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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

#61

Post by ryandrake »

ratrocket wrote: post #55
em-bee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? i never pay with card except for online purchases. i withdraw cash from an ATM. pretty much my whole withdrawal history on my bank account is ATM, rent and utilities and almost nothing else.

I think the point you're replying to still stands, it's just moved "up" a level: If someone cared to look into the financial history of someone with no grocery store payments on their credit card (why are they looking into this person's spending history? Maybe because they're suspected of embezzling a lot of cash, I don't know!), found no credit card payments, looked further and found not enough ATM withdrawals to ac…

Lack of data is also a data point, and could be considered suspicious if most "normal law abiding" profiles produce data. Imagine you're the IRS and you see 1,000 people living in the same neighborhood, with comparable lifestyle profiles. 999 of them report similar incomes and have similar banking/investment profiles, but 1 of them reports drastically lower income and has little-to-no banking presence. Who are you going to apply more scrutiny to? Not saying it's fair, but I know an outlier when I see one.

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

#62

Post by AshamedCaptain »

jknoepfler wrote: post #35
yieldcrv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very easy to launder 20M Be a promotor or promotion company, sell VIP tables at big event or music festival for 20,000 euro each, 9 out of 10 clients don’t show up (because they don’t exist and you made them up) Do it all summer, our economy is big enough to support this Your money is now clean from selling VIP tables Deposit cash, pay taxes, move on

So the suggestion is that uh... the former fraud chief of the Spanish police... become a highly connected event promotor... with access to high profile clients who will actually spend 20,000 euro for a concert ticket... which we inexplicably demand and receive IN CASH... in exchange for VIP tables at high profile events that we magically have access to... while supplying 20,000 worth of services to the one VIP that d…

The actual truth is not very far from this. He actually had a cab / private ride company. Most of his rides were fake.

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

#63

Post by ano-ther »

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…

Good question. In Switzerland you could buy real estate with cash until very recently.

You could also open a front, say a barbershop or a restaurant, though convincing authorities you earned a million or more through that could be a stretch.

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

#64

Post by ekianjo »

CalRobert wrote: post #25
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. :)

I don't like it, but I think the long term plan is to eliminate paper money, and with it privacy. I live in the Netherlands and you can really live 100% cash-free here. A lot of places are card-only, even.

Dystopian future here we come! Cashless seems cool until you realise one day they decide to turn off your access to money, or tax you more based on your spending pattern. The possibilities for abuse are endless so it WILL be abused.

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

#65

Post by ekianjo »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #49
sneak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refuse to patronize places that are card only. Not everyone can use electronic payments. New York and some other cities actually made it illegal, as it's discriminatory.

How on earth is requiring card payments discriminatory? Providing cash payment options is absolutely not free and implies extra risk on behalf of the business. Refusing to take part in the banking system is not worth penalizing businesses for. Let the free market work.

Because not everyone has access to cards?

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

#66

Post by lupusreal »

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…

Go on lots of vacations, booking modest hotels within your legitimate means but then live it up going to all the expensive restaurants/etc you desire. Unless you've got somebody following you keeping track of what you do, nobody would figure it out.

You'll probably never get through 20M like this but you should have plenty of fun.

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

#67

Post by bryanlarsen »

javajosh wrote: post #20

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 p…

I believe one standard term is negative sum games. The losers lose more than the winners win.

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

#68

Post by bigiain »

bagels wrote: post #44
dylan604 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Canada did it.

So did Australia.

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

#69

Post by thaumasiotes »

vinni2 wrote: post #57
dgfitz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d probably “dig it up from my backyard because I’m a newly minted metal detector hobbyist” or something. If the bills were marked though I think your point is solid, it’s hard to make bad money clean. Find some millionaire to pay you your own money for a job or something, give them 10%? I guess you still need to launder the money somehow. Now I want to know how people can turn illegal cash millions into clean laund…

Ozarks

The TV show seemed fairly incoherent in its treatment of money laundering. They're explicit about the mechanics, sort of: the idea is that Marty shows up in a rural area with a big bag of cash and he needs to make it appear legitimate - and he does this by taking ownership stakes in local businesses. So far so good.

What you'd actually want, in that kind of setup, is to hand the active owner of the business you just partnered with a big bag of cash, see that distributed into the flow of legitimate income from the business, and then have it returned to you as dividends or whatever on your ownership stake.

But in the show, the goal is to then book a bunch of fake expenses against the business. So:

1. Purchase ownership stake in a hotel, for cash. The cash doesn't need to be legitimate. Money is transferred from you to the active owner.

2. Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.

3. Now you have a piddling amount of legitimate money from the hotel, and a big bag of illegitimate cash that you still haven't laundered.

We've skipped the step where you hand the owner some of your illegitimate cash under the table and then the owner gives it back to you above the table, which is the part of money laundering that launders the money. If you want to embezzle from a running business while making your expenses look like business expenses, you can just do that; you don't need to start with a pile of illegitimate cash.

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

#70

Post by ajxs »

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…

Here in Australia real estate transactions aren't covered by the national AML/CTF act. You can currently buy Australian real estate with millions of dollars stuffed into a duffle bag, and the realtor you gave it to is under no obligation to report who they got it from. You'd still need to declare your real estate assets for taxation purposes though. Our government has been so slow to fix this problem. There are new rules coming into effect in 2026. Long overdue. I've heard estimates from people working on AML in the banking industry that around 15% of Australian real estate transactions involve some form of money laundering.
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