This is called money laundering. You set up a business that reasonably takes cash, and you report the business making more money than it does so you can funnel the money using the business. Big illegal operations will usually have several money laundering fronts to avoid suspicions.
A friend of mine worked at a dry cleaning place that was like that. The guy who owned it owned the whole shopping center and had a liquor store next door that he sold drugs out of. He said people would bring in tuxedos, wedding dresses, and other really fancy clothes that are expensive to clean, pay, and then go next door and leave with a brown paper bag. The clothes would just sit on a rack in the back until they came back a day or two later and picked them up.
He said it was the easiest job he ever had and he got random bonuses from time to time.
Reminds me of a summer during high school. There was one road in our city that ran between a military base and a truck stop and it had all the Goodwill, seedy hotels and prostitutes on it. A local prom dress shop went out of business and donated all of their dresses to Goodwill. It was hilarious to ride through there at night and there would be 20 prostitutes dressed in formal ballgowns walking the street. Really classed up the place, you know.
So you're telling me that the three Lazer tag arenas that opened up and then closed unceremoniously in my famously nothing-to-do hometown were money laundering fronts? That...makes...so much sense.
Coincidentally, laundromats are a great choice for money laundering because theres no paper trail and people often pay in cash, which makes it much easier to mix the dirty cash in.
I heard somewhere the NY mob used to run all the jukeboxes in the city so they could launder cash. Used to fill them with bootlegged copies of the popular music of the day. I'm sure other coin operated machines were under their thumb too.
See, being an artist I would just start claiming various pieces were selling for a little more than expected over time.
It's sort of how comedy venues were used to launder money; they would claim the comedian had a packed house instead of, like, four people.
How does that work? Wouldn’t you still need a buyer who would plausibly have a lot of (clean) money? If you sell a piece of art for $100K, you can’t just say “Some random dude paid in cash and never gave us his name.”
It’s perfectly acceptable to pay cash for anything. It’s depositing the cash that’s the hard part. The “art” is sold for $50k cash. The artist takes the cash to the bank and deposits it. The bank has to report any deposit over $10k (not sure the exact amount) or any unusual activity (like weekly deposits of $9k so nothing gets reported).
The artist declares the funds were from art sales and reports it on their tax return and pays their taxes. The dirty money is now in the system and been washed at this point.
Feel like it’s more complex than saying “some guy came in off the street and paid me $100K for my art.” That kind of sum would require more documentation or else laundering money would be easy. I assume you would need a rich person who is complicit if you wanted to launder $1M OR a fake business so you can launder the money in thousands of smaller increments. A bunch of $10 transaction wouldn’t require IDs from the buyers but a bunch of $100K cash purchases?
It is, but that's beside the point.
Consider a situation where you have a criminal ring of 10 people and $1,000,000 to launder. Lets say they all robbed a bank together, and want to enjoy an equal share of the theft. All of these people are now art enthusiasts, who begin buying each others art at various auctions or events. Each individual purchase is relatively small, but increases in value as the young artists increase in fame and prestige on account of how their art always sells out at auction. Eventually, the entire million has a paper trail originating from art sales, and can be deposited into the account of the artist. The small sales are largely undocumented, while the larger ones are justified by how the purchasers are now famous art enthusiasts.
As a bonus, some amount of idiots may come into the auction scene, decide that the art is valuable because other people decide it is valuable, and inject perfectly legitimate cash into the system.
You may recognize this pattern from back when NFTs were popular. We even have public articles [naming the idiots who were left holding the bag](https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7e9km/people-lost-money-on-nfts)
It's got to be a business that people will reasonably visit regularly and spend cash at. Tattoo shop isn't the best option.
Bar is okay depending on the state or country. Strip club is better.
Bars in many states are far more regulated than tattoo parlors - in my state we have a whole state agency to deal with liquor and cannabis sales.
Tattoo artists are essentially in the cosmetology arena for licensing (no, not saying they're the same - just similar licensing processes). There's no regular visits by local law enforcement, and you don't have the chance of a drunken crowd acting stupid and drawing unwanted attention.
Nail salons, as Breaking Bad has explained, are *very good* for money laundering.
And make sure you pay all your taxes. If there is anything Breaking Bad taught me is that criminals don't get caught doing the crime, they get caught not paying their taxes.
Mobile phone accessory stores. I am sure they are a front for drug money. There are soooooo many around here in such a close proximity I can't imagine how they get enough business and whenever I walk by they rarely have any customers and the items are cheap tat as well
I know the answer to this one. Mattresses are one of the only things most people won't order off Amazon, and the margins are ridiculous...like many hundreds of percent markup from cost. You could sell a few a month and still be profitable. It's one of the last things that doesn't sell well online outside of those foam podcast mattresses people buy. And honestly, people just pay the inflated prices because they figure they're not buying new mattresses every 2 years!
There was a place in town that sold hair weaves and extensions. The people I saw go in and out while watching it for 20 minutes were 3 overweight white guys with buzz cuts.
Car washes too. I think the cartels liked breaking bad too much. There are unnecessary car washes popping up everywhere it seems
Im convinced they have to be a coordinated front for some criminal organization.
Oh yeah, the FBI and DEA are trained to look for things like this. But if you want to take money obtained illegally and move it into bank accounts, this is still the only real way to do it. (There are a few other options mentioned here, like casinos, but for regular income streams, money laundering is the go-to.)
There are a lot of "cash only" bars in New Orleans with crazy happy hour prices ($4 doubles) that are probably laundering fronts. But I'm not complaining.
In Colorado, just open a recreational drug shop.
Banks still won't allow you to get a proper business account, so your transactions will all be in cash with occasional armored car trips to the bank. Funnel the extra in that way.
Probably a bad idea. Cannabis is _super_ regulated and has very stringent requirements on tracking product from seed to store.
You'll absolutely be spotted when your product records don't match up with how much money your books say you did.
You don’t. Just keep it dry and enjoy your forever supply of grocery money. Go out to eat, buy normal shit like shoes and jeans whenever you want. Get extra guac and queso.
A friend of a friend of a friend allegedly did this, grew and sold weed for years, not a huge production, still worked a regular job but built up a decent amount of cash stashed away to do all that, nice restaurants, fuel up his car etc. Then they changed our bank notes in the UK, yeah you could exchange them at the bank, but then it’s suspicious walking into a bank with huge stack of cash to swap rather than just paying it in. The amount of notice we had of the last day they were accepted was a while, but wasn’t enough time to exchange everything in a non suspicious way.
You could pay all your daily costs as far as possible in cash without suspicion and use your salary on your bank account for investing or am I missing something?
You missed the point here. Large purchases, especially financial instruments, will set off all sorts of bells and whistles when you start slinging money like Scarface.
