Conceptually, at least, money laundering does require at least a veneer of plausibility of why the money is changing hands.
The most brazen example is of course the Yakuza with their pachinko parlors, where ball bearings from pachinko were used as currency. Partly this was, of course, to skirt gambling laws, but it was also to launder money through the pachinko parlors.
How? Yakuza goon comes in with money, buys a tub of pachinko balls. Drops it by obachan who's madly pouring balls through a machine like the money losing addict she is; obachan is all smiles for the nice boys.
But wait a minute, wouldn't that be like them giving her chips in a casino? What if she wins?
Well, yes, it would. But pachinko's win/loss ratio is worse than most casino games. Obachan is "losing" shit tons of money to the house, for the Yakuza, who controlled both sides of the operation. But SHE isn't losing very much, if anything, because she's playing balls the yakuza gave her. If she wins anything it's just her unwitting cut for doing work for them. Assuming she doesn't know the score, which maybe she does.
The principle here is just to wash the criminal money, which happens the moment the low level goon buys a bunch of pachinko balls (from his clean handed bosses) and plays them away (mostly being lost, to his clean handed bosses).
The goon can't just dump them. The need to be played or it'll be suspicious. He could play them himself, I suppose, and it'd work too, but who wants to sit around pouring ball bearings into a machine all day? Obachan enjoys that shit, so let her do it. So he'll play for a bit, then leave. Cops have nothing to work with.
Japan was ultimately forced to create a state monopoly over the exchange by creating TUC (Tokyo Union Circulation). They couldn't get voter support to crack down on gambling, so state control over the exchange was all they could do to suppress using it for laundering, by taking private ownership out of one side of the operation.
Just a bunch of fake transactions written with the real ones in the books.
A long term pattern of brazen fraud is much easier to pin down in an investigation. The art of laundering is plausible deniability. Historically many laundering operations (see: Pachinko, Al Capone, etc) have withstood years of intensive investigation that was unable to establish grounds for charges.
Shrug.
Conceptually, at least, money laundering does require at least a veneer of plausibility of why the money is changing hands.
The most brazen example is of course the Yakuza with their pachinko parlors, where ball bearings from pachinko were used as currency. Partly this was, of course, to skirt gambling laws, but it was also to launder money through the pachinko parlors.
How? Yakuza goon comes in with money, buys a tub of pachinko balls. Drops it by obachan who's madly pouring balls through a machine like the money losing addict she is; obachan is all smiles for the nice boys.
But wait a minute, wouldn't that be like them giving her chips in a casino? What if she wins?
Well, yes, it would. But pachinko's win/loss ratio is worse than most casino games. Obachan is "losing" shit tons of money to the house, for the Yakuza, who controlled both sides of the operation. But SHE isn't losing very much, if anything, because she's playing balls the yakuza gave her. If she wins anything it's just her unwitting cut for doing work for them. Assuming she doesn't know the score, which maybe she does.
The principle here is just to wash the criminal money, which happens the moment the low level goon buys a bunch of pachinko balls (from his clean handed bosses) and plays them away (mostly being lost, to his clean handed bosses).
The goon can't just dump them. The need to be played or it'll be suspicious. He could play them himself, I suppose, and it'd work too, but who wants to sit around pouring ball bearings into a machine all day? Obachan enjoys that shit, so let her do it. So he'll play for a bit, then leave. Cops have nothing to work with.
Japan was ultimately forced to create a state monopoly over the exchange by creating TUC (Tokyo Union Circulation). They couldn't get voter support to crack down on gambling, so state control over the exchange was all they could do to suppress using it for laundering, by taking private ownership out of one side of the operation.
A long term pattern of brazen fraud is much easier to pin down in an investigation. The art of laundering is plausible deniability. Historically many laundering operations (see: Pachinko, Al Capone, etc) have withstood years of intensive investigation that was unable to establish grounds for charges.
That's actually the theme of my next video.