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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

#71

Post by defrost »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #69
vinni2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses.

eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the shell trades companies (carpentry, plumbing, labor hire) can report that money as legitimate washed income from the hotel.

There are a number of variations of this.

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

#72

Post by potato3732842 »

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…

You buy groceries and fake papers and a beater car registered to your fake identity. The point isn't to be rich. The point is that you can have a modest retirement while being off the grid. It's basically an insurance police that might let you have a life and freedom if the state wants to take those away, which of course is why the state goes so hard trying to prevent it.

I could live my whole life with cash easily if I rented instead of owned.

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

#73

Post by krisoft »

defrost wrote: post #71
thaumasiotes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses. eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the…

I don’t understand the scheme you are describing. If you have a hotel/bar and you falsely inflate the customer income then you are done. The previously illegitimate cash is now legitimate.

Why would you want to complicate it more with the fake rennovation works? Especially when a hotel is so much easier. You can just put fake guests on the book. (Or report longer stays for your real guests.)

With the renovation business you have to somehow cook up bills for the “new” materials and the workforce. So many more things the authorities could check there and thus so many more chances to slip up and get caught.

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

#74

Post by washadjeffmad »

bagels wrote: post #42
sneak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of people who live very nice lives ($300-750k/year spend) using nothing but cash and never showing ID. There are a million ways to convert it to crypto, and a million ways to convert crypto to many of the other things one might want to use: gift cards, airline miles, etc. Same goes for gold. There are lots of shops in many countries that will buy gold for cash. Many countries still have hotels that accept…

Can you name the top three ways to convert it in to crypto? I don't think there are literally one million ways.

This is one of those "if you don't already know" topics.

The feds cracked down on it earlier this year leading up to the election, but it's back.

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

#75

Post by potato3732842 »

ryandrake wrote: post #61
ratrocket wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

What even is the goal of such a speculative dragnet based endeavor? Instilling fear?

Enough of those "one in a thousand" cases are going to be legitimate people with oddball reasons to do what they do, and the minority of those who shoot back will still be enough that you'll get your guys killed faster than you find real headline grabbing criminals. Sure you'll roll up a bunch of petty dealers (these will be most of the people who shoot back) and you'll slander all the innocents but this sort of big dick of the law dragnet based stuff isn't an effective use of resources. It makes two people hate you for every useful idiot it makes respect you.

Reminding everyone that none of this is voluntary and it all hinges on violence is highly counterproductive generally. If the goal is to get everyone to goose step in line and pay their taxes doing positive things to legitimize the government is a far better use of resources. Build a bridge or renovate a port or something.

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

#76

Post by SilasX »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #69
vinni2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

As I understand the show, they were buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises, and that step was getting the money laundered to the client.

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

#78

Post by defrost »

krisoft wrote: post #73
defrost wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses. eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the…

I don’t understand the scheme you are describing. If you have a hotel/bar and you falsely inflate the customer income then you are done. The previously illegitimate cash is now legitimate. Why would you want to complicate it more with the fake rennovation works? Especially when a hotel is so much easier. You can just put fake guests on the book. (Or report longer stays for your real guests.) With the renovation busin…

Without getting into the nitty gritty of trace back forensic accounting the added layer is akin to why people use proxy relay's in networking, diffusing cash outwards through layered shell companies makes the origin point(s) less visibly "hot".

The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).

Also, as noted by SilasX in a peer comment the books for the fake work can include higher than normal payments for "supplies" to cartel owned suppliers .. yet another (fake but) documented trail to explain income and profits.

As the pooled money grows larger it's increasingly better documented.

It's literally a full time occupation to generate a mountainous pyramid of a paper trail to "explain" a million or so a week.

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

#79

Post by mjevans »

nitwit005 wrote: post #59
mattmanser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK they heavily discourage even the £50 note (roughly €60/$63). We basically only use 5/10/20. Most shops won't take them and cash machines don't give them out. Which is pretty odd now given how high inflation got here for the last few years. Here's an article from 5 years ago saying that £50 notes were widely regarded as just used by criminals. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48993008

The same attitude is present in the US. You can occasionally find signs in stores in the US indicating they won't accept bills larger than $20: https://www.amazon.com/SmartSign-V-shaped-Businesses-Restaur...

The real root of the attitude should be "We don't accept transactions that would produce more than 20 USD in change." However the average person is an idiot so it's easier for them to just say they don't take 50s/100s. I guess arguably there's a greater incentive to try to use lesser bills to make larger ones, but that's what the watermarks and security strips are supposed to prevent.

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

#80

Post by pier25 »

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. :)

Many years ago I got paid a bonus with €500 notes. They were so rare in Spain that people used to call them Bin Ladens (since at the time he hadn't been caught yet).
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