In my area you can "find" multiple Chrysler 300Cs for rent for $600/day. I say "find" because many of them are unavailable for days or even weeks on end as being rented.
Good scam if you're, say, a dealer. Have one of your customers "rent" your car through Turo at an inflated rate. Bonus: you don't even have to let them have your car. They're just paying you and saying they rented it.
A huge barrier to wide adoption of BEVs is because dealers won't sell them because BEVs have far lower vehicle service requirements (no oil changes, no 20,000mi servicing, etc) which are normally half their revenue stream. Car dealers, en-masse, are happy to see the world burn than do-their-part and transition the world away from fossil-fuel cars simply due to their bottom-line.
Beth has dirty money. Bob, a friend of Beth’s, “rents” her car. (There is no car. Maybe Bob pays Beth over Turo and then Beth gives Bob the dirty cash.) Beth now has the appearance of legitimate income.
It still seems risky for those involved because there is a paper trail linking the buyer and seller in the case the buyer gets busted.
This is a layering mechanism, designed to obfuscate and distribute dirty cash. There may be many Bobs. Or Bob may be fine running cash to Mexico whereas Beth is not; this lets Bob sell that service to Beth.
(I’m also not sure how much Turo requires rentals be settled through its platform. If it allows off-platform billing and settling, there is no need to reimburse with dirty cash.)
Or Bob knows people who know what to do with suitcases full of $500 Euro notes without alerting legal issues.
Presumably Beth pays Bob for this service.
Then Bob may have to pay his friends.
This can be done with varying degrees of sophistication.
Bob just happens to have the Cayman Islands as the business location.
Money flows from U.S. business as a deductible expense, to the location out of the IRS's reach.
Or there isn't one Beth but lots of people with dodgy credit cards from banks in weird places. Those card holders indeed get their money in suitcases full of folding money, pay for their "rentals" and so the money flows into legitimate commerce. Bob of course pays for this.
Does Beth have cash? Is it in a bank account? You can't use cash on Turo from what I understand. If money is in bank account, it won't be "dirty". So, how can Beth pay for a rental on Turo?
As someone already commented, there is nothing special about Turo, you could just set up an ecommerce store and ship rocks around.
Can you please expand?
Your analogy is correct. These serve similar functions. It’s just easier to pretend to rent a car than it is to ship rocks. (I disagree with OP about there being massive money laundering on Turo.)
1) How is it "dirty" money when it is in the bank account? It is accounted for. Your tax ID / EIN is associated with the bank account and it is reported to IRS.
2) The ecommerce rock-shipping company would need to take cash and have to deposit in a checking account to be able to successfully launder money. So at this point, it cannot be an "ecommerce" company. It would need to be a hot-dog stand. Right?
Lots of dirty Russian money in bank accounts looking for invoices to launder against.
I don't understand what's unique about doing it through Turo.
If you have some other eComm platform telling T-shirts or whatever, sure there could be fake orders but it wouldn't be all that hard to track down that these THINGS were never sent/made. But anything involving a service...well, it's much harder to prove that those things DIDN'T happen.
It’s also tough to verify an actual transaction happened. With most e-commerce, the equivalent would involve shipping around boxes of rocks to generate tracking numbers.
I'm a big Turo user (love renting sports cars off there for weekend corner carving), but I forget if it's required.
The idea of money laundering is to turn cash into legal income. There’s other kinds of money laundering too including cross-border type transactions like you might see with art or collectibles but it’s hard to see how this makes much sense via Turo.
If the buyer has the ability to use a credit card to spend the money without attracting attention why not just buy something they want instead?
All these others are thinking to hard. I see it on the airbnbs in the LA hills that are all fake with fake pictures etc. just there to rent to instantly launder a transaction from what I’m guessing.
Once it's a digital transaction it's a digital transaction I am not seeing the benefits here of getting Turo involved and lots of fees and costs when literally any platform will do this more easily. Like call it a car detailing service and get a square reader and only pay a couple percent.
Having used Turo in the past my theory is that there's just a bunch of people mildly delusional about what their car is worth, or maybe that found renting their car is usually not worth the hassle but will take an exorbitant rate for when the super bowl is in town or some other time every rental car option is totally sold out.