Especially in reference to casinos?
Edit: since I’ve gotten some answers, I want to add: is it possible to use sports betting to launder as well?
In: Economics
Regarding your question about sports betting, I know that where I live criminals buy and keep winning sports betting coupons, because when they are cashed you have a receipt that these money are legally obtained, so they only have to explain the amount betted. I don’t know who makes the bets or sells them. I don’t know if it’s a thing in the US, but it is in Denmark.
**”How is gambling used to launder money?”**
Its not, mostly
In theory, you walk in to a casino and buy $100,000 of chips with cash
You gamble a few hundred dollars and take $99k of chips to the cash desk and request a cheque for your “winnings”
The casino gives you a cheque AND informs law enforcement you are a criminal
Or
You walk in to a casino and buy 100k of chips, you gamble ALL of them and bank your winnings in a different cups, you are down 100k but up 80k, and get a tax bill on your “winnings”
Or you own the casino and have mules who gamble everything no matter what they win
I “did the maths” once and think I could clean 30% risk free, if you can find a drug dealer who wants me to turn £300k in to £100k send him over 🙂
Guy i knew would ‘win’ 900k (not dollars) when he needed to wash a million. He had a deal with the casino so they took 10 percent, so 100k.
Some criminals buy vouchers and cheques from Jack pot winners at premium
….I guess like a high speed loan.
There are other examples here
https://learn.baselgovernance.org/course/view.php?id=150
*edit. Seems like most people do not know the actual purpose of laundering money. **Laundering money, just to be clear, is to give it a paper trail where you can pay taxes on it and use it as you normally would without suspicion.** **You want the casino to generate tax forms. You want to pay taxes on the money.**
Say you are a computer programmer making $100,000 a year. If you had like $50,000 of questionable money that you wanted to introduce into your taxable income, then yeah you could use a casino to do that over the course of a couple of days. Each day, you buy in for a portion of that $50,000 (say $9k a day) and then play games for a bit. Then finally, when you have bought in for the total of $50,000, you play for a bit… and then you cash out. The casino will generate a report to the IRS of your winnings. **Once you pay taxes, you have now cleaned the money.** If the IRS asks where the money came from… you have a $100,000 a year job where you can say that you saved the money and went to Vegas to gamble away.
Same with sports betting.
The key thing about money laundering is you need another “clean,” legitimate income stream as co-mingling is how you get away with it.
For wealthy Chinese there is (was?) a market for people paying for all inclusive vacations at gambling destinations. This would include however much gambling money they wanted deposited at the casino.
They would go and do little to no gambling then cash out in a different currency (USD).
Not totally money laundering but kind of as it was a way to get your money out of China.
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