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.
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.
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.