Hiding $1M isn’t too difficult: if it’s in hundred dollar bills, it’ll all fit inside a 5 gallon paint tin. For a Brucie bonus, wrap the money in cling film and cover with paint.
no but you can drop 11 grand into a bank and list it as gambling winnings and pay taxes on it, and claim that it was from private poker games with friends and strangers and NOT casino. People do still play poker outside casinos …
Or you can start doing one of several at home businesses - cleaning homes or gardening, they do not ask you your client list if you handle all the normal taxes and deductions yourself.
Buy sports cards.
Troll Craigslist for card listings, go to several sports card shops and hit a large card show with dealers from all around the state.
Buy older cards, prefferably from when you were a kid or older.
Sell said cards a few months later for between 50-75% of purchase price.
There you go, the entire wad is now free and clear and all you’ve done is sold your baseball card collection. It sure was a lucky thing your mom didn’t throw it out.
The point is to have a plausible explanation for how you came to have so much money. Bricker’s explanation is that in his younger days when gold was cheap, he purchased an ounce every month @ $350/oz. He was being responsible and investing his hard-earned cash. Over 10 years, the story goes, he accumulated 100oz at a total investment of $37k, let’s say, according to his entirely made-up pen and paper spreadsheet “documenting” his purchases.
In actuality, he’s gone around to coin shows and gold dealers and purchased 100oz in cash transactions, spending a total of $150k. Now he cashes out his gold for the market rate of $130k, pays the capital gains tax on the $130k, and has the remainder as legitimate laundered cash.
Now he can use that to make a downpayment on a mortgage for his carwash, with which he can launder the remainder.
Buy antiques.
Claim you got them at rummage sales.
As a “picker” or “divvy”, you could get away with it.
If I wanted access to all the money, and only wanted to be mildly dishonest, I would do the following:
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Hire the best lawyer in town (using the money, of course) to investigate the laws for found property.
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If the result of the legal review was that the laws were amenable to my purposes, I would announce in the paper that I had found a satchel of money buried on my property while digging for a new rosebush. The money was wrapped up in a very special way and had a distinct label on it. Anyone who wants to claim it must only tell me exactly what the special way and distinct label were. If the bills are all brand new issue, that might be hard to explain, however…perhaps you say you found it along the roadside then?
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After the legal amount of time had passed and I had made the appropriate legal announcements in the paper, I would claim the money as mine, and claim it as “other income” on my taxes the next year to be legal. Sure I’d take about a 40% hit, but then I’d have most of the money, and not be looking over my shoulder for the IRS/police the rest of my life.
Alternately, you keep the money hidden and buy old gold coins (like US $20 gold pieces, almost an ounce of gold net) in cash from coin dealers over time (go for poor-quality ones which are mostly bullion and much less numismatic value…so you won’t get ripped off as much when you sell them). You would be able to buy about 800 or so of them…maybe a little heavy. Then when an elderly relative dies and wills you something - anything - which could conceivably hold the coins (such as your grandmother wanting you to have her old cedar chest) you then make triple-damn-sure from the will executor that you have full, incontestable rights to the item, and then announce to several disinterested third-party witnesses that you found all these old gold coins in her VERY HEAVY old cedar chest…if you exceed the inheritance tax, pay your taxes to stay legal.
Home improvements can often be very expensive, and many, MANY contractors just love to be paid in cash, with no records. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess why that is. A solid mahogany floor? Why not! A staircase decorated with hand carvings by gentle mountain folk? Sure! You could probably dump $500,000 into home improvements with no records being kept (other than building permits…and you know some contractors will skip those too, if the price is right).
Lots of great ideas here. Now if I can just find the damn bag of money…
I make a thread about money laundering and it’s closed but this one is fine? Sheesh.
If I found a solid million I might consider moving to a different culture. I’m not sure how easy it would be to trace my history from, say, Britain or something.
Good point. Paying taxes is an excellent money laundering technique.
The best lawyer might not take you as a client if he suspects future criminal activity, and that you might be paying with ‘illegitimate’ money, and potentially unable to pay continued inflated rates. Try a mid-level criminal defense lawyer who already has this problem with his clients.
Which would bring the person who recently lost a big satchel of money right to your door.
