Not sure how dumb you think the feds are, or why you would want to structure your deposits in direct contravention of a law with real teeth, or how you think you will benefit by structuring your deposits. Banks file millions of CTRs every year; it doesn’t mean your transaction was suspicious, it just means it was large. If your large single transaction was legit, and the feds ask you about it for some arcane reason, you’re fine. If OTOH you structure your deposits to avoid triggering a CTR, and the feds determine that you structured your deposits to avoid a CTR, you’re in deep shit, whether your funds were legit or not.
Everything I’ve heard says cash is the way to go, with the transaction conducted at a bank or police station. If you do it at the bank, you can deposit it immediately; once the teller has accepted the bills and credited your account, you have some assurance that the bills are not counterfeit.
Several years ago I sold a car on craigslist. The buyer showed up from 150 miles out of town; I assumed he just wanted a test drive and would be back to buy the car at a later date, but he arrived at my door with $6000 cash in hand, and wanted to buy as soon as the test drive was done. I had intended to do the transaction at a bank, but this was a Sunday, so it screwed everything up. :smack: I didn’t want to do the transaction at my house; there would be no cameras/witnesses, and I was also uncomfortable with the buyer knowing that I would be left with $6000 in cash at my house for at least the remainder of the day, an easy mark. So I insisted we head for a nearby grocery store that had a Western Union outlet which could immediately convert the cash into money orders. That way if the buyer did later send someone to rob my house, I could stop payment on the MOs, assuring the funds would be safe. The buyer was there with me and saw me getting MOs, which also acted as a disincentive for any later robbery. All in all it was a mess, probably overkill (I had no particular reason to be suspicious of the buyer or his son), but it turned out OK.
I’d second the post(s) saying not to overreact to the $10k (though potentially lower) IRS cash transaction reporting threshold by trying to ‘structure’, thereby actually breaking the law. Whereas if the bank ends up reporting a $7k deposit because it’s suspicious in their view (or they don’t even think so but are afraid regulators would think they should) but it’s in fact all legit, so what?
I doubt fake cashier’s checks for cars are all that common. But people trying to buy used vehicles from people they don’t know with loads of counterfeit money has got to be extremely rare. If you’re in the business of producing hard to detect fake C notes (like the North Koreans) you must have more subtle and indirect ways of injecting them into the money supply than that through some kind of intermediary/launderer to spread them around. And it’s much more likely also outside the US where the great majority of real C notes reside. I once sold a car for $6 wad of cash, without a second thought.
Why wouldn’t a cashier’s check issued from the bank teller directly and handed to you be secure, btw? As I understand it, the process to make a cashier’s check is the bank withdraws the money from the account of the person writing the check, and the check itself is written against the bank account of the bank itself. So they must honor it if they issued it, and they have limitless funds to honor it with. It just seems simpler to use 1 piece of paper instead of a substantial stack of filthy luchre, and I’m just wondering why the cash is safer.
What if you were buying a jet or something and were paying several million for it?
It probably would be, unless the teller was a co-conspirator with the buyer. The teller goes through all the motions of producing a cashier’s check and then switches the real check with a fake check.
I am not saying that this is at all likely to happen. I am not saying that the teller couldn’t eventually get caught and fired. It’s just that there are ways of scamming people no matter what you do.
Do you have any more $6 cars for sale? 
I’ll take a dozen.
Cash. Do vehicle transactions at the rmv/dmv. It’s a secure and recorded place to do business and you can ensure the vehicle is immediately removed from your name. Plenty of problems occur where the buyer gets into an accident or claims a problem before they transfer the title, leaving you having to spend your time addressing it.
This is a STUPID IDEA and is likely to get you into serious trouble. Lots of smart people who know how the system works try to game the system, by this point the banks and feds have been over all the simple tricks. At this time, anything that starts with ‘all you would need to do’ has been seen before, and they know to look for the pattern. You are going to get caught structuring payments, and are likely going to be under suspicion for laundering money for some illegal enterprise because most people don’t commit felonies for no real reason.
You’re talking about committing a crime that, in addition to jail time and confiscation of funds, can severely mess up your ability to function financially for years to come just to try to avoid a bank filing a form that doesn’t actually do anything.
When the feds come to ask you why you spread your money to multiple banks, I hope you have a good answer ready.
Here’s a question. We are closing my current bank account in a state we moved from. We needed to move a large sum of money to our new, local bank.
We had electronic transfers already set up, but the daily max is 10K. So we had to move the money over a few days in 10K chunks. It was all our money- from one account to another.
Would this raise any red flags vis-a-vis restructuring?
