradeable "assets" are a reliable way to launder money, or more directly, launder stolen credit card details into usable money.
in reality it just goes home w/ the business owner and/or his people -- sometimes the same day as it's bought. drop off a couple kilos of unsold doner kabab meat to his mom who is retired, hand some out to uncle, etc.
it's hard to trace, and hard to ID -- just some random meat in an old lady's freezer, and may have already ended up in a stew or something -- and in theory should have been disposed of (in theory) anyway per health code regulations.
pretty common technique in use, like, everywhere.
The laundered money is reported to the tax office as cash payments from customers. Add some fake invoices from meat suppliers to make your books look legit, and you have converted dirty money into clean, even taxable income.
This only works to a certain degree, though. If the tax office becomes suspicious, they will definitely use undercover people to count customers and meat deliveries over a few weeks. But if for example only 10% of your sales volume is fake, it is quite hard for the tax office to prove this. For smaller laundry volumes, you don't even need fake supplier bills, you can always just claim that you put a bit less meat on the kebap, etc. The general idea is to take advantage of the fact that even the tax office acknowledges that it is impossible to keep books accurate to the last penny in such businesses.
When I was a student I often ate pizza in a really nice Italian restaurant which later turned out to be a money laundering front for the Mafia. But the pizza was great!
In New Zealand "Income that is earned from illegal activities needs to have tax paid on it." however they do try to deter money laundering, tax evasion and tax fraud.
In New Zealand it is getting harder to launder money because cash is not used as much as it used to be. Certainly a legitimate kebab shop should now receive the majority of their money as card payments. Few businesses here would have a majority of takings in cash.
And I imagine card payments do make it harder, but the schemes just become more difficult, which might press on the margins a little. You could always buy your kebab shops overseas. Sell your drugs for Bitcoin, send the Bitcoin to Berlin, exchange them there for Euros, cash them in at your Kebab shop, and then wire them back to New Zealand, bam you're an international investor in the eyes of your government.
At one point our friend told us it was well known that both were owned by the local mafia. If you were to check the books you'd find the place was fully booked every day of the year and doing a roaring trade, while if you actually went and visited you'd find 3 slightly bemused looking English people and maybe a wedding party.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2024/05/08/londons-plagu...
The whole think must be a facade to justify rental income and declared jobs.
> obviously aimed at the money laundering business
Places also provide facade to some social networks. They can keep relatives having a job, can act like a store front for doing whatever deal.
I accept they don’t survive by just serving food, but some of it basically just bad business or some guys to have a legit place for other activities.