Max Cherry: Half a million dollars will always be missed.
Same here. I’d keep my job, and use the money to eat at nice restaurants a couple of times a week, get massages, treat my wife to spa outings. I’d also use to pay for things that I regularly use cash for like groceries, gas, etc.
Or you could, as one poster suggested above, go to Macao for a week, do whatever, and then when you get back claim you won $50,000 at the casinos and declare it as income. If the government decides to audit, I doubt that the casinos in Macao would be eager (i.e. willing at all) to let the IRS poke around.
Are you going to fly out and then back with $50,000 in cash? I was being a bit facetious with the Antiques Roadshow thing - it has the same problems of getting the cash to Europe in the first place, though I suppose maybe you could go to a few dozen different banks and get a bunch of relatively-small money orders or travellers’ checks.
The sports-card thing might be a good bet. Anonymously buy some lucite-blocked mint-cards, remove the blocks, have them re-evaluated and reblocked, and it’s “look what I found in my old toy chest.”
You can shuffle it out faster with new currency. Cash every legitimate paycheck you get for newer bills then take an equivalent amount of the older bills and deposit them. Financially nothing suspicious but your keeping the older bills up to date.
Depends on how much you chose to supplement your lifestyle with the bag-o-cash.
I’d make a habit of gambling which I like to do for entertainment anyway. Who cares if I slowly lose a million dollars gambling the casino doesn’t broadcast how much people lose and a million extra in profits is chump change for a big casino the IRS isn’t going to care to investigate it. A few wins here and there can be funneled back into my real money supply, but the plan overall is to have a good time and have fun losing the money. Easy come easy go.
This is just what I thought of. I love Bridget Fonda in that movie; she goes from frumpy mother and part-time librarian to manipulative shrew like an F1 car.
If you’re trying to launder money, the last place you want to go is a casino. Even the mob doesn’t try to launder money there anymore; the accounting and security systems in the modern casino industry are as traceable and secure as the domestic banking industry, perhaps moreso. You also don’t want to even try passing counterfeit money through casinos.
The best thing to do is invest in a cash-only business; vending machines, laundromats, fast food restaurants, et cetera, and report fake sales (and pay your taxes on such sales). Even then, laundering a million dollars is no mean task. In order to mask your laundering operation, you’re actually going to have to have several times that volume in legitimate sales lest the fake receipts stick out like a sore thumb. Honestly, unless you already have the infrastructure in place, it’s almost easier and certainly less risky to make money legitimately than to try to launder a large sum of cash.
Stranger
There is definitely some truth to this. In my time doing econometrics in the credit card industry, I had to be trained several times on how to catch money laundering in transaction data. This is never the kind of analysis I did for a living. But anyone who handled data needed to be aware of the various schemes so they could report suspicious behavior if they saw it. As horrendous as corporate training usually is, the anti-money laundering training was actually quite interesting. I learned at least a half dozen ways criminals and terrorists could launder or hide money in the world financial system. I also learned about how credit card companies (and others) monitored this behavior.
Unless you are incredibly patient and are content to launder the million over decades, don’t use the financial system to make your cash disappear. Seriously.
Interesting.
You could live fairly well and on the down low if you paid cash for almost all day to day exspenses. Nights out, groceries, vacations etc. Nice 2nd hand car cash from a private owner. If you had a job you could deposit all your paycheck plus a little extra for other bills.
I think a small business is a good way. I made my living playing music for years which was almost always cash transactions. Bars close and you could create work from closed establishments.
Become a consultant, a private computer repair guy, a DJ, whatever, and create business to explain a decent income for yourself. Have a legit business and just use the found money to supplement. resist the temptation to show off.
There was a bartender in Maine that was robbing her employer blind and not reporting her tips for years. She bought a house and nice cars and when the IRS finally got around to looking at her she had no explaination. You can’t claim a 20,000 dollar a year income and be spending 50,000. Her spending habits became a huge red flag that got her into trouble.
Of course, the only way to answer this question is through some empirical studies. If we can get Bill Gates to give us each a million dollars in cash, in secret, we can each try his or her own method of getting away with it. After 20 years or so, the ones who are out of jail will meet and compare notes. How about it, Bill?