If you are dealing with Pyongyang, their cut is going to be 100%+. Isn’t NK the source of the best counterfeit US money?
If you get ransom money, even if its not marked, won’t the government keep track of all the serial numbers? Once you start spending that money, it’s going to go through legitimate banks and those serial numbers are going to be scanned. If you’re spending that ransom money regularly in the same geographic area law enforcement might be able to track you down.
Sure, if the law enforcement authorities have time to. But tracking it back isn’t easy. If the federales know $100 bill number ABC1234567890 is part of the ill gotten gains and I spend it at the grocery store, at what point does it get detected? It sure as hell isn’t the grocery store’s job to monitor that stuff. Might it get caught at the bank? I don’t even know if the bank does that but if they do, so what? A $100 bill from Walmart could have been from any one of a bazillion customers.
It’s not something that happens immediately. Let’s say a bill gets flagged at a regional bank. Okay, nothing comes of that but then additional bills are flagged. They start looking at where those bills are coming from and narrow it down to smaller and smaller regions. If you’ve been using your ransom money at the local Piggly Wiggly regularly for a while then it’s possible authorities could trace it there. If we’re talking about a kidnapping case where someone actually received the ransom this seems like something law enforcement would be very motivated to capture someone.
Nitpick: Canada removed legal tender status for the $1 and $2 bills in 2021. You can still redeem them at a bank, but they are not legal tender for purchases.
At some point they’ll start putting unique QR codes or something similar on bills, which will be scanned automatically whenever money is deposited or withdrawn from a bank. This will be followed by cash registers that’ll track every bill coming in and going out. Then it’s just a matter of Big Data.