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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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?

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You are overthinking all this. This is not Al Capone investigation, tax offices are understaffed and petty negligence or even crime happens with tax returns very frequently. 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? Not sure if casinos even keep all video feeds for say 3 years since it takes time to actually file and process those tax returns.

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.

Hell, even someone like Dan Bilzerian basically openly laundered tens of millions via “private poker games” and he’s never going to be charged for it.

Yep. A classic movement (at least on Spain) is buying winning lottery tickets.

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...

You can say whatever you want if you assume you can't be audited. In that case there's no reason to play the slots at all. Your money will stay just as dirty in either case, but you'll have 30% more of it.

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.

If you play long enough, you always lose all of your money.

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