Are you saying people are buying houses for literal cash, meaning piles of ten- and twenty-dollar bills?
In some cases yes, but in reality, these companies are banking normally with local credit unions which are not subject to similar federal banking laws.
Its normal for insurance companies to assess a value to the property they are paying out for. If an building with a few old worn out washers and dryers is filing a claim for a supposed super laundrymat then it draws attention. Which gives then reason to further investigate .
Burning down a place for insurance is the last thing you do after you used it up and covered your tracks .
I don’t know. Potentially to prove assets that were claimed destroyed in the fire.
But I’m not saying they’d find it via forensic accounting necessarily, I’m saying that having insurance and police investigators sniffing around about arson is really the wrong sort of attention. Even if they don’t find anything that conclusively points to arson (and my understanding is that arson is legitimately difficult to get away with), it’s an attention-grabber.
The ideal money laundering business is a boring sleepy business that no-one thinks twice about. Not the one that has burned down three times in the last decade and that the local constabulary is salivating over nailing for arson.
Although I guess according to the comment I’m replying to, the money laundering is an open secret and the authorities can’t be bothered to enforce. Which also seems surprising to me, but is possible. But if it’s true that you can just openly launder money with impunity why not try to run an insurance scam too? Nothing about the story makes sense to me, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
Really? Are there financial institutions that are not subject to reporting and compliance laws nowadays?
Also, buying houses - or cars, or yachts - any transaction over $10,000 the bank must file a report with the feds, specifically to track money laundering. Plus, apparently they can /must file reports of suspicious and interesting transactions even if they don’t hit $10,000, and I read somewhere the $10,000 reporting limit can vary from day to day to confuse any attempt at money laundering. And… breaking up a transaction into less-than-$10,000 chunks is structuring, which is also illegal and allows the feds to seize the money too.
I see two aspects to money laundering -
One is the car wash / Blue Lodge problem, converting a pallet of cash into legitimate deposits. Again, volume is your enemy. Exceed the logical yield for the business/location, and you could attract the attention of computer programs. Most cash businesses are pretty restricted, and the growth of debit and credit sales has limited business throughput. You can use an army of “mules” but then they too have to explain why they are depositing cash, and legitimately explain why they are sending the electronic deposits to someone else. The key, as has been discussed is to NOT attract attention. You may at first be a too small fish for the police to bother, but that’s a gamble.
The second problem and the one I think relates to the art market, is how to justify the income coming to yourself. Are you personally the guy who’s cornered the market on pizza delivery, vending machines, and car washes in the metropolitan area? How many employees do you have, and how deep is each into the scheme? Every one who knows the system, even for their little storefront, knows something the feds would be happy to know; and you can’t rely on the type who is happy to be neck-deep in criminal activity not to rat you out for a get-out-of-jail-free card. It would take several years to build up to the level where you sit back and enjoy a life of luxury pretending to live off legit investments.
The art market thing works when you have funds coming in from shady countries; if you buy a Ludwig von Gogh for $1,000 and then sell it for $100,000, that $100,000 already has to be electronic funs, not cash, or you’re back to the “Explain where the cash came from” story. And if it’s from overseas, you or your buyer has to have declared it at the border (and explained it) for it to be legit. The nice thing about being the feds is if they don’t like your story, they can hold onto the money while they investigate.
Another interesting point is that the Treasury also has a process where they track the serial numbers of all large bills coming into the banking system. They can tell whether you are spending DB Cooper’s hidden stash, or maybe they notice that every time the undercover narcs do a buy the bills end up in the deposit for Big Al’s Pizza Bar and Car Wash.
Another point is that the feds also have a good idea what proportion of a business should be bank cards (credit, debit) vs cash nowadays in that area of town. Nobody buying on debit is probably a red flag. A business not interested in signing up for those banking sevices but still doing gang-busters is a red flag too. .
But I’ll agree that the key point is to “not attract attention”. Don’t overfeed the cash register at the business front. If the police really really have it in for you, or a slow month, they can easily sit outside the business and count customers. This is made even easier by modern surveillance tech - plant a camera on the pole across the road and count customers by fast-forward.