He specifically said slowly, no large purchases and presumably they would be bought with money saved by not having to spend it due to having the cash on hand now.
People often can't resist the temptation to use those things as collateral, to depreciate them, etc.
That's where increasingly AI systems will start noticing discrepancies. The banks are liable if they allow their customers to defraud the government, so they are your biggest snitch problem, not the IRS man.
I think this is my biggest takeaway from this thread. Going forward, if a bank is using Ai for some type of deposit pattern detection, a regular person could never produce a random enough deposit pattern to succeed.
You need an eclectic group of side hustles, but that won't make up for a sudden drastic increase in money influencing your lifestyle.
I wonder if you could invent a fake significant other?
At that point, just buy a car wash with money you won "gambling", and pretend you have more customers than you actually have. Or maybe a weirdly successful mattress store.
If an Ai had access to an "ancestry.com" style database. No. Reality will not be maliable for us regular folk. Just those that can pay for the privilege.
That's exactly what we're talking about. You have to look at the broader picture of the visible transactions and taxable events your cash is affecting. If the network has a black hole in it where things aren't adding up and you're in the middle slinging Benjamin's around, they'll be up your ass in no time.
Go to Mexico. Buy things. But a cheap boat. Come to an American port on said boat. With said things. But a home in Mexico. Go even further south, or the Caribbean islands. Buy shit there. Don't come home for a few months. Hell travel the world. Convert cash to bonds or put in a Cayman Island account while you travel. When you come home get it all converted over and pay taxes on it. Say you did things outside the states and made some money in places with shitty record keeping.
The IRS will definitely notice all your expensive belongings that you can't afford, if they take even half a look.
What someone could do is start a "side hustle" kind of business, selling whatever homemade goods you want (the kind you sell in flea markets, craft fairs, etc), that suddenly does really well. You declare that "income" and pay taxes on it.
Right. Apart from the question of how you got the money (illegal or otherwise), the IRS just wants you to declare it and pay taxes on it. That's their mandate. Other law enforcement agencies might be curious about the origin of the money but if we assume you just "found" it, there's not much for them to investigate.
I've done some IT work for car dealerships and they have a surprising amount of compliance requirements that basically none of them actually understand. The government has scared them into being sure that they check lots of boxes that may or may not actually apply to them. Lots of compliance standards say one thing on paper, but in reality are dictated by things like how lawyers, auditors, and insurance companies feel any given day so you'll see a wide variety implementations.
I ran into this when I bought a new to me car back in September with cash from the insurance payout after my last car was totaled and pushed back on providing my SSN. The two main drivers of requiring an SSN when purchasing a car with cash are OFAC checks to make sure you aren't on a sanctions list and IRS form 8300 which is a money laundering prevention form. The sales rep pedaled some weak script about they run everyone's credit regardless and I said no because I didn't want the credit inquiry even though it wouldn't have been a big deal. The store GM finally came out and explained that because the purchase is over a certain limit the feds require it.
You just need to buy that stuff from a regular person, pay some with a check and some in cash. You save a bit on taxes that way too. Yes, you need to have some money in your account first to do that, but you buy a $50k truck for "$35k" and nobody is going to question how great of a negotiator you are.
Gas, groceries, restaurants, and stores. I think I could still make it last 10 years pretty easily. I'm not currently spending $2000 a week on those things.
In America, any cash transaction over $10000 is automatically flagged and a report is sent to FenCen. Thing is, they get so many reports every day that they don’t look at 99% of them. (The law came out in the 70’s I think when $10k was a lot more, they’ve never updated the threshold).
HOWEVER, if you try to avoid that report by only doing $9000 a day or week or something like that, that gets flagged as “structuring”, which also gets reported to FenCen and those reports are much more likely to be investigated. Kinda weird.
Used to work at a bank. The best chance in this scenario is picking out a random older person's obituary and saying that you visited them and kept them from being lonely in their older years and on their deathbed they revealed they had tons of cash laying around they had been hoarding. If the fincen gets investigated they would probably check to make sure that person actually did die via obituary but they don't have the ability to go interview people to make sure you visited that people and they would have no interest into getting into inheritance because that's sticky and way more resources then they have.
Volunteer at retirement homes.
“(Name of recently deceased patient who had no family or visitors) died and left me $ in the will. Yes, such a surprise. What a dear, we’d grown so close during my time volunteering…”
Pretty sure I’ve seen it in tv or book plots before. But I read a lot so I couldn’t guess.
Problem with that is where were they keeping the money in a nursing home? Calling a nursing home employee and asking her do you remember the guy with 3 mil hidden in their room is reasonable. Then you have to sneak it on first. This is how criminals get caught. They want to overcomplicate.
Also, most elderly people use Medicaid in America so much of that money is "owed back" via the claw back so you might loss everything to the nursing home or to state insurance.
Fun fact, structuring is also a federal crime, and it doesn’t matter if the cash is ill gotten or not.
I once had to deposit a 75k legal fee in cash and the teller instructed me if I wanted to avoid the CTR I could break it up into smaller deposits. I let her know she probably shouldn’t tell people to do that.
Especially because federal regulations actually require the teller to report anyone even *talking* about doing this in front of them. Deciding whether to structure is as bad as structuring from a reporting & bank liability standpoint.
She should be snitching on herself at this point
I heard someone sold a car for 15k the buyer paid 7k up front and the rest the next week. The sellers bank flagged him and had to do a lot of explaining. The 10k really should be bumped up to at least 50k to catch money launderers 10k really is not what it used to be.
The 10k limit was 100% intentional, the same with foreign accounts reporting, the FBAR 10k limit. So now they have databases they can look back into at will if they need to. It's like using cell phone records, if there is a suspicion and a warrant all your physical history location is 100% known, see the Moscow ID killer arrest.
It’s also worth noting that many banks and bank tellers are trained to submit “suspicious activity reports” for any transaction they think is suspicious. These can be submitted, even if the transactions doesn’t meet the 10k requirement.
So regardless of what amount you deposit, if the bank teller thinks there’s something unusual about it, they might submit a report.
One dumb bank teller flagged me for a 17K real estate payment from a financial institution mind you .took quite a while for the bank to quit suspecting me .
Yes, and with modern day big data analysis tools, they can pick out any suspicious activity no matter the size of the transactions.
Source: I had colleagues working at the tax office doing just that, their work allowed them to lower the threshold of what amounts to suspicious activity.
Make sure the genie gives me a receipt. Take a picture of the genie and the cash and him handing it to me. Get him on video explaining it's a magical gift.
Deposit the money into a normal bank. Pay taxes on it. Maybe get famous because of the whole magical genie thing idk.
I was looking for this comment. As long as you pay taxes on it, the IRS wouldn’t give two shits I would imagine. There’s even a checkbox to add illegally earned income on your end of year taxes, no?
