[BiteCode_dev]

Maybe the shops are laundering money, and pretend they are loosing money with their "victims", while actually registering a sale to allow dirty money to come in.

This solves the problem you get when laundering money with a food joint: you need customers.

[goto11]

Money laundering is often used as an explanation for seemingly bad business, but often it doesn't make any sense. Why would you send a pizza to a person who didn't order it and who will not pay? You can make fake orders without actually delivering any pizza. Actually producing and delivering the pizza is only expense and will increase the risk of attracting attention for specious orders (as in this article). If you really need to deliver an actual pizza for some reason, why not to a friend or relative rather than a random person?

[bryanrasmussen]

maybe they just drive there with an empty pizza box and say here's your pizza. It would suck if one time after years and years of saying no thanks, if he said "you know what, I would like a pizza. yes" and then tried to pay.

[goto11]

What would be the purpose?

[BiteCode_dev]

I agree. I'm just speculating for fun here.

[ben509]

The point of laundering money is to hide the origin of the money, and the way to do that is to exchange it for clean money.

You can launder money with a business: you pay vendors and employees with the dirty money. But then your receipts are the clean money.

That means you need real customers giving you money. So you do need to run an actual business.

(There are other ways to launder money, usually that involve spreading it around between various accounts so it becomes hard to track. But those don't require anything as elaborate as actually hiring employees, just a fake storefront so you can get a merchant account and some paperwork done.)

[marcinzm]

I always assumed the point of laundering money is that dirty money becomes clean once the government has a legitimate source for it. There is after all nothing technically different between clean and dirty money, it's the same bills.

So a business that is cash based claims $5 million in income from sales to customers. The business pays taxes on that $5 million. That $5 million in fact came from selling illegal drugs for cash. However, to the government the money is now clean as it originates from a legitimate source. The owner of the business can then send the profit to whatever place he wants with no worry. No real customers are needed.

edit: More specifically, a drug dealer cannot just deposit $5 million in cash into Wells Fargo without police intervention, a cash based business can.

[ufmace]

I presume it's about making the income appear to be plausible to a tax inspector.

If you actually sell illegal drugs as a business, but claim to have a pizza place on your tax returns, the government might inspect you someday. If they find that you don't have any big pizza ovens, routine large orders for ingredients, staff of delivery drivers, piles of receipts from customers, etc, then they'll probably get suspicious very fast.

If you do make and deliver at least some pizzas on a appropriate scale, then things get a lot harder. They'd have to run down all of your customers and ask them if they ordered and received pizza, check if the dough order receipts are real and match the expected volume, are the delivery drivers real and how much work do they do, etc. Much more work to run down, and who has time for that? You could probably get away with it, for a while at least, as long as you didn't screw something else up.

[atombender]

Using the money to "pay vendors and employees" does not hide the source of the money. Laundering typically involves inflating reported income so that you can slip the dirty money into your income stream. If you run a pizza business, you sell one pizza for $10, but in your receipts you claim you sold two pizzas for $20. Now you've laundered $10; it's hard for the government to prove that you didn't sell two pizzas that day, and the income will seem legit.

[foepys]

Why would they not just randomize the addresses? Or just deliver to an office where they could claim 100€+ deliveries?

[BiteCode_dev]

I don't know, the restaurants I suspect of laundering money around me don't bother faking customers. They are just empty most of the time.

Maybe they noticed that those adresses never cause problems (single old people) and are close enough to not be too annoying to deliver to?

Maybe they are just too lazy to do more, and it's enough for it to work?

Maybe they are using a lot more addresses but we don't get that information? But there is a limit to the addresses you can use, and you are supposed to have repeated customers.

Maybe there is something special about those adresses we don't know about?

[crizzlenizzle]

I’m wondering how this works actually. Are they actually delivering pizzas or are those pizzas with expired ingredients or just fake boxes? I guess the latter doesn’t make sense since you’d notice more registered sales than what your raw materials are able to yield.

[billme]

No, under the assumption the pizza business is laundering money, they are real pizzas. Key to business laundering money to appear real to audits, surveillance, etc.

Reason to give away pizzas would be to cutdown on marketing costs, since then you’re only filter for a “customer” is people that take random free stuff.

Similar but different setup is a fake lottery, where the winner was is preselected to win and the tickets are given away free to the public who have no chance of winning but provide there information. As long as the method of controlling the winner remains secret, it would be hard after the fact to prove the “randomly” selected winner was not random; clearly people do get caught and there are ways to detect people are doing this.

One last example would be a dry cleaning service, where they offer limited amount of to good to be true offers, then stock the rest of the clothes being “laundered” via cheap used clothes purchased at second hand stores.

A lot of these patterns show up in due diligence for business acquisition, especially mom & pop lines of business.

[BiteCode_dev]

I'd assume eat and share what you can, and just waste the ingredients when you can't.

When you launder money, you loose some of it. It can't be helped. And criminal probably don't care about not being green.