Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I've come to realize that viewing the world through the simple lens of laundering causes dumb systems to suddenly make sense. Silly rabbit, you thought these industries were there for the normal public?

Gambling: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/online-gambling-sites-money...

Casinos themselves: https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trumps-businesses-...

Commerce: https://www.wired.com/story/wired-awake-180518

Crypto: https://financialcrimeacademy.org/cryptocurrency-money-laund...

Shell companies: https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...

Real estate: https://www.firstaml.com/resources/5-ways-criminals-launder-...

View on HN

Out in the developing world you’ll see all kinds of things that make no sense commercially, because they were really just a way to park a few million dollars in a way that slowly trickles out under the guise of legitimacy. Buildings with rent ROI> 100 years. A motorcycle dealership with 3000 motorcycles in stock, slowly selling them off , many > 10 years old and zero miles…. Etc.

Here in Colombia it's almost a staple to find perpetually-empty restaurants that never go broke. We call them "lavaderos" - kinda like "laundering-stations".

Have that here in Austria from time to time as well.

Funniest case I visited was a Chinese restaurant where the waitress always wore a winter jacket, because they couldn’t be bothered heating the place.

I've always wondered if Baskin Robbins is a front, I used to see them everywhere in Oregon, where they were always empty even during the summer made me wonder how they stayed in business. as a kid I always thought it was a mob front.

Heya Jerry! Hope you're well!

I think Baskin Robbins was just increasingly bad.

Growing up in Wichita it was definitely around and I remember going to it a lot when young. But then we started going to Braun's more, and I think it was a combo of location, liking the ice cream better, and getting burgers if we wanted.

I think they just didn't adapt over the decades and sort of coast as a zombie now.

I can't think of why I'd go to one vs so many other options now. Even supermarket stuff is gonna be better.

I remember as a kid they were really good. Like some of the best ice cream I ever ate. Wide selection too.

Can't help but feel like they got the private-equity squeeze deal to turn them into a zombie.

Some MBA comes in and cuts all the corners, all the costs that made them a first class market leader. Turning them from the best out there into just another ice cream shop with nothing distinctive that Washington and Lincolns everyone for all their money. (We're long past nickles and dimes these days)

This is interesting to me and I see why it would work in a place with lower state capacity but in more developed countries it’s not a great strategy. You want your money laundering to operate through high volume cash businesses. When I lived in Seattle I used to sometimes go to a sketchy cash-only teriyaki joint. The food was great and they were always filled with paying customers. Sadly, they were later caught and shut down.

The scaryaki joint on 3rd? Weren’t those guys also fencing stolen iPads or something?

That place had super good food though!

They were fencing stolen iPads! I assume they were also laundering the stolen iPad money through their teriyaki cash flow, but it’s easier to get away with that if you actually have teriyaki cash flow.

Laser tag.

Car wash

In the US, the feds pay close attention to businesses like car washes, coffee stands, and taco trucks because these are often used for laundering.

There was a period where it seemed like they were doing some data crunching of IRS data and taking down domestic drug trafficking orgs (DTOs) this way, and a bunch of businesses were raided and shut down across the region I was in at the time.

Personally, I wouldn't do any of those and would launder through art and collectibles where the values are somewhat arbitrary. And "consulting".

Banana stand

To be fair, there’s always money in the banana stand.

Bananas can't stand.

You just can't stand bananas.

Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like banana.

I'd like a banana hammock!

Nail Salon

Basically every desert parlour in the UK, particular Treatz and Creams.

I wonder if anyone keeps stats on "number of obvious fronts on the high street over time". Between those and betting shops etc. it'd be interesting to see what proportion of businesses on the high street are truly "legitimate regular businesses for normal people" like cafés, shops etc.

Fast-food restaurant chain

In Europe, we have: Phone repair shop. Pizzeria. Gambling cafe.

The seventh mid Döner Kebab on the block right in the middle of the city

This is, unfortunately, a problem that many tech companies have made worse and more accessible as they have removed friction from these systems.

Most folks will remember the 2019 temination of lootbox key trading for CS:GO on Steam.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50262447

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/research-identifies-suspicious...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...

I'm not sure what good ways there are to manage this generally, other than limiting the size or types of financial transactions that can occur within a system.

You can thank Cryptic Studios for the loot box virus...

The same thing is happening right now with cases.

Trying to stop money laundering via mass surveillance of people's transactions is futile and creates far more losses than gains for society. It is what's responsible for the epidemic of debanking that has emerged over the last decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debanking

"The Financial Conduct Authority reported that banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.[4]"

Money transfer is a basic utility and should not be rationed out and gatekept by government regulators.

