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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

>buying overpriced items to bring illicit cash into legitimate ownership is another

No, Christie's (or some other big auction house) is never going to take your money that way. No one, actually.

It's the same with real estate. "Just walk in with a million in $20 bills and pay the property with cash". That's not going to happen. Ever.

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Never ever?

You’d think so, and yet it’s come to light Crown Casino in Melbourne was doing just that, knowingly maintaining relationships with known crime organisations, and was actively enabling money laundering.[1]

I argue politics and big business is a front for bad behaviour, as evidenced by the endless stream of corruption news pouring out of the Australian federal government.

I find it difficult to believe the the other G20 nations[2] are markedly better.

1. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/five-bombshells-th...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20

That's a casino, you expect cash to be there. And they're being busted ... so there goes your super laundering operation.

You will never buy property and pay for it in cash (in developed countries, obviously).

You’d think so, but I actually know a drug dealer who did just that not so long ago.

Cash deposits above $10,000 in Australia are mandatorily reported, that doesn’t mean every cash deposit above $10,000 is investigated.

Wait, so your friend (or acquaintance?), bought an apartment in cash? Or does he regularly makes cash deposits below $10k?

Please clarify because those two things are THREE orders of magnitude apart.

Buying an apartment with a briefcase full of money is something you see only on Disney movies.

Small businesses regularly make $20-30k deposits in cash. That represents the weekly cash revenue of a successful McDonald's franchise. You can slip an extra $1-5k in there, weekly - If you do your accounting "right", it looks like you're moving a little more product than you actually are, and is virtually indistinguishable from real business. See Walter White buying a Car Wash in Breaking Bad. You need a bit of scale: 5 or 10 locations to make it really work, but it does work.

I know, but that's still far from making a $1M+-or-so operation with a bunch of cash.

That's the whole point, you just can't drop that much gray money on something at once.

Purchase a property with AU$150,000 in cash, literally a briefcase full of cash.

So, he’d have handed that money to the vendor.

Wow, amazing. I stand corrected then, but I don't think you could pull that off on this side of the world.

I think you drastically under estimate how much dodgy shit goes on all around us all the time.

There is but a thin veneer of righteousness barely covering a small fraction of the lands.

I believe it's more like: here's 1.5 million dollars that you can use to explain to the IRS how you're paying for a new house. If you give me 2 million in illicit cash, I can use that elsewhere and the IRS doesn't care because I already have 100 million dollars in assets.

>IRS doesn't care because I already have 100 million dollars in assets

Again, that won't happen, ever. The IRS is not going to just forget those 2 million, they don't care if it's "pocket change" for you or not.

Also, you are implying that somebody with 100M+ in assets is going to compromise everything to launder 2 million from some other stranger ...

What if the buyer is from outside US - say a foreign oligarch or dictator? I find it hard they refuse to sell to such people altogether, esp. seeing how much real estate in London is being bought by Russian kleptocrats.

The smart way to launder money is to create a company that "rates and pays" stuff like your electric bill then vastly overcharges you to do it.

There is a place you can do this. Casinos.

There's apparently been an incredible amount of money laundering going through casinos in Vancouver.

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