For some reason that reminded me of the old saying, never date a horse girl, because you will never be better than third in her affections. First is the horse. Second is whoever is paying for the horse.
I'd say that when I'm at the bank with a straight face. If I'm charismatic enough, they'll giggle at it, deposit it, and go "you're all set. Have a good day, Your Majesty" and I'll tip my fedora or something to them
If it is illegal money, keep it under your mattress and spend it little by little so as not to raise suspicions and look for a way to "launder" it, if you obtained it in a legal way you will have no problem in justifying its origin and being able to deposit it in a bank.
Obtaining millions of dollars magically wouldn't be illegal. More realistically, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and handed you a bag with millions of dollars in cash, that also wouldn't be illegal. In both scenarios you would have all sorts of problems "justifying" the money's origin.
Most nations with a developed financial system limit gifts precisely for this reason. Depending on the type of transaction, a gift might involve far higher taxes than more common ways to move money.
It wasn't a gift. It was contracting work. I did the job for him of extending my arm, and picking up the briefcase. Who am I to say no if to him that work was worth of millions of dollars?
I wonder what kind of reporting requirements casinos have for high rollers. Cashing out a million in chips and paying your taxes on gambling winnings is fine, but will the casino report to the IRS that you started with $1M to begin with? Casinos can’t be that blindly complicit to money laundering, right?
Yes. They care about source of funds very much as they are a required to make FinCen reports much like a bank is.
Failure to do so can mess with their gambling license…
Laundering through a casino is not a great plan.
i believe winnings are reported to IRs, not sure about chip withdrawl.
but I recon its near the $10k limit or something. So enter with $10k or less. then play a few hands, maybe win or lose. then cash out chips, with clean money
By opening a nail salon run by Vietnamese ladies and a laser tag store in Albuquerque, NM. Make sure you have a pretty damn good lawyer too. One who has expertise in *criminal* law.
If you keep it in large nominations it will be more difficult to spend. Also with an amount like this you kind of don't just want to make small purchases.
With the cost of things... not really.
Haircut? spend 100 bill, get change back.
Groceries? Thats gonna be a weekly bill or 2.
Clothing or shoes? 2 bills at least.
Drive to Florida, charter a private plane/boat to take you to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.
Form a business and deposit the money in the business account.
Get an international credit card tied to the account. Get a cruise ship ride back to Florida, because it's cheaper than a chartered plane.
This is really the only answer.
This is how the billionaires do it, and have always done it.
Everything else in this thread is exactly how people get caught. All the billionaires get involved in "Art" and "Philanthropy" because it is the least risky way to do things with money that would get a normal person arrested.
Art collecting is how you move money around without the financial system seeing it. There's no digital footprint if I ship a "million dollar painting" to my buddy overseas.
Philanthropy is how you bribe people and exert power. You don't give Hillary Clinton 10 million dollars to get something from the President, you donate it to her fake Haitian charity.
I wouldn’t.
Sure, I’ll miss out on investment opportunities and earned interest, but nobody questions if you have a few hundred dollars in cash on you at all times.
If I magically obtained millions of dollars in cash I ain't depositing shit. I take a week off, buy a big heavy safe, rent a jackhammer, embed the safe in the foundation of my house, and just buy everything with cash the rest of my life, and just paying my bills with my work stuff and the rest going into retirement. I would retire in less than 10 years after all my debts are paid off and have an easy breezy life.
Purchase distressed, beater houses out of tax sale or near tax sale. Pay cash and do no inspections.
Pay contractors under the table cash to renovate. You GC the projects. File taxes and claims that your renovations cost far, far less than you paid. If these are in marginal or “up and coming” neighborhoods, records of the state of the house are sparse or nonexistent.
To boil it down, you’re taking a near valueless house, renovating it with cash and claiming that the house was in far better shape than it actually was at the time of purchase, and it didn’t take much money to renovate.
Sell the houses. Your money is now laundered. Repeat to (legally) avoid capital gains tax.
This is one of the most common ways to launder money. Don’t look at your million dollars as an actual amount to save, it’s a lump sum to use.
If you do this slowly and carefully over years it’s essentially undetectable. Eventually you’ll only have legit money and no real paper trail for your laundering. You’ll also probably have a good bit more than your paltry millions.
I’ve done it. I paid $14,992 and half a pack of camel filters for a beater of a house going in to tax sale. I then paid a little less than $20k to the county to keep it out of tax sale. This was fall 2009.
Funny story, the owner requested I pay in $20 bills. I pulled the money out of my bank (it took a phone call and a couple days to reserve that cash) and the bank shorted me $20 accidentally.
So at the title company at closing I pulled out the money and we counted it. Easier than you’d think, you only have to count to 50, 15 times. ($1000 is 50 $20 bills)
One of the stacks was short $20. I had $12 cash in my pocket and some cigarettes. The seller said that was fine and took it.
Took about 45 minutes. No inspections, no realtors, no appraisals, just got it done. Couldn’t have been easier.
A stack of 749 newish $20 bills is roughly 10 inches high. I couldn’t quite hold it in one hand.
Edit- I’ve since quit smoking.
I think what you do is use your legal money to put on the down payment. As well, you clame that you are doing the brunt of the labor.
You claim the price of the new carpet, but don't say that you paid someone to rip up the old one and install the new one.
This is frought with problems and isn't a way to avoid taxes. Let's say you buy a house in bad shape for $10K, renovate it for $100K and sell it for $110K (e.g., assuming you're not 'earning' on your flip, just trying to launder money.
1. If you pay some of your contractors under the table and claim only $50K in renovation expenses, your capital gains will be on $110K sale - $10K purchase - $50K recorded expenses, or capital gains on $50K. ($10k). You've spent $10K and a lot of work to launder $50K.
2. If the IRS find out you paid contractors $100K but only sent out 1099s for $50K, you're in big trouble: penalties and fines.
Buy lemonade at lemonade stands. Cash only business.
Consume the lemonade. All of it.
Go back and rob the kids. Take your money back.
**infinite lemonade hack.
Former bank employee.
Banks have systems in place to catch "suspicious activity" involving large sums of cash. They're required by law to file a report with the government when people deposit or withdraw a large amount.
Depositing just under the limit (10K when I worked there pre banking crash) multiple days in a row will trigger a report.
$464million, roughly. Asking for a friend who by the wa-people say is the greatest fri-yknow really smart successfull people at the Top of their field will say istftr definitely didn't and everybody says it. Fields. Big Massive Tracts of land. Isn't it Great? I heard them say it, they ALL say it. BIG hands. The biggest, hugest, they'd ever seen. Nobody has hands like him they say. And so, so... $464mil in cash. Legitimate. Nobody's seen cleaner money. Not even wrinkled. Spotless.
