(I know we’re not supposed to discuss how to commit a crime . . . but this is so unlikely it shouldn’t count.)
Suppose you did some work for a very wealthy person, and he paid you a million bucks in cash. And suppose you really don’t want to pay taxes on it. What could you do with the money that wouldn’t raise the IRS’s suspicion? (Assuming that the rich guy also kept no record of the transaction.) And I don’t mean something like buying a Picasso. You want to use it to augment your income, but you can’t just deposit it into your bank account without raising suspicion.
Use your salary to pay utilities and mortgage. Pay for everything else in cash. You’ll legitimately build up savings quickly using your salary.
Use the cash to eat in nice restaurants, buy good quality furniture, buy a great pc, tv, and sound system, buy a decent second-hand car (if you want a new car you can then trade in the used car and pay the excess in cash). Give a trusted friend $21k and get them to transfer you $20k (only do this once).
We did this a few months ago, I’ll see if I can dig up the link.
But I think buying and selling sports cards would be a pretty fool proof (and untraceable) way of laundering the money. Buy up a bunch of cards from when you would have been a kid and turn around and sell them. You could even do it on eBay with a paper trail and everything and I don’t think anyone would bat an eye at a guy selling his childhood baseball card collection.
The standard approach is to open a store as a money laundering front.
There was a deli in Queens, NY near my dad’s office that never had any customers that we could see but was in business for years. We always wondered about it. I need to ask him if it is still open.
I’ve been thinking the exact same thing about a second-hand vinyl album store in my town. My theory is that they just bought a warehouse-full from a bankruptcy auction and haven’t actually sold a single one of them in the past twenty or so years.
Nailed in one reply- spend cash on whatever toys you like, but everything that leaves a trail pay with your legit income. Build up savings from your salary, don’t quit your job, don’t draw a huge amount of attention (build up your toy stash slowly). There is also cocaine- a drug habit is a terrific cash sink.
Oh wait- this is all about how to SPEND a million in cash, not launder it, exactly. Hmmmmmm… back to the drawing board…
There are a couple of stores around here that appear to be fronts. They are more common in cities than in suburbs, but if you know what to look for, you still run across them occasionally.
I actually did this with a guy (although I didn’t quite realize what we were doing until some time into it).
We used to fly to Panama every few months with TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in cash. He would deposit it down there and before I realized it, he had a foreign bank account in the high six-figures.
*
Pity he drank and partied away most of it…*