Aw I understand it, a vehicle is considered a capital asset, so in most cases you are selling it for a loss, and no tax liability is incurred. If you sell it at a gain, you’re supposed to report it as a capital gain.
Exactly. the feds simply seize the money, and then it’s up to you to prove why it was not “structuring” to do a multi-transaction deposit where you could have done one. IIRC the seizure is a civil matter, so it’s a preponderance of evidence rule - and it’s already uphill battle if you split the transaction.
Not sure what’s worse - two transactions separate banks, the same day - very obviously structuring. Two transactions a week apart - well, they will ask where the money came from. You got it all in one lump sum? So why did you then split up the deposits? You thought you might need the other half as cash? Why, what were you planning to buy that required a huge wad of cash rather than a credit card or a cheque? And so on. Lie, and you face obstruction charges. Meanwhile, the legal costs fighting to get your money back are exceed only by the legal costs of trying to avoid jail for structuring.
AIUI, CTRs are only generated for transactions involving cash, i.e. physical dollar bills and/or coins. If you’re doing electronic transfers or checks, then I don’t believe there’s any issue with structuring or CTRs. (and the term is “structuring,” not “restructuring.”)
Electronic transfers leave a nice clear trail; the banking system knows exactly where the money came from and where it went. The whole issue with CTRs is that if you deposit a large chunk of physical cash, the provenance of that cash isn’t explicitly known to the banking system. Not a big deal for people who make large deposits once in a while (e.g. by selling a personal vehicle for cash), but if you make a lot of large cash deposits, officials may eventually come and ask where you’re getting all this cash from. If you have written records or other evidence that show it to be income or proceeds from a legitimate business, then all is well. If you don’t - say, you’re a drug kingpin - then the CTRs have worked as intended.
If you make a single deposit of >$10K from a vehicle sale, and for some odd reason the authorities come asking you about this large deposit, you can point them to the DMV, where the transaction will be a matter of record, with the selling price recorded on the title that got turned in to the DMV.
Structuring- got it.
That explanation makes perfect sense, Machine Elf. Thank you!
The biggest problem with running a “business” under the radar and off the electronic bank books, is how you convert pallets of cash into something you can use to buy your Ferrari, bling, and McMansion. So they look for cash deposits; especially large ones, regular large ones. The ideal business front is something that takes in wads of cash for a lot of small purchases. If you saw, in Breaking Bad they used a car wash; in Weeds, a pastry shop. For real world types, pizza places are allegedly an ideal front. Bars too. Casinos? Certainly.
So when you deposit your $10,000 or $7,000 the first thing they’ll ask or check, is “where did you get this wad of money?”. If it’s a one-time thing, you probably won’t have a problem. (Unless the guy who bought your car doesn’t want any attention.) If you are continuously depositing large sums of cash, you may sooner or later get checked out.
Not sure how it goes in the USA, but in Canada it seems almost 3/4 or more of transactions now are debit or credit in various stores, so opportunities to deposit money are fewer and fewer. They, of course, they could stake out your pizza place, determine number of customers, see if the cash being deposited makes sense based on traffic, etc.
There’s several hundred million bank accounts and not enough agents to examine them individually without cause, and automated bots can only spot so much. I would suspect it’s more likely that you’d get away with it until the authorities are investigating you for something. Then, I’m sure they can just type in your SSN, your spouse’s SSN, and (probably after some delay) get a list of every bank account you hold. A sharp eyed forensic accountant is going to spot the patterns pretty easy - hmm, total cash deposited in one year to these accounts is greater than 100k. No transaction is more than 10k or less than 5k. Multiple transactions per day, some days. Into different accounts instead of the nearest bank branch to where you live or work. Hmm…
But, if you’re in some sort of illegal business, sooner or later they’ll get a tip and look into you. So yeah, I’m going to say that you’re partially correct. I seriously doubt you’d get busted for structuring if that was the only crime you were doing, and you didn’t have any relatives or friends or known associates being investigated for a crime, and you were using multiple banks.
But yes, it isn’t worth the risk. If you plan to commit tax fraud or are dealing drugs, don’t put your money in the bank at all, obviously. This would be like storing your inventory as a drug dealer in a locker at a police station. The authorities insure those banks and thus have the right to examine all records and can easily get them with your SSN.
This is an incredibly irresponsible post.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about, and if anyone took your speculation for advice, they could wind up in a huge amount of trouble.
No, since it is not cash or cash equivalent, such as MO, Cashiers checks, etc.
Or you can just wire it.
Dont worry about CTRs, ie Cash Transactions reports for $10000 cash.
Do worry about a Suspicious Activity Report or SAR.
Note, that if you want to use multiple banks legally, you’d deposit the wad of cash in one bank and then wire or write a check from that account to your other bank account.