Ages ago I worked as a waiter. While I reported 100% of my tips religiously and without fail let’s just say that not everyone did.
This has me wondering how many employees at a money-laundering business actually realize that it’s for illegal purposes. I’m sure most think they’re working for a perfectly legit place.
I’m reminded, tangentially, of how many workers at Bernie Madoff’s thought they were working for a legit employer, all the way until his Ponzi scheme came crashing down.
well supposedly you couldn’t tell because other than the supply ordering and not using a bank it ran like a typical McDonalds even McDonalds its self apparently didn’t know …although dad did say he thought it strange that management seemed not to care if it made money or not … but he just chalked it up as "no worries as mcd doesn’t fail so w e don’t need to try too hard "
Every now and then I see a news story about a restaurant customer who leaves a gigantic tip at a restaurant. Here’s an example that happened just a couple weeks ago… a $16,000 tip on a $37 bill. An obvious example of money laundering?
I don’t see how it could be, unless there is an established pattern, or a reason why someone would try to launder a mere $16000 plus all eight bartenders are in on it (since they allegedly received the tips).
Google seems to think plenty of McDonald’s have gone out of business, and I didn’t see anything about a franchise location being used as a mafia front.
Generally in the real estate world when you say “buying for cash” you don’t literally mean physical cash, but cash in the accounting sense - current assets that are immediately accessible, like money in a bank account. It just means they aren’t financing the purchase of the home, they’re paying for it in full.
This laundering of cash through a laundromat puzzles me,
You have a limited number of washing machine, and limited time the place is open. Some arithmetic reveals a maximum income possible, and a maximum income possible for related services.
Another way: It’s not difficult to check the water usage and again use arithmetic to determine the number of actual washer loads.
The gross income seems very easy to estimated pretty closely.
No warrants needed.
Right, if anyone actually bothers to check those things. Which is why the first goal of laundering is to avoid notice from anyone who cares.
From what I read in the news, most MLs are caught because they have no visible source of income to support their extravagant lifestyles.
The boss of a few small businesses may well run a BMW and live in a nice house, but if he trades up to a Maserati and a gated mansion, he will attract unwanted attention.
And it certainly isn’t in the bar’s interest either, as that means that they have to pay payroll taxes on that $16,000 that they cannot touch.
There’s the maximum it can do, and there’s how much it actually does, and in between that, you can play.
It’s not difficult, once you have a warrant. The idea is to keep suspicion down so that they don’t have probable cause to get a judge to sign off on one.
Interestingly the previous owner of my parents house paid for the house with a suitcase of cash. Needless to say this caused some comment. However it was legit. She was a widow whose husband has been killed in an industrial accident, and the cash was the payout from his death. She didn’t trust banks*, and kept all her money as cash. This was the early 60’s. One could not imagine this happening now.
*I think her heritage went back to a time and country when bank failings were a bit more common.
I know a guy in Brasil who bought an apartment for a literal pile of US $100 bills, so it has happened.
ETA the piles of cash were withdrawn from a legitimate bank, so ??? in this case (I know nothing about the seller)
Sure but that doesn’t seem to involve money laundering, since you’re moving money from one bank account to another.
Also, this $16,000 tip appears to have been on a debit or credit card, so it’s a bank-to-bank transaction, which I don’t think are useful for money laundering.
It kind of amazes me to think that people seem to expect the IRS to be digging into how businesses are keeping their books, they don’t unless they suspect you of underpaying. If you are paying taxes and then one year your rate of paying taxes goes up the IRS says hell yes business owner, keep sending in more taxes. Not we must investigate this extra source of tax revenue and audit your business. That’s not how it works in the real world. And the Feds have to have a warrant for your tax returns, they can’t just go ask for them.
There’ve been threads here in the past along those lines - “what would you do if you found a huge pile of cash?”. I seem to recall that the consensus was to keep working at SOMETHING, so you’d have the ability to have a bank account with unquestionable deposits for larger purchases (house, car etc.), and then use the physical cash to pay for whatever else you could manage. Groceries, clothes, some travel expenses etc. You could probably get away with making small cash deposits, on a very sporadic basis, as you’d want to avoid running afoul of IRS reporting rules.
Spy Aldrich Ames lived a much more lavish lifestyle (very expensive house, among others) as a result of his extracurricular income. That was before the IRS rules on bank deposits, I think, so he was likely far more able to deposit his profits for such large purchases. It wasn’t the house itself that triggered the investigation though, that was more of an “in hindsight” kind of thing.
Almost a hundred replies and nobody has made a crack yet that the coins are the hard part of laundering money?
Well, they can be hard on the washing machines. Bills are much gentler - and from our occasional attempts, they hold up surprisingly well even when tossed into the dryer.