[saalweachter]

The second half of money laundering is you need a way to pretend to have income from a plausible source.

People will ask questions like "How do you pay for your groceries?" and "Where did you find the money to buy a $37M penthouse?" and your paper trail needs to convince people the answer isn't "With the billions of dollars I embezzled."

[bnchrch]

I understand your point but I feel like even a 10 year old could come up with 100 plausible excuses.

Many of them end with "Consultant", "Collector", or "Trader".

[acdha]

Most of those only work at a certain scale: if you launder $500, you might be able to say some people bought your comic book collection at a garage sale and get away with it. Try that with $1M and you’re going to start getting requests for evidence of your collection, how it got to have so many high value items, etc. If you’re claiming consulting revenue, then you need clients and a justification for what kind of legal work was worth paying that kind of revenue for – make the case that your advice is worth $1k/hour and you still need to be showing a year of full time work to launder a million dollars after taxes, and it’s going to be suspicious if the invoice is just “I’m awesome, pay here” with no details about such valuable work.

Every few years there will be some story about a cartel banker getting busted and one of the things which will usually stand out is that they had a bunch of people working for them, and found some legitimate businesses which had large enough volume to hide millions of dollars in criminal activity. Setting that kind of thing up isn’t usually a one man operation.

[saalweachter]

Also, it doesn't make it easier if you're a person well-known for maybe having access to billions of stolen dollars.

[saalweachter]

For whom did you consult? What collection did you sell? What trades did you make, with what starting capital?

If you can't answer those questions -- questions the tax man at least will expect you to answer, and probably other people as well -- you might as well say "I found money in the street."

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Husband :)