Just bring it out of the country. Many third world countries use USD as a side currency, just spend it there. Buy a few houses in Syria, a few businesses in Ecuador, sell them when you need clean money.
Many armchair money launderers on HN cooking up unrealistic schemes..
There’s a reason real money launderers charge up to 50 cents on the dollar. It’s f** difficult.
> While the involvement of Chinese money-laundering rings in handling drug proceeds from Mexico is nothing new, a number of recent court cases in the United States have revealed crucial information about how these schemes work ... weekly pick-ups from representatives of Mexican criminal groups, made in cash ranging between $150,000 and $1 million, with an average of $500,000. These were made in large cities including Chicago, New York and Atlanta ... network of Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico ... transfer a correspondent amount of money through Chinese banking apps. This happened entirely through the Asian country’s domestic banking system ... “It’s the most sophisticated form of money laundering that’s ever existed,” one of the US sources told Reuters.
Jane picks up 500K in cash in Chicago and then transfers 450K from her business in China, to Joe's business in China. Joe then transfers 400K from his US account to Juan's account in the US.
Is that how it works ?
It relies on everyone having other money already aside from the illicit funds
I wonder what's the difference between the IRS and their French and Italian equivalent. For what I've experienced in both those countries, the easier path would be paying a percentage of the heist to whoever is making those checks.
I have no sense of scale for any of the things in this topic, my reaction to this is "only 50 cents?" because that would still leave these thieves with 15 million USD, which is significantly more than most Americans earn in their lifetimes.
I find any US crime show that places the IRS above FBI, DEA etc in terms of fear factor is generally a better one.
It turns into a fascinating business and process problem, since you can only inject a certain percentage of dirty money into a legitimate cash revenue stream. And this in turn means - even if you had infinite dirty income, you end up with a finite amount of money you can launder per month. And marked bills make this a lot harder. And if attention comes to the business it becomes harder.
And that in fact has happened in reality. Some cartels were earning so much dirty money that they couldn't launder it all. And in fact, just storage of the dirty cash became a real logistical issue. And to be honest, "storage of large amounts of illegal cash" hasn't been a problem on my radar so far.
It does actually work exactly that way all the time. On the larger end, major drug traffickers routinely move millions in cash to Mexico and elsewhere with little trouble.
On the smaller end, many lesser criminals and groups also do the same in creative ways. 20 million in cash is a lot, physically, but nowhere near enough to be really hard to move overseas through smuggling in several largish, carefully concealed shipments, especially if you can use a small part of that same money to pay for all kinds of object shipping arrangements.
If you get caught with over $10,000 undeclared at any US border or at the corresponding border, it gets seized
If you declare it, it gets seized.
The Mexicans usually don’t bother.
And in both cases, most remote crossings are unmonitored.