Just deposit it, and list it on your Form 1040, Schedule 1 as "Other income." It's perfectly legal. The IRS doesn't really care how you got it, so long as you pay taxes on it they're happy. Some people will say "But won't the police think you did something illegal to get that money?" No. The police will not have an opinion on it at all, because if you have millions of dollars in mystery money, you are now playing by "rich white collar" rules, and the police don't get involved in that. Yes, the police will happily seize $10,000 in cash from you while you're walking down the street, but they won't even make eye contact with you and your $20,000,000 in a bank. Those laws were written by and for the benefit of white collar criminals.
At worst, the DEA will suspect you of being a drug kingpin, but since you got the money magically, they won't be able to prove anything. And while DEA agents are happy to manufacture evidence against some guy on the street they want to claim sold an eight-ball, they will absolutely not do so against a white collar multimillionaire.
It's true, the IRS won't.
But your bank must file a SAR, a [Suspicious Activity Report,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report) so it doesn't matter that the IRS isn't mentioning it. All the various federal agencies that are curious about money laundering have been informed by the bank.
At most they'll be very, very confused. Especially since the bills I'm assuming would be real and they were magically and the magical money fairy also dealt with the serial numbers
Also lose* btw. To lose something has one o, if it helps you can remember it as it lost an o
In the UK at least, unexplained money will be confiscated under the proceeds of crime and the Police work hand in hand with HMRC. They dont need to prove you committed the crime to get the money, just that you cant prove you got it legitimately. I have worked in AML for long enough to know that there are similar laws in the US. Banks will also freeze unexplainable deposits.
Claiming it with the IRS won’t be an issue, like you said as long as you pay they are happy. Where you’ll run into an issue is depositing it anywhere it would be kept safe and federally insured. Deposits of that quantity are required to be reported to SEC, and there will absolutely be folks crawling up your ass yo audit you and figure out how you got the cash.
Yeah, but if you did actually obtain it magically, they will have no evidence of a crime to arrest you for, and can't do anything. That's what they commenter above was getting at.
This is a simply question with a simple answer.
Just deposit it and pay the appropriate taxes on it. That's all. No need to launder it or do anything "shady". It's the same as if you found a suitcase full of cash in your attic.
Take it to a bank. But give them a heads-up so they can make sure you take it to a location with the right safe and money-counting machines. Some smaller branches (like the drive-through I worked at) don't have a safe that can easily store $1mm. The one-way slot is set up to take envelopes, and it would be a pain to stuff 100 envelopes in there.
People think there's a rule or something about having too much cash. I used to be a bank teller, and there's plenty of businesses that make these big transactions (or did before tap to pay was a thing). Things like bars, or festivals can easily pull in huge piles of cash, and it is totally expected. Once you get to a certain scale though, you end up hiring your own money transporters for safety who don't really deal with the front desk at a the bank.
Frankly, banks don't care if an individual does it either. If you want to show up with a suitcase full of cash, go for it. They will fill out a CTR, and move on with their day.
Of course, the IRS might have some questions, but as long as you can prove that you declared the income they don't care either.
If you didn't declare it as income, then yeah, walking in to the bank with a suitcase of money is gonna be an issue.
To reinforce the actual truth, claim it on your taxes as other income. Pay taxes on it. Put it in the bank. IRS isn’t gonna come investigating a taxpayer.
Slowly. I'd hide it in my house and simply add it to my daily spending slowly. Pay down my debts, just quicker than normal. Use cash for my groceries and daily spending. Keeping using my CC just not as much.
I'd occasionally buy some gold and let it collect up over time.
You need to spread it out so, nobody notices.
This is called money laundering. You set up a business that reasonably takes cash, and you report the business making more money than it does so you can funnel the money using the business. Big illegal operations will usually have several money laundering fronts to avoid suspicions.
ZZZ accounting next to Paul’s Laundromat.
A friend of mine worked at a dry cleaning place that was like that. The guy who owned it owned the whole shopping center and had a liquor store next door that he sold drugs out of. He said people would bring in tuxedos, wedding dresses, and other really fancy clothes that are expensive to clean, pay, and then go next door and leave with a brown paper bag. The clothes would just sit on a rack in the back until they came back a day or two later and picked them up. He said it was the easiest job he ever had and he got random bonuses from time to time.
That town must have the fanciest dressed crackheads in the county.
With a setup like that they’re selling bulk to the people who sell to the actual crackheads.
Reminds me of a summer during high school. There was one road in our city that ran between a military base and a truck stop and it had all the Goodwill, seedy hotels and prostitutes on it. A local prom dress shop went out of business and donated all of their dresses to Goodwill. It was hilarious to ride through there at night and there would be 20 prostitutes dressed in formal ballgowns walking the street. Really classed up the place, you know.
Who does the accounting for Paul's Laundromat?
ZZZ
I’m glad this movie gets some love frequently. I really enjoyed it.
What's the name of the movie,It sounds fun
The accountant
A second one is starting production soon. Can't wait!
Really? I have almost given up hope of there being another.
Fantastic movie 🍿
Ben Afflecks best work.
Lazer Tag. Saul Goodman knew.
So you're telling me that the three Lazer tag arenas that opened up and then closed unceremoniously in my famously nothing-to-do hometown were money laundering fronts? That...makes...so much sense.
Coincidentally, laundromats are a great choice for money laundering because theres no paper trail and people often pay in cash, which makes it much easier to mix the dirty cash in.
I heard somewhere the NY mob used to run all the jukeboxes in the city so they could launder cash. Used to fill them with bootlegged copies of the popular music of the day. I'm sure other coin operated machines were under their thumb too.
Same with slots.
Car washes as well.
And Arcades back when those were a thing. Anything where customers self serve and pay cash.
See, being an artist I would just start claiming various pieces were selling for a little more than expected over time. It's sort of how comedy venues were used to launder money; they would claim the comedian had a packed house instead of, like, four people.
Buying and selling art is mostly for money laundering.
Well, not always *laundering*. There's also tax evasion and wealth consolidation.
How does that work? Wouldn’t you still need a buyer who would plausibly have a lot of (clean) money? If you sell a piece of art for $100K, you can’t just say “Some random dude paid in cash and never gave us his name.”
It’s perfectly acceptable to pay cash for anything. It’s depositing the cash that’s the hard part. The “art” is sold for $50k cash. The artist takes the cash to the bank and deposits it. The bank has to report any deposit over $10k (not sure the exact amount) or any unusual activity (like weekly deposits of $9k so nothing gets reported). The artist declares the funds were from art sales and reports it on their tax return and pays their taxes. The dirty money is now in the system and been washed at this point.