Not sure how it worked in the good old days, but McD’s in the last two decades had full computer systems their franchisees had to install - tills recorded transactions (the corporation took a share of the profits), they had their own ordering systems from their own warehouses, etc. It would be far easier and ring less alarm bells to run a non-franchise business.
I see your point. I dunno. Maybe they’re stupid, maybe they’re lucky, maybe it works differently here, maybe they’re paying off the right people, maybe the fires are started by their rivals.
I don’t think they’re all that stupid because the one place is still there and they do basic upkeep - so it must be working out for them. Otherwise they’d surely sell, it’s a good market.
I don’t see why rivals would start the fires; what would they want to achieve? The linked article mentions an explosion, the other times (the other place that’s now a nice restaurant) I’ve seen fairly minor fire damage.
They’re certainly not trying to keep a low profile or fly under the radar. They stick out like a… skanky purple-LED-lit thumb in this nice area. They’re sort of seen as an awkward nuisance and the council is apparently well aware of their activities but unable to do anything about it.
In conclusion, from observing these two places for years I would answer the OP by saying it’s really easy to launder money, but you raise excellent points and I might have to conclude that it is, indeed, hard. I apologise to the local criminals for underestimating their work ethic, accountancy skills and business acumen 
I hadn’t read your later comment because I had a reply open for ages and then got stuck doing other things. Now I’m getting more and more intrigued.
I’m going to try and find out how the other place ended and what’s going on with this one, now.
This one I can check their Chamber of Commerce registration, though I’m not sure what it will tell me. The other didn’t have a visible name, so I can’t look them up in any way.
For both I can ask around for the gossip and ask the guy I know who used to be on the council for this area.
If I find out what the hard part of money laundering is, I’ll let you know. For gossip, fightin’ crime and answers to GQ! 
I’m not sure I follow you. Let’s say that it happens for real: it’s Monday morning, and you have a painting that some guy actually does offer to buy for $100,000 — and so you hand him the painting right as he does, in fact, hand you the cash. And you dutifully record that transaction: some guy paid $100,000 cash for Painting A. Was he a tall guy in blue jeans? No, a short guy in khakis. Huh. Okay.
And then, on Tuesday, nobody offers to buy Painting B: you’re handed no cash, but you shrug and record that, um, some guy paid $100,000 cash for Painting B. Was he fat and balding? No, slim with a full head of hair. Huh. Okay.
How can I tell, by looking at your books, that the first sale happened and the second didn’t? How does your explanation vary from one telling to the next?
Here is an actual thing in the UK and I would be surprised if it doesn’t happen in the US too.
Students are always looking for more funds, so if someone offers them a deal where they are given a few hundred whatever to deposit in their bank on condition that they deduct 20% and send it on electronically, they are tempted, even though they suspect that it’s dodgy.
On the face of it, it’s pretty harmless, and when they offer a bonus for signing up a few mates, why not? The sums are kept moderate, so do not attract attention from the bank, but with a few hundred or even a few thousand students processing 500 a month each, it soon mounts up.
Teenager Jamie said he did not have a job when he was approached.
“It was extra income,” he said. "I was asked to take payments and not ask questions in return for a profit of what was going through my bank account.
“It could be anywhere from £500 to £5,000 - we’d only get a very small percentage so you wouldn’t make much money but to someone who didn’t have a job, someone who’s a student, it’s actually quite a lot of money to be making for very little work.”
But he said acting as a mule led to abuse and threats to kill.
Two students thought to have been used as “mules” by criminals have been sentenced for money laundering.
Abdi Mohamed and Nyanjura Biseko, both 22, pleaded guilty after more than £10,000 of fraudulently obtained money was transferred into their accounts.
Sussex Police believe the pair were used as “money mules” and said the case highlights how students are being “targeted and used to launder money”.
Mohamed was jailed and Biseko given a non-custodial sentence.
My understanding of the pot banks is they aren’t FDIC insurred and so have no reporting reporting requirements.
