Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 136 posts

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

#101

Post by thaumasiotes »

defrost wrote: post #99
thaumasiotes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). You might note that this scheme doesn't involve you owning the hotel to any degree. You only need to o…

Control of the hotel is required - that's the cash business that fabricates fake customers and orders non existent repair and upgrade work. The work is billed by fake (or better, partially fake) contractors who do no work but charge for time, labor and supplies. It's a funnel with many cash casual customer locations inflate their intake and spend the excess on illusionary busywork "performed" by the next tier in the…

Control of the hotel is required in a sense. Ownership isn't. It's actually much better for you if you come to an informal agreement with the owner of the hotel than if you take a legal ownership stake.

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

#102

Post by davidwritesbugs »

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…

Convicted ex-money launderer here.

It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}. There are entire areas of shops in some cities where no-one goes in but the business has a healthy turnover.

There are lots of other methods too but those are trade secrets. "I could tell you but" etc. Easy 'big bang' methods like houses Rolls-Royces and art no longer work easily in most jurisdictions (oddly, apparently still in Oz from other comments). I miss the days when you could walk ito a bank with a shopping bag full of bundles of notes, I've done that - fun.

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

#103

Post by bagels »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #74
bagels wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why can't anyone say what it is?

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

#104

Post by thaumasiotes »

defrost wrote: post #100
thaumasiotes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong on two points. First, they haven't obfuscated that; it's not present at all. Second, your first step is that your hotel falsely inflates customer income. Then you follow up with some pointless additional steps. But if you can falsely inflate customer income, your job as a money launderer is already done. There are no additional steps. Spending revenue from your company on spurious invoices from another c…

What was the scale of total income per month to wash again? You might want to dwell on the bookkeeping scale required to soak up that volume in a diffuse manner and then "legitimitely" consolidate that upwards.

As I recall, the scale was eight million dollars in one month.

I'm with you that a sleepy rural hotel can't handle that.

However, charging fraudulent expenses to the same sleepy rural hotel can't fix that problem. (It aggravates it!) The hotel can't spend more money than it has. And if you can make it look like the hotel has enough money to suit your needs, your job is already done. Fake expenses don't help.

After a long time spent on various dramas related to this initial problem, the show addresses it by having Marty found a casino, which seems plausible.

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

#105

Post by thaumasiotes »

SilasX wrote: post #76
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…

>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.

That would make sense, but I don't think it's ever mentioned.

It is specifically mentioned that Marty books expenses that he hasn't actually incurred, notionally buying things that he never receives, which will stand up to an audit much more poorly than "buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises" would.

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

#106

Post by gosub100 »

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…

Get an auto dealers license and buy a bunch of used cars, one at a time in cash, and sell them for less than you paid. But not too cheap to get other dealers upset and report you.

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

#107

Post by gosub100 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33
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…

I'd be happy just paying groceries with cash for the rest of my life tbh. Although I can imagine a lack of grocery shopping on anyone's bank account would be suspicious. But moving to a country where nobody knows you / nobody cares would be an option too. Of course, then you get the challenge of moving 20 million in cash abroad...

The idea of paying cash doesn't hold up when you account for changes in the currency notes over time. What would you do with a suitcase full of 1990s hundred dollar notes? Eventually they go out of circulation and using them looks highly suspicious. A casino tried giving me one and I asked them to swap it.

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

#108

Post by gosub100 »

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…

Remember when Greece went broke 10+ years ago? Apparently no one was paying their taxes because they looked around and saw no one paying their taxes. It was a contributing factor because it impaired the nation's ability to get loans because it lowered the government revenue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis

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

#109

Post by bigbones »

davidwritesbugs wrote: post #102
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…

Convicted ex-money launderer here. It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}. There are entire areas of shops…

Money laundering conviction to tech worker sounds like a great story, I'm sure plenty more than just me would love to hear more about your background if you were willing to share.

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

#110

Post by thraxil »

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…

There's still quite a gap between "suspicious" and "probable cause". Just having a large amount of cash isn't by itself illegal. You could easily have enough cash to live on for quite a while having inherited it or earned it decades ago, etc.
Post reply on HN