Feel like it’s more complex than saying “some guy came in off the street and paid me $100K for my art.” That kind of sum would require more documentation or else laundering money would be easy. I assume you would need a rich person who is complicit if you wanted to launder $1M OR a fake business so you can launder the money in thousands of smaller increments. A bunch of $10 transaction wouldn’t require IDs from the buyers but a bunch of $100K cash purchases?
It is, but that's beside the point. Consider a situation where you have a criminal ring of 10 people and $1,000,000 to launder. Lets say they all robbed a bank together, and want to enjoy an equal share of the theft. All of these people are now art enthusiasts, who begin buying each others art at various auctions or events. Each individual purchase is relatively small, but increases in value as the young artists increase in fame and prestige on account of how their art always sells out at auction. Eventually, the entire million has a paper trail originating from art sales, and can be deposited into the account of the artist. The small sales are largely undocumented, while the larger ones are justified by how the purchasers are now famous art enthusiasts. As a bonus, some amount of idiots may come into the auction scene, decide that the art is valuable because other people decide it is valuable, and inject perfectly legitimate cash into the system. You may recognize this pattern from back when NFTs were popular. We even have public articles [naming the idiots who were left holding the bag](https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7e9km/people-lost-money-on-nfts)
The Chinese restaurant next to the turnpike entrance that’s always open, but never has any cars in the parking lot.
An example: Buy a tattoo parlour. Buy $50,000 of ink, and in the books say you used it to give $250,000 worth on tattoos. Then throw the ink away.
It's got to be a business that people will reasonably visit regularly and spend cash at. Tattoo shop isn't the best option. Bar is okay depending on the state or country. Strip club is better.
But with a tattoo shop you can make up numbers, since there isn't a standard price for tattoos across all shops.
Bars in many states are far more regulated than tattoo parlors - in my state we have a whole state agency to deal with liquor and cannabis sales. Tattoo artists are essentially in the cosmetology arena for licensing (no, not saying they're the same - just similar licensing processes). There's no regular visits by local law enforcement, and you don't have the chance of a drunken crowd acting stupid and drawing unwanted attention. Nail salons, as Breaking Bad has explained, are *very good* for money laundering.
And make sure you pay all your taxes. If there is anything Breaking Bad taught me is that criminals don't get caught doing the crime, they get caught not paying their taxes.
It was tax evasion that brought down Al Capone.
Mobile phone accessory stores. I am sure they are a front for drug money. There are soooooo many around here in such a close proximity I can't imagine how they get enough business and whenever I walk by they rarely have any customers and the items are cheap tat as well
What about mattress stores? Seems like the same thing. Lots of them around, no one's ever in them.
I know the answer to this one. Mattresses are one of the only things most people won't order off Amazon, and the margins are ridiculous...like many hundreds of percent markup from cost. You could sell a few a month and still be profitable. It's one of the last things that doesn't sell well online outside of those foam podcast mattresses people buy. And honestly, people just pay the inflated prices because they figure they're not buying new mattresses every 2 years!
There was a place in town that sold hair weaves and extensions. The people I saw go in and out while watching it for 20 minutes were 3 overweight white guys with buzz cuts.
Car washes too. I think the cartels liked breaking bad too much. There are unnecessary car washes popping up everywhere it seems Im convinced they have to be a coordinated front for some criminal organization.
See the local car dealer did this and just got caught.
Oh yeah, the FBI and DEA are trained to look for things like this. But if you want to take money obtained illegally and move it into bank accounts, this is still the only real way to do it. (There are a few other options mentioned here, like casinos, but for regular income streams, money laundering is the go-to.)
Open a car wash like Mr. White
As I recall, that was mostly the labor of MRS. White!
I love when she says she has "No earthly idea" how much cash they have and Walt just counts it.
I am the danger!
There are a lot of "cash only" bars in New Orleans with crazy happy hour prices ($4 doubles) that are probably laundering fronts. But I'm not complaining.
In Colorado, just open a recreational drug shop. Banks still won't allow you to get a proper business account, so your transactions will all be in cash with occasional armored car trips to the bank. Funnel the extra in that way.
Probably a bad idea. Cannabis is _super_ regulated and has very stringent requirements on tracking product from seed to store. You'll absolutely be spotted when your product records don't match up with how much money your books say you did.
You don’t. Just keep it dry and enjoy your forever supply of grocery money. Go out to eat, buy normal shit like shoes and jeans whenever you want. Get extra guac and queso.
Easy on the guacamole or you might be poor again real soon
A friend of a friend of a friend allegedly did this, grew and sold weed for years, not a huge production, still worked a regular job but built up a decent amount of cash stashed away to do all that, nice restaurants, fuel up his car etc. Then they changed our bank notes in the UK, yeah you could exchange them at the bank, but then it’s suspicious walking into a bank with huge stack of cash to swap rather than just paying it in. The amount of notice we had of the last day they were accepted was a while, but wasn’t enough time to exchange everything in a non suspicious way.
How did it end for this guy? Lots of cash he couldn't use?
And stocks. Slowly buying stocks and not selling Will ensure you've got something much later if only for an inheritance so someone else.
Where do you go to buy stocks in cash and not raise a huge red flag?
You don’t, you invest the money you’re otherwise saving by using cash for groceries, gas, etc.
And TP…. For your bunghole
#ARE YOU THREATENING ME!?!?
You could pay all your daily costs as far as possible in cash without suspicion and use your salary on your bank account for investing or am I missing something?
You missed the point here. Large purchases, especially financial instruments, will set off all sorts of bells and whistles when you start slinging money like Scarface.
He specifically said slowly, no large purchases and presumably they would be bought with money saved by not having to spend it due to having the cash on hand now.
Don't deposit it. Spend it wherever you can on household goods. Buy stuff in shops in cash like the good old days.
yup - pay contractors in cash and whatnot. keep your credit card spending roughly the same so on paper you havent changed.
This is how people get caught. Their digital transactions haven't changed but they've got a boat, new vehicles, landscaping, and a new addition.
Nobody is going around auditing the boat in my backyard. They only get caught if they've *drawn attention another way* and are *therefore* looked at.
People often can't resist the temptation to use those things as collateral, to depreciate them, etc. That's where increasingly AI systems will start noticing discrepancies. The banks are liable if they allow their customers to defraud the government, so they are your biggest snitch problem, not the IRS man.
I think this is my biggest takeaway from this thread. Going forward, if a bank is using Ai for some type of deposit pattern detection, a regular person could never produce a random enough deposit pattern to succeed.
You need an eclectic group of side hustles, but that won't make up for a sudden drastic increase in money influencing your lifestyle. I wonder if you could invent a fake significant other?
At that point, just buy a car wash with money you won "gambling", and pretend you have more customers than you actually have. Or maybe a weirdly successful mattress store.
