How one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates

The obvious potential issue is that the data on the AirBnB side looks sketchy as hell if anyone ever actually looks at it. Nearly all guests via gift card, nearly all those gift cards purchased locally (presumably) at only a few locations (presumably).

But I guess they don't have any incentive to be proactive.

> This doesn't really detail any money laundering scheme

Yes, there are reasons to avoid providing a detailed manual on the exact workings of a successful large-scale money-laundering scheme. For the same reason why an article wouldn't explain exactly how to e.g. make explosives or cook meth at scale.

You can always find out if you try, of course. But NYTimes level journalism does hesitate to explain those details.

Turo is a good mechanism for this too.

Around my area there are dozens of mid range cars, most prevalently the Chrysler 300C, that are "available" to rent for $600/day. Not that you can find availability, even if you wanted to rent that car at that rate...

Dealer gives trusted client money to rent their car (spoiler: car keys never change hands). Client rents the car for extended periods. Dealer helpfully sends client starting and ending odometer pictures and such to close out the rental. Rinse, repeat.

Yes, I was disappointed by the article too. It used "money laundering" and "scamming" pretty much interchangeably. But there's a difference. It needs to have a clean origin and this article doesn't describe how that comes into being.

I don’t understand why digital financial transactions are so heavily regulated and scrutinized while cash still exists. Governments have even basically soft-killed Monero which is pretty much the only way to get actual cash-like semantics digitally. Yet cash is still given preferential treatment over traditional digital payments.

I understand the rationale behind both camps ie “to prevent personal/tax fraud, money laundering, and cut off funding to terrorists we have to give up privacy” vs “personal privacy extends to transactions and the benefits justify the increased difficulty in fighting crime”. What I don’t understand is the inconsistency between physical and digital payments. Anybody committing crime can just use cash so why even bother with all the annoyances with digital transactions?

IMO we might as well outlaw cash because typical law-abiding citizens already have basically zero financial privacy, but are missing out on all the tax revenue and supposed safety from actually fully tracking transactions. The way I see it, cash right now basically only exists so that small businesses/individuals can cheat on taxes and to keep criminals on the USD.

People get scammed out of cash just as easily. See "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam." https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...

Discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39382981

Cash is being made more and more inconvenient over time, presumably to push more people towards monitored transactions.

Cash transactions are vital under authoritarian regimes that would otherwise have potentially total surveillance and control over financial transactions, or for people who may be unable to open a bank account for whatever reason.

Doubtful, yet they'd probably rebuild your vacuum if you brought it to them.

There are a glut of hyper-specialized businesses around here. Russians run all of the appliance repair shops. Israelis ran all cell phone repair places until COVID (now we have few at all). These all took digital payments.

Iranians/Turks around here run a bunch of rug shops that never get any customers yet linger for decades. I don't know a single person that owns a rug.

The Chinese run donut shops that are cash only, never see any foot traffic, sell terrible stale donuts, and don't even have seating. Vietnamese run all the nail salons and both change owners and personnel every few years.

Disney race-swaps protagonists of old movies that predictably flop instead of creating the next Frozen, and Concord burned $400m on a game that only 25k people wanted ($1m revenue). How is this sustainable?

It could be money laundering, but some of these businesses look like they're intended to fail. I'd sooner suspect some other financial engineering going on. H1-B fraud or SBA loans-for-foreigners schemes.

Some of it might be a competition thing, where clustering is a Nash Equilibrium to prevent the other guy from taking unclaimed territory/customers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILgxeNBK_8

"I'm looking for a dust filter for a Hoover max extract pressure pro model 60"

(from Breaking Bad)

Could also be a vehicle for importing illegal drugs.

The interesting bits are before that happens. You need money mules, you need brokers to find the mules for you, you need escrow companies to stop the brokers from running away with your money, etc.

Grok makes a better, more coherent text when asked to explain the steps involved in money laundering based on this article.

Only partially. This is Scambodia. The plot of The Beekeeper is US-based, and the head of that operation is the son of the President (or candidate? can't remember exactly anymore).

At least Germany recently changed their laws (initiated by the Green Party) that prevents buying real estate with cash. But this has been a money laundering practice for the mob for decades.

It used to be that you only had to declare the actual owner of a LLC purchasing a property if the value at sale was over, IIRC, $1.5 million. In NYC that's a typical 1-2 bedroom apartment.

They (Treasury Dept?) recently lowered that to $300K.

Reminds me of the line from an old NPR podcast:

"If you are not a US citizen, the US is one of the best countries for money laundering due to our strong privacy and banking laws."

The Brazilian media reported that the Bolsonaro family bought at least 51 properties with cash.

https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2022/0...

Paying for things in cash is banned over a certain price (usually $10k) in some parts of the world.

Vancouver is also more than happy to help you out https://www.sanctions.io/blog/the-vancouver-model-of-money-l...

This is missing the most important step though, which is to actually launder the money. Concealing the source of the money is only half of the ordeal, making the money seem legitimate is the second, usually considerably trickier bit. If you suddenly receive $100k from a crypto exchange with no trace of how you came to own it, your bank is going to ask you some questions.

Where does your knowledge come from? With respect, how do we know you're right and they're wrong and not vice-versa? They spent a lot of time on it, went to Southeast Asia to see it for themselves, have editors, etc. That doesn't mean they get it right always, but neither do people on HN.

you realise that something's not just clickbait because you don't understand it? Huione is a behemoth in the laundering-sphere; it's intrinsically linked to Cambodian scam compounds, as well as handling every single step of the wash process in-house. These guys don't just receive the stolen funds, but they link international clients with mules across literally thousands of Telegram groups before converting said currency into the Hui-one coin and then onto Tether. All of this is done within Hui-one's infrastructure.

If you'd bothered to do just one iota of research into any of the topics covered in the article, you may have stumbled across chainanalysis' report on them from last year. Elliptic, also mentioned, have done comprehensive reports on them. Lazarus Group, who recently stole around a billion from Bybit, frequently move funds through these guys, so did Conti, and many of the other big cyber-threat groups.

To your point around it being a huge cost to the scammers, that's a given. Effective laundering is expensive because organised crime groups are most vulnerable at this particular stage of the fraud. A massive decentralised network of groups that can match criminals to a steady flow of international bank accounts that can handle fraudulent funds is pricless.

The article makes it pretty clear that China is the jurisdiction that is the hardest to evade.

> Interpol hardly does anything by comparison and have much less doggedness (it was the US who found Bin Laden for example). It typically helps the US, not actually initiates the investigation. At best its like a sidekick.

That's a strange take on a strange article, because the articles is mistaken in that Interpol "tried to combat scammers" - it can't, Interpol is an organization to coordinate cooperation between national law enforcement agencies. They are essentially a large clearing house where national LEAs exchange information and can use databases. Interpol has no agents or investigators.

Which makes your take strange too, because you sound very confident that it's "at best" a sidekick, because it doesn't do as much as the FBI and IRS. But knowing what Interpol is and what it does (or rather: what it doesn't), it's pretty clear that you don't know what you're talking about.

The article has found its target, your patriotism was tingled and you accepted its premises but felt it necessary to proclaim that the US does much more than the organization that doesn't do that type of work at all.