Yes that was my thought. It would seem if anything much easier to work a kidnapping scheme. Capture some wealthy person, give them a laptop connected to the internet via VPN, and demand at gunpoint that they liquidate all of their assets and convert it to bit coin, and then transfer it to your wallet, which you then shuffle around between other multiple wallets until its hard to tell what is what. If it takes a while for the transactions to go through hold them prisoner until it goes through. This is much simpler and more secure than trying to get their relatives to drop a suitcase of cash over a bridge.
… especially if the suitcase is filled only with dirty undies.
My family: “you know, there’s still a lot of good wear in these undies.”
Yeah, when we cracked down on money laundering for drugs and terrorism, we also put a wrench into many other financial crimes.
Yeah, that could work for some accounts, but there are safeguards in place to prevent this being done on a mass basis.
To mostly reiterate what’s already been said, it’s easy to kidnap people but almost impossible to get away with collecting a ransom. And cash isn’t what it used to be before the devaluation of the dollar at the end of the 1960s. The 1963 movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World revolved around the scramble for $350,000, which fit in a briefcase and back then was a heist you could retire on.
(A shame, from that standpoint, that they ceased printing the high-denomination bills they used to have. A suitcase full of $10,000 bills would be worth stealing.)
I do wonder what would happen if some renegade sovereignty offered for a cut to completely launder any illegal gains no questions asked. The First Bank of Pyongyang for example.
On a related note…
My bank has an ATM limit on my card, let’s call it $X00. I assumed that I could not remove more than this amount via ATM, no matter how many times I tried. But the way you put it, it sounds like I could take out $X00 out of each ATM I visit. If so, someone could force me to empty out my entire bank account this way.
Is that the way it really works? I’ve never had that done to me (fortunately!) and I’m not about to try draining my bank account as a thought experiment.
I see that kidnappers will have to contend with the F.B.I. (especially in child abduction cases), even if it doesn’t involve travel over state lines.
As for collecting and spending the proceeds, it gets unwieldy if a kidnapper demands huge sums in the form of Amazon gift cards. 
I think that kidnapping for ransom has been pushed by technology into a lower niche.
From what I read, there are still quite a few kidnappings in the undocumented community. The victims can’t pay much, but they won’t involve the authorities and they don’t have technology available to help them prevent kidnappings or find their kidnapped loved ones (in fact, sometime they actually know where they are being held, but can’t do anything about it).
So the take is smaller, but there are more of these types of kidnappings.
As Marty Byrde himself put it to a bunch of rednecks who had just stolen $3 million - "All that’s there is a lifetime supply of groceries and gas.” Not nothing, but not worth going to prison for a hard stretch.
Those were not meant for circulation. However, yes $500 and $1000 bills were, and a briefcase full of 1000’s would be a nice chunk of change.
All sorts of international sanctions, including cutting them off from all international money transfers, etc. Some small islands tried that but found it to be not productive.
Yep.
But it would be hard to cash those bills, or would a 7-11 take a $1000 note? Here, most shops don’t even take €200 bills (which is the highest € bill after the €500 bill has been abolished for exactly the reason of preventing money laundering).
If you came across a ton of cash and didn’t have a Marty Byrde to help you, groceries and gas are, to be fair, one of the ways you could START to launder the dough. I could very easily spend ten thousand a year on those things, so for the rest of my life that burns two or three hundred thousand; cash can also be used for everything at the drugstore, when I buy smaller items at Best Buy, and the like. It isn’t going to let you use $3 million but it’s a start, and it’s effectively undetectable. If you kidnapped someone whose wife didn’t want him back all that much maybe you only got $100,000 anyway, so it’s a decent approach that basically does the three laundering stages - placement, layering, integration - in one act.
Anything larger than that, though, and it gets complicated. Kidnapping strikes me as being one of the dumbest crimes you can possibly attempt nowadays, to be honest.
Unless the design of the note is changed and old notes withdrawn … as was done in India a few years ago with high value notes. Some reports indicated this was to ‘flush out bad money’ in the black economy. Probably true as the measure was announced and then implemented at midnight the same day.
Wikipedia:
“…On 8 November 2016, the Government of India announced the demonetisation of ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes with effect from midnight of the same day, making these notes invalid. A newly redesigned series of ₹500 banknote, in addition to a new denomination of ₹2,000 banknote is in circulation since 10 November 2016.”
So far as I am aware. Canada has NEVER done this, ever. All money remains valid.
Granted, if in 30 years I was still using 30-year-old $100 bills, that’d look weird. But… on the other hand we now have the polymer notes, so really old notes might become a more common thing; they are exceptionally durable as compared to paper cash.
If you’re stuck without a plan on what to do with the ransom, you can always just call your victim for financial advice.
Neither has the US. There was a mention on the Treasury Department website that federal notes have not been devalued or withdrawn since they were introduced in, I think, the 1860s.
Yep, you make a good point. But if they were in common circulation, I would imagine Vegas, and other gambling places might use them more frequently. Or buying a used car with 8 of those rather than 80 100’s.
Oh yeah, if you aren’t greedy, you could live in some comfort. Even buy a decent used car from a private party.
You would skip the layering I expect, but this is a good summation. $100K is easy to get rid of if you are not greedy or foolish.
Same as the USA. I was called out of the back room where I was doing a audit by a business that was sure they had a counterfeit bill- but it was only a old Gold Cert bill- likely somewhat valuable as a collectors item. (Note- my dept did not investigate counterfeiting. But we did get basic training, and were given instructions on what to do if we encountered a fake bill. I even helped uncover a small ring that was making very bad 20’s)
It’s a lot of work that entails a huge amount of risk for the kidnappers. Think about it. You need a team of people who can identify and acquire a potential target. Actually kidnap them, while circumventing the sort of security that people worth kidnapping typically employ. You then need a place to safely keep your target against their will. You need to contact their family or whoever you plan to extort money from. You have to assume the authorities will be contacted, regardless of what you threaten. That means the full force of the FBI doing what they do best. You need to figure out a way to receive payment, all while avoiding various banking controls designed to prevent this sort of thing. And last, but not least, you need an exit strategy that ensures you leave no evidence behind that identifies who any of you are and allows you to actually spend the money you acquired.
Oh, and by the way, thanks to Baby Lindburgh, if you are caught you go to jail for 20 years to life. And you could get the death penalty if you injure or kill your victim.
Probably a whole lot safer and easier to just boost expensive cars or heist diamonds or whatever.
Apparently, (like everything else) it’s so much easier to just kidnap people virtually these days!
It’s not like rich people keep all their assets in a bank account they can just Venmo over to someone to buy Bitcoin with.
But again, they didn’t even in the days of suitcases full of bills. I’m not saying that Bitcoin makes it trivial, just that it makes it much much easier than before bitcoin,