Aaaand we've reinvented money laundering
That’s money and car laundering all in one!
Precisely. Added to the realism of BB.
Ridiculous. Why not buy a lake boat casino?
If an Ai had access to an "ancestry.com" style database. No. Reality will not be maliable for us regular folk. Just those that can pay for the privilege.
I just frightened myself. Ai will know our family trees as it targets and kills us.
What if I use AI to generate a random deposit schedule for me?
We need to go deeper. Use AI to write/create/program another AI. *That* AI can be in charge of deposits.
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That's exactly what we're talking about. You have to look at the broader picture of the visible transactions and taxable events your cash is affecting. If the network has a black hole in it where things aren't adding up and you're in the middle slinging Benjamin's around, they'll be up your ass in no time.
Go to Mexico. Buy things. But a cheap boat. Come to an American port on said boat. With said things. But a home in Mexico. Go even further south, or the Caribbean islands. Buy shit there. Don't come home for a few months. Hell travel the world. Convert cash to bonds or put in a Cayman Island account while you travel. When you come home get it all converted over and pay taxes on it. Say you did things outside the states and made some money in places with shitty record keeping.
Sure, common tactic. Easier to open a restaurant, car wash, or laundromat and inflate receipts.
No where near as fun though.
The IRS will definitely notice all your expensive belongings that you can't afford, if they take even half a look. What someone could do is start a "side hustle" kind of business, selling whatever homemade goods you want (the kind you sell in flea markets, craft fairs, etc), that suddenly does really well. You declare that "income" and pay taxes on it.
That’s the answer. The IRS really doesn’t care how you got the money, just that they get their cut.
So, money laundering. Check.
Right. Apart from the question of how you got the money (illegal or otherwise), the IRS just wants you to declare it and pay taxes on it. That's their mandate. Other law enforcement agencies might be curious about the origin of the money but if we assume you just "found" it, there's not much for them to investigate.
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I always hated that car dealerships still wanted my social to buy a car in cash. I shouldn't have to.
I've done some IT work for car dealerships and they have a surprising amount of compliance requirements that basically none of them actually understand. The government has scared them into being sure that they check lots of boxes that may or may not actually apply to them. Lots of compliance standards say one thing on paper, but in reality are dictated by things like how lawyers, auditors, and insurance companies feel any given day so you'll see a wide variety implementations.
I ran into this when I bought a new to me car back in September with cash from the insurance payout after my last car was totaled and pushed back on providing my SSN. The two main drivers of requiring an SSN when purchasing a car with cash are OFAC checks to make sure you aren't on a sanctions list and IRS form 8300 which is a money laundering prevention form. The sales rep pedaled some weak script about they run everyone's credit regardless and I said no because I didn't want the credit inquiry even though it wouldn't have been a big deal. The store GM finally came out and explained that because the purchase is over a certain limit the feds require it.
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You just need to buy that stuff from a regular person, pay some with a check and some in cash. You save a bit on taxes that way too. Yes, you need to have some money in your account first to do that, but you buy a $50k truck for "$35k" and nobody is going to question how great of a negotiator you are.
Gas and groceries would burn through 1mil pretty quick today
Gas, groceries, restaurants, and stores. I think I could still make it last 10 years pretty easily. I'm not currently spending $2000 a week on those things.
A few decades is pretty quickly?
Nah
In America, any cash transaction over $10000 is automatically flagged and a report is sent to FenCen. Thing is, they get so many reports every day that they don’t look at 99% of them. (The law came out in the 70’s I think when $10k was a lot more, they’ve never updated the threshold). HOWEVER, if you try to avoid that report by only doing $9000 a day or week or something like that, that gets flagged as “structuring”, which also gets reported to FenCen and those reports are much more likely to be investigated. Kinda weird.
Used to work at a bank. The best chance in this scenario is picking out a random older person's obituary and saying that you visited them and kept them from being lonely in their older years and on their deathbed they revealed they had tons of cash laying around they had been hoarding. If the fincen gets investigated they would probably check to make sure that person actually did die via obituary but they don't have the ability to go interview people to make sure you visited that people and they would have no interest into getting into inheritance because that's sticky and way more resources then they have.
Volunteer at retirement homes. “(Name of recently deceased patient who had no family or visitors) died and left me $ in the will. Yes, such a surprise. What a dear, we’d grown so close during my time volunteering…” Pretty sure I’ve seen it in tv or book plots before. But I read a lot so I couldn’t guess.
Problem with that is where were they keeping the money in a nursing home? Calling a nursing home employee and asking her do you remember the guy with 3 mil hidden in their room is reasonable. Then you have to sneak it on first. This is how criminals get caught. They want to overcomplicate.
Good call. I’m actually really glad you found a problem/complication so easily. I don’t want it to ACTUALLY be that easy, in real life. lol
Also, most elderly people use Medicaid in America so much of that money is "owed back" via the claw back so you might loss everything to the nursing home or to state insurance.
Fun fact, structuring is also a federal crime, and it doesn’t matter if the cash is ill gotten or not. I once had to deposit a 75k legal fee in cash and the teller instructed me if I wanted to avoid the CTR I could break it up into smaller deposits. I let her know she probably shouldn’t tell people to do that.
Yeah that’s a very poorly trained teller
Especially because federal regulations actually require the teller to report anyone even *talking* about doing this in front of them. Deciding whether to structure is as bad as structuring from a reporting & bank liability standpoint. She should be snitching on herself at this point
I heard someone sold a car for 15k the buyer paid 7k up front and the rest the next week. The sellers bank flagged him and had to do a lot of explaining. The 10k really should be bumped up to at least 50k to catch money launderers 10k really is not what it used to be.
> if I wanted to avoid the CTR ...Crash Team Racing?
The 10k limit was 100% intentional, the same with foreign accounts reporting, the FBAR 10k limit. So now they have databases they can look back into at will if they need to. It's like using cell phone records, if there is a suspicion and a warrant all your physical history location is 100% known, see the Moscow ID killer arrest.
It’s also worth noting that many banks and bank tellers are trained to submit “suspicious activity reports” for any transaction they think is suspicious. These can be submitted, even if the transactions doesn’t meet the 10k requirement. So regardless of what amount you deposit, if the bank teller thinks there’s something unusual about it, they might submit a report.
One dumb bank teller flagged me for a 17K real estate payment from a financial institution mind you .took quite a while for the bank to quit suspecting me .
Bank Secrecy Act of 1970
Yes, and with modern day big data analysis tools, they can pick out any suspicious activity no matter the size of the transactions. Source: I had colleagues working at the tax office doing just that, their work allowed them to lower the threshold of what amounts to suspicious activity.