It seems my understanding is wrong. I found an article talking about pot banks in Colorado and it says: Financial institutions are able to remain in regulatory compliance, albeit gingerly, under guidance provided in 2014 by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes and Enforcement Network, but federal prosecutors could still intervene.
So it looks like a small loophole has been created to allow for the pot banks.
I think you are overestimating the resources expended by police to randomly look for money laundering operations. I’m not sure what these “computer programs” are that apparently monitor the entirety of retail transactions in the United States. In almost all cases, it’s the underlying crime that initially garners the attention of law enforcement, not the laundering.
I had dinner in a restaurant recently that was absurdly overpriced for the area it was in and, accordingly, only had one or two customers.
I didn’t check the price ahead of time, and, once there, I ended up having to save face by eating there anyway, but it was at least 4 times the price of even the most fancy places in that part of town.
ISTM that if it’s not a money laundering operation, it would certainly work well as one. You could clean thousands of dollars a day by just claiming a handful of customers. And if anyone ever comes to look around, well, you’re open for business, it’s just today happens to be a bit quiet.
I get the feeling that there is a bit of then and now in organised crime and money laundering. Prior to drug dealing crime was in the traditional areas of extortion, prostitution, and gambling. A restaurant might be a front for a numbers racket. The locals knew that they could lay bets in a back room, and the the restaurant would run the illegal takings through the restaurant’s books. All nice and easy, the local cops were on the take, so that was nothing but a business expense anyway. Local crime boss lives very nicely, and nothing terribly obvious to outside scrutiny.
Drugs changed that. The money becomes silly, the risks vastly higher, and the stakes more so. Local society and the law don’t regard drug problems as simply a problem of vice.
One wonders what the aftermath of Covid will be for a lot of crime. Here in Oz cash has virtually vanished. I basically have not needed to, or used, cash for any purpose in over a year. I’m not alone.
I used to joke that there were rolls of bank notes that represented virtual cars. If you sold a car, it wasn’t unusual to be paid with a roll of cash, and clearly you would be in the market for another car, and may well pay for it using the same roll of notes. The roll might get bigger or smaller as people traded up or down, but it might persist for ages. It was like a semiconductor hole. It took the space a car would be. Not any more. I can direct debit pat for something in seconds with my phone. The recipient has near instantaneous confirmation. Cash is dead for a huge amount of legitimate commerce.
Cash is certainly on the way out. I bought my last car with a credit card and paid it off interest-free 40 days later. Our daughter bought her car last year on a credit card that was offering 12 months at 0% interest.
I look forward to more info as this mystery unfolds 
The other thing with money laundering is that the more you do it, and the better you get at it, the more it becomes like running a purely legitimate business. If you have a business that could plausibly be netting you, say, $1 million per year, and you have a large enough premises to make that happen, and enough employees, and enough inventory, and whatever else, then why not just make that megabuck, without the part where you’re risking going to prison if you get caught?
I thought that is what happened in Vegas. Organized crime ran the place and used it to launder money. Over time they found they were making way more legitimately so went nuts on that and transformed the place into a legit moneymaker.
In the video below a retired FBI money laundering expert looks at TV/movie versions and rates them. At the beginning is a clip of Skylar telling Walt they have so much money the car wash cannot come close to handling it all. Expert says that is true. Later she notes that Pablo Escobar (the drug kingpin) had so much money they literally buried piles of cash because they simply could not move it into the legitimate banking system. Rumor has it some buried caches are still out there.
Here is a different video doing something similar to the above if anyone is interested:
In one account I read about two very successful bank robbers, they got tripped up because a contractor reported a cash payment as suspicious. He had a dispute with the wife of one of them over the work on their house and turned her in.
I guess this is why a life of crime isn’t for me. I piss too many people off, someone would report me.
Which gets us to tax evasion. If you are a contractor, taking cash payments means you can avoid paying tax on that job. But you can only do this for a limited number of jobs, otherwise you will draw attention to yourself with the tax authorities. So cash jobs may become things done for people you like. Paying cash is assumed to get you a cheaper price as you are effectively splitting the evaded tax.
This does provide a mechanism to dispose of some illicit cash. But don’t annoy your co-conspirators.