I get this question a lot! “Doug what is money laundering?, how does it work? and why should I care?”. So here we go folks hang on to your Lazy Boys and get your calculator I will try to explain one of the most complex and hardest crimes to investigate. The basic idea of money laundering is that bad guys take in profits they have received legally ( theft, drug deals, arms deals, illegal gambling, human trafficking etc.) and later show that is was earned legally, thus they can transfer it internationally and reuse it to refinance the next illegal deal. In the past you have seen on many movies where the bad guys would walk into a bank on the islands with duffel bags full of money and the bank would charge them a % to deposit the money and at that point it was laundered (washed) because when they took it out the money came from a bank but now because of international banking regulations it is not that ez. Thus the bad guys have gotten a lot smarter. I just posted a new way its being done. A company here in Costa Rica steals U.S. Tax refunds runs it through 2-3 companies here and pays it out through a pyramid scheme and an on line casino, when it is paid out it is clean. Another way that is being done down here is this. Bad guys buy hotels here in Costa Rica they then show on the books that X number of people have checked in at X amount per night and pay the about 16% to the government the balance is in the bank and when it is transferred or taken out it is clean. Now get your calculators and put in any dollar amount that you want and use these percentages. You had a minimum of a 500% mark up on the illegal money that you took in to start the money into the illegal endeavor that you are doing then you pay Costa Rica about 16% tax, about 15% labor and expenses and maybe even 20% to the people that financed the illegal endeavor to start with. You now have 49% clean money from a product or service that had a 500% mark up or cost to start. Please understand that these are very round numbers and they are subject to be different depending on what ever illegal endeavor is going on.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 15:04:47 +0000
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