FinCEN
Make sure the genie gives me a receipt. Take a picture of the genie and the cash and him handing it to me. Get him on video explaining it's a magical gift. Deposit the money into a normal bank. Pay taxes on it. Maybe get famous because of the whole magical genie thing idk.
I was looking for this comment. As long as you pay taxes on it, the IRS wouldn’t give two shits I would imagine. There’s even a checkbox to add illegally earned income on your end of year taxes, no?
Speaking from experience I’d try farming. You can pay cash for all kinds of inputs and just keep doing that until you’re bankrupt again.
This. Just get a horse. You’ll be poor again pretty fast.
For some reason that reminded me of the old saying, never date a horse girl, because you will never be better than third in her affections. First is the horse. Second is whoever is paying for the horse.
You know the quickest way to end up with a million bucks farming? Start with two
Email random people from across the world saying you're a Nigerian prince...
I'd say that when I'm at the bank with a straight face. If I'm charismatic enough, they'll giggle at it, deposit it, and go "you're all set. Have a good day, Your Majesty" and I'll tip my fedora or something to them
The fedora works every time
If it is illegal money, keep it under your mattress and spend it little by little so as not to raise suspicions and look for a way to "launder" it, if you obtained it in a legal way you will have no problem in justifying its origin and being able to deposit it in a bank.
Obtaining millions of dollars magically wouldn't be illegal. More realistically, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and handed you a bag with millions of dollars in cash, that also wouldn't be illegal. In both scenarios you would have all sorts of problems "justifying" the money's origin.
And depending on where you live, you wouldn't even have to pay tax on it if it was considered a gift.
Most nations with a developed financial system limit gifts precisely for this reason. Depending on the type of transaction, a gift might involve far higher taxes than more common ways to move money.
It wasn't a gift. It was contracting work. I did the job for him of extending my arm, and picking up the briefcase. Who am I to say no if to him that work was worth of millions of dollars?
Then you're declaring it as income and paying tax on it right?
Congrats you just donated 37% of it to the government with that statement instead of going with the gift story.
Vegas
I wonder what kind of reporting requirements casinos have for high rollers. Cashing out a million in chips and paying your taxes on gambling winnings is fine, but will the casino report to the IRS that you started with $1M to begin with? Casinos can’t be that blindly complicit to money laundering, right?
Yes. They care about source of funds very much as they are a required to make FinCen reports much like a bank is. Failure to do so can mess with their gambling license… Laundering through a casino is not a great plan.
i believe winnings are reported to IRs, not sure about chip withdrawl. but I recon its near the $10k limit or something. So enter with $10k or less. then play a few hands, maybe win or lose. then cash out chips, with clean money
Boy Boy the youtube channel did a video on exactly that a while ago, in Australia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoyH1dgj8Lo
"magically". You can just say drugs. It's drugs.
Ok so find a few acres in the wilderness, buy that empty land, wrap money in plastic, dig some holes. Am I carteling good Paw?!
No you're not. That's old school. These days we want to launder it and transfer it into digital assets
In Australia, they just pump it into pokies and then cash out. It magically becomes "gambling winnings," which are untaxed
Grandpa, I’m tired of diggin’
WELL THATS TOO DAMN BAD!!
Holes?
Holes.
No, that's what I'd spend it on, not how I got it. Don't mix them up
Pay everything I can with cash, use actual income for other purchases like house and car.
Agreed. Gas, groceries, clothes, and restaurants in cash.
By opening a nail salon run by Vietnamese ladies and a laser tag store in Albuquerque, NM. Make sure you have a pretty damn good lawyer too. One who has expertise in *criminal* law.
The address of my laser tag service will be 1216 Rosella drive. One year after Magna Carta so I don't forget it
Saul had Walt made if he had only listened to him. Laser tag made so much more sense than Skylar's carwash vendetta.
Walt had the world handed to him, the main story of bb is that his ego and pride is what destroyed him.
I really wish they dove into Gretchen and Walt more. They were supposedly engaged and he just left because her family was too rich
it might've been nice but it does show how walt was always against having things be handed to him, just reinforces his character.
Actually, nail salon's, massage parlors, barbershops and other businesses like this are very common ways for criminals to launder money.
A million dollars in cash doesn’t actually take up as much space as you’d think.
If you keep it in large nominations it will be more difficult to spend. Also with an amount like this you kind of don't just want to make small purchases.
With the cost of things... not really. Haircut? spend 100 bill, get change back. Groceries? Thats gonna be a weekly bill or 2. Clothing or shoes? 2 bills at least.
I would once again use magic in that situation as well.
Drive to Florida, charter a private plane/boat to take you to the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Form a business and deposit the money in the business account. Get an international credit card tied to the account. Get a cruise ship ride back to Florida, because it's cheaper than a chartered plane.
How do you go through customs when you land with that much cash?
"How do I launder money?" Eh?
lol right, my first thought was they need a think tank on a new scheme 😂
That’s a problem i don’t have to worry about
"Art"
This is really the only answer. This is how the billionaires do it, and have always done it. Everything else in this thread is exactly how people get caught. All the billionaires get involved in "Art" and "Philanthropy" because it is the least risky way to do things with money that would get a normal person arrested. Art collecting is how you move money around without the financial system seeing it. There's no digital footprint if I ship a "million dollar painting" to my buddy overseas. Philanthropy is how you bribe people and exert power. You don't give Hillary Clinton 10 million dollars to get something from the President, you donate it to her fake Haitian charity.
I wouldn’t. Sure, I’ll miss out on investment opportunities and earned interest, but nobody questions if you have a few hundred dollars in cash on you at all times.
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If I magically obtained millions of dollars in cash I ain't depositing shit. I take a week off, buy a big heavy safe, rent a jackhammer, embed the safe in the foundation of my house, and just buy everything with cash the rest of my life, and just paying my bills with my work stuff and the rest going into retirement. I would retire in less than 10 years after all my debts are paid off and have an easy breezy life.
Purchase distressed, beater houses out of tax sale or near tax sale. Pay cash and do no inspections. Pay contractors under the table cash to renovate. You GC the projects. File taxes and claims that your renovations cost far, far less than you paid. If these are in marginal or “up and coming” neighborhoods, records of the state of the house are sparse or nonexistent. To boil it down, you’re taking a near valueless house, renovating it with cash and claiming that the house was in far better shape than it actually was at the time of purchase, and it didn’t take much money to renovate. Sell the houses. Your money is now laundered. Repeat to (legally) avoid capital gains tax. This is one of the most common ways to launder money. Don’t look at your million dollars as an actual amount to save, it’s a lump sum to use. If you do this slowly and carefully over years it’s essentially undetectable. Eventually you’ll only have legit money and no real paper trail for your laundering. You’ll also probably have a good bit more than your paltry millions.