Lotteries, too: https://www.acamstoday.org/lottery-and-money-laundering-a-ma...

I remember reading about a case where criminals bought an entire issue of a local lottery, thus collecting all the prizes, and apparently saw that a reasonable cost to launder their cash.

this works quite well even at small scale. In my country you can just go to any tobacconist, buy 1000 € worth of scratch cards with cash, and happily keep whatever comes out. And since they're heavily regulated, you can check winning probabilities in advance so you already know the expected return!

A prominent Belgian political figure laundered cash for years using the lottery https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/11/revealed-how-t...

Art https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works...

> Then there is the case of international terrorism, where bands like ISIS have been noted for their laundering of cultural antiquities.

Reminds me of True Lies.

Add to the list almost all high end (dance) clubs, the kind that sell you the $50 bottle of champagne for $5000, "cleaning" thousands for every easily justifiable and anonymous bottle sale with close to 0 effort.

Actually, any business that can just add an arbitrarily huge markup for what are otherwise cheap, run of the mill products and services is probably also laundering money. Usually exclusive/luxury places, the ones where in one go they can convert the lowest possible cost into the highest possible clean profit.

Apparently in Vancouver BC (money laundering capital of North America), they use luxury watches and cars to launder funds as well, in addition to the obvious local casinos and real estate.

If you read The Guardian or even The Economist or other UK sources you see there is a drumbeat of concern about "bad businesses" which range from

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/04/do-charity-bookshop...

which legally evade taxes and

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shop...

which illegally evade taxes not to mention

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/26/more-than-90...

and

https://www.esquire.com/uk/style/grooming/a65829331/high-str...

and these are frequently accused of being involved in all sort of crime not least money laundering.

> which legally evade taxes and

If it's legal I think it's "avoidance".

If something in the world doesn’t make sense, figure out who’s profiting from it.

That’s something that a friend mentioned to me a few years ago, haven’t forgotten it since, and now everything does make sense when viewed from the right context.

The expression goes back to the Roman Republic. Coined by former consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, who 'gained fame for formulating the question "Cui bono?" ("Who benefits?") as a principle of criminal investigation.'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

So "Follow the Money" has a much earlier origin and wasn't just a catchy phrase from various TV drama series? Figures.

This is a fairly common view, but it overstates people's rationality abd assumes you have perfect information, leading people to pretty conspiratorial views.

Often the actual answer to things not making sense is that most things in the world are done poorly and many things are some mish mash of various interests rather than a singular actor.

Incompetence is far more common than malice, and many observers are themselves incompetent.

So Occam's razor then? That's a fair point. I'm torn between how much my instinct is to ascribe things to incompetence, malice, or profiteering...

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Occam's razor is "the simplest explanation is most likely to be true". Hanlon's razor is a special case of Occam's razor if you assume that stupidity is simpler than malice, which is a hard statement to prove in concrete terms, but intuitively seems to be true.

Stupidity is simpler than malice because a plan that seems dumb would need to be far more complex to be secretly smart and malicious than to just actually be dumb.

Ah yes, the wrong razor. Or, like you say, a more general version of it that might still apply (but wasn't the one I was thinking of).

And for a specific example:

In my local neighbourhood there are a couple of commercial spaces that keep seeming to become new businesses, go through the expected few months of rebranding and outfitting, stay for a couple more months, then shut down. Only to become new businesses doing the same thing. Repeat ad nauseum.

Which would be fine, except it’s always the same owners. I’m not sure what the grift is, but I’m sure there’s one. Perhaps its simply taking advantage of business loans. Perhaps something more involved with contractors and business expenses charged differently on paper. I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m curious.

In the same way that buying a company and taking out business loans for expenses isn’t itself fraudulent, but can be done for that purpose, I can’t help but feel like there’s something going on.

Crappy contractors change business names like hats. I had one that was on his third name by the time I finished with him.

Overly expensive candy stores that only accept cash and have an excess of staff...

Is that laundering or just retail drug sales?

Money laundering, visa scams, and probably other criminal activity. The ones I noticed were in an airport so I doubt they were slinging drugs.

In Australia that's typically black market tobacco.

In Austria we have an infinite amount of middle eastern barbershops and „phone shops“ with about zero customers.

Quick calculations on minimum wages, rent, other costs and the required amount of sales show that they can not be profitable.

You’re not wrong. Just enough “legit” to create reasonable doubt.

Art is another really good example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com