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Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

theguardian.com

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Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#11

Post by metadat »

I'd forgotten Europe has €500 notes, whereas in the US everyone now gets to deal with $100 bill spam.

Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.

What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family of of 4.

:)

Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#14

Post by pavlov »

metadat wrote: post #11

I'd forgotten Europe has €500 notes, whereas in the US everyone now gets to deal with $100 bill spam. Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore. What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family of of 4. :)

The 500 euro bill hasn’t been produced since 2019.

Apparently 25% of them were in circulation in Spain, despite the Spanish economy being only a fraction of the eurozone.

Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#15

Post by ryandrake »

How does one even expect to use €20M of physical paper cash? You're going to get scrutiny from the government and/or financial institutions if you try to deposit it into a bank. I guess you'd "launder" it somehow, but does that even work anymore? Major purchases with cash put a giant government bullseye on your back these days. That is if you could actually make those purchases. I'd imagine most major purchases that someone legitimate might make (like buying a house or a car or a private jet) cannot be done with physical cash. Does the local Mercedes dealership really accept a suitcase full of cash? Even if you were to use it for all of your normal routine spending like groceries, you'd never go through €20M in your entire lifetime. So, career-fraudsters, I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?

Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#17

Post by CommanderData »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

How does one even expect to use €20M of physical paper cash? You're going to get scrutiny from the government and/or financial institutions if you try to deposit it into a bank. I guess you'd "launder" it somehow, but does that even work anymore? Major purchases with cash put a giant government bullseye on your back these days. That is if you could actually make those purchases. I'd imagine most major purchases that…

The best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe not this one though.

Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#19

Post by dylan604 »

metadat wrote: post #11

I'd forgotten Europe has €500 notes, whereas in the US everyone now gets to deal with $100 bill spam. Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore. What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family of of 4. :)

> Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.

My favorite head scratcher is the US penny. It would be so much easier on all involved if we rounded so everything was MOD5 friendly, and just eliminated the penny.

Re: Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

#20

Post by javajosh »

There needs to be a word for when someone does something bad in their own interest, and as a result the wider society degrades far more than the individual profited. Corrupt anti-corruption officials, yes, but also college professors issuing passing grades to customers, er I mean students, news networks that give in to the urge for sensationalism and ideologically driven attention, lawyers who escalate conflict for profit, and so on. The individual act is (relatively) harmless, but over time if left unchecked these acts degrade institutions and eventually society itself (or confidence in society, which is the same thing). These actions cause a society to move from the good nash equilibrium to the other. A healthy society can endure a certain amount of malefactors, has an immune system for them ranging from "stink eye" to "prison", but when the violations gets higher than a certain threshold, across a certain number of industries and institutions, when the immune system starts failing to catch even a fraction of it (or the immune system degrades completely), the host society begins to weaken and the majority of the herd flips from "cooperate" to "defect".

How about "enshittifiers"?

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