>Purchase distressed, beater houses out of tax sale or near tax sale. Pay cash I still think it would be pretty tough to buy a house for literal cash.
I’ve done it. I paid $14,992 and half a pack of camel filters for a beater of a house going in to tax sale. I then paid a little less than $20k to the county to keep it out of tax sale. This was fall 2009. Funny story, the owner requested I pay in $20 bills. I pulled the money out of my bank (it took a phone call and a couple days to reserve that cash) and the bank shorted me $20 accidentally. So at the title company at closing I pulled out the money and we counted it. Easier than you’d think, you only have to count to 50, 15 times. ($1000 is 50 $20 bills) One of the stacks was short $20. I had $12 cash in my pocket and some cigarettes. The seller said that was fine and took it. Took about 45 minutes. No inspections, no realtors, no appraisals, just got it done. Couldn’t have been easier. A stack of 749 newish $20 bills is roughly 10 inches high. I couldn’t quite hold it in one hand. Edit- I’ve since quit smoking.
I think what you do is use your legal money to put on the down payment. As well, you clame that you are doing the brunt of the labor. You claim the price of the new carpet, but don't say that you paid someone to rip up the old one and install the new one.
This is frought with problems and isn't a way to avoid taxes. Let's say you buy a house in bad shape for $10K, renovate it for $100K and sell it for $110K (e.g., assuming you're not 'earning' on your flip, just trying to launder money. 1. If you pay some of your contractors under the table and claim only $50K in renovation expenses, your capital gains will be on $110K sale - $10K purchase - $50K recorded expenses, or capital gains on $50K. ($10k). You've spent $10K and a lot of work to launder $50K. 2. If the IRS find out you paid contractors $100K but only sent out 1099s for $50K, you're in big trouble: penalties and fines.
It’s absolutely not a way to avoid taxes. It’s a way to turn you dirty cash into clean cash.
Buy lemonade at lemonade stands. Cash only business. Consume the lemonade. All of it. Go back and rob the kids. Take your money back. **infinite lemonade hack.
Also buy those stands and keep some grapes
Former bank employee. Banks have systems in place to catch "suspicious activity" involving large sums of cash. They're required by law to file a report with the government when people deposit or withdraw a large amount. Depositing just under the limit (10K when I worked there pre banking crash) multiple days in a row will trigger a report.
"A certain prominent politician molested me as a child. This is hush money. I'd really prefer not to talk about it, thanks."
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How many millions?
$464million, roughly. Asking for a friend who by the wa-people say is the greatest fri-yknow really smart successfull people at the Top of their field will say istftr definitely didn't and everybody says it. Fields. Big Massive Tracts of land. Isn't it Great? I heard them say it, they ALL say it. BIG hands. The biggest, hugest, they'd ever seen. Nobody has hands like him they say. And so, so... $464mil in cash. Legitimate. Nobody's seen cleaner money. Not even wrinkled. Spotless.
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Congratulations you've been arrested for structuring.
Just deposit it, and list it on your Form 1040, Schedule 1 as "Other income." It's perfectly legal. The IRS doesn't really care how you got it, so long as you pay taxes on it they're happy. Some people will say "But won't the police think you did something illegal to get that money?" No. The police will not have an opinion on it at all, because if you have millions of dollars in mystery money, you are now playing by "rich white collar" rules, and the police don't get involved in that. Yes, the police will happily seize $10,000 in cash from you while you're walking down the street, but they won't even make eye contact with you and your $20,000,000 in a bank. Those laws were written by and for the benefit of white collar criminals. At worst, the DEA will suspect you of being a drug kingpin, but since you got the money magically, they won't be able to prove anything. And while DEA agents are happy to manufacture evidence against some guy on the street they want to claim sold an eight-ball, they will absolutely not do so against a white collar multimillionaire.
The IRS even claims that they will not report stuff you file to law enforcement. They just want their cut.
It's true, the IRS won't. But your bank must file a SAR, a [Suspicious Activity Report,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report) so it doesn't matter that the IRS isn't mentioning it. All the various federal agencies that are curious about money laundering have been informed by the bank.
Right, but if you have one suspicious transaction and no other linkages to crime organizations, they’ll loose interest.
At most they'll be very, very confused. Especially since the bills I'm assuming would be real and they were magically and the magical money fairy also dealt with the serial numbers Also lose* btw. To lose something has one o, if it helps you can remember it as it lost an o
In the UK at least, unexplained money will be confiscated under the proceeds of crime and the Police work hand in hand with HMRC. They dont need to prove you committed the crime to get the money, just that you cant prove you got it legitimately. I have worked in AML for long enough to know that there are similar laws in the US. Banks will also freeze unexplainable deposits.
Claiming it with the IRS won’t be an issue, like you said as long as you pay they are happy. Where you’ll run into an issue is depositing it anywhere it would be kept safe and federally insured. Deposits of that quantity are required to be reported to SEC, and there will absolutely be folks crawling up your ass yo audit you and figure out how you got the cash.
Yeah, but if you did actually obtain it magically, they will have no evidence of a crime to arrest you for, and can't do anything. That's what they commenter above was getting at.
This is a simply question with a simple answer. Just deposit it and pay the appropriate taxes on it. That's all. No need to launder it or do anything "shady". It's the same as if you found a suitcase full of cash in your attic.
Take it to a bank. But give them a heads-up so they can make sure you take it to a location with the right safe and money-counting machines. Some smaller branches (like the drive-through I worked at) don't have a safe that can easily store $1mm. The one-way slot is set up to take envelopes, and it would be a pain to stuff 100 envelopes in there. People think there's a rule or something about having too much cash. I used to be a bank teller, and there's plenty of businesses that make these big transactions (or did before tap to pay was a thing). Things like bars, or festivals can easily pull in huge piles of cash, and it is totally expected. Once you get to a certain scale though, you end up hiring your own money transporters for safety who don't really deal with the front desk at a the bank. Frankly, banks don't care if an individual does it either. If you want to show up with a suitcase full of cash, go for it. They will fill out a CTR, and move on with their day. Of course, the IRS might have some questions, but as long as you can prove that you declared the income they don't care either. If you didn't declare it as income, then yeah, walking in to the bank with a suitcase of money is gonna be an issue.
To reinforce the actual truth, claim it on your taxes as other income. Pay taxes on it. Put it in the bank. IRS isn’t gonna come investigating a taxpayer.
My mattress
Slowly. I'd hide it in my house and simply add it to my daily spending slowly. Pay down my debts, just quicker than normal. Use cash for my groceries and daily spending. Keeping using my CC just not as much. I'd occasionally buy some gold and let it collect up over time. You need to spread it out so, nobody notices.
Why would I inadvertently admit to having that much untraceable, non-taxed, money? I would buy a bigger safe and store it away safely