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Comment by polonbike | Hacker News Reader

Did the serie Breaking Bad inspire a trend, showing a seemingly innocent/efficient way to clean money ?

On the contrary, the TV show was inspired by car washes used as drug fronts—not so much money laundering as selling drugs. Cash changes hands, and the attendant gives you a wipe for your dash, but he could just as easily hand you a bag of coke if you'd given him the right amount of cash.

From what I've heard the current way to clean cash is to buy gift cards and then use them to buy items from Amazon/Steam. Sure, the store fronts take a cut but having a 1099 from Valve looks way more legitimate than reporting thousands of dollars of cash.

So how do you clean them with this scheme? By registering a game on Steam or selling something on Amazon?

Also made me think why in the country I live, in stores like 7Eleven you cannot pay with a credit card for gift cards, google pay cards, etc.

From what I understand the scheme works like this.

Create a very basic "game" that technically meets Valve's requirements. As long as it runs well enough then it won't be blocked. Have people buy Steam gift cards with cash, then buy the games you have published.

Valve takes 30% and you get a nice check with a verified source of funds from a legitimate company.

Unlikely, the meme of using car washing places for washing money has been around for longer than the tv show.

The show was written in eary 2000s - I seriously doubt many people pay cash anymore

Late 2000s and early 2010s*.

Er you’re right it was during gfc when vince gilligan lost his job. The point still stands though

But people don't have to pay cash, the "pretend people" pay cash.

I won't claim this isn't happening somewhere, but the newer automated car washes near me are card only. They don't accept cash at all.

If you pay with card there will be an electronic trace.

A lot of money laundering involves traceable transactions, no? The point isn't to hide the transaction but rather have a plausible explanation for it that's difficult or impossible to verify. I'd think a larger issue would be that you can't plausibly charge very much per swipe. I'm betting there's much easier ways to launder cash these days with so many digital goods and services with basically arbitrary profit margins than brick-and-mortar storefronts can provide.

Granted, there are benefits to laundering money with literal cash, but you still want some legitimate money trail even if you don't actually hand over the claimed goods or services—enough at least to cover the actual expenses of the business, i'd presume.

If you do too many cash transactions compared to legit carwashes in the area i can imagine it will attract attention

So buy all the other carwashes in the area, offer them some money in a nice way, or if this doesn't work, guess you just have to do it the hard way.

Probably way easier and more scalable to setup something offshore than doing a scheme that can literally be thwarted by a guy with a clipboard standing outside

You would need to get all of the cash offshore then first, right.

Interesting observation. I do use a car wash, not frequently enough as my car is more often dirty than clean, but I have only ever paid cash! For context, I currently live in Austria.

John Mulaney | Venmo Is For Drug Deals[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBpDvCu8yYI

I don't think a car wash is a very good place to wash money, but it's a great joke for a tv show.

Wow. The Term has been in use since the early 1900's

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