How is money laundering detected and prevented at casinos?

Question

Let’s say I have 500k in cash from fraudulent activities. It seems like I could just go to a casino and play games in a way that minimises my losses or even, if let’s say I was a big organisation, try to work with some casinos for them to launder my money for a lower fee.
I suppose there are rules in place to prevent this type of activities. But what are they? How is this prevented from happening? It seems like it’s really easy to launder money if I needed to

In: Other

Answer 1

Remember that when laundering money you’re never going to get $1 out for every $1 you put in. So you’re going to have some operating costs. Generally groups trying to launder large quantities of cash are some form of organized crime. Casinos are a great way to launder money because if someone comes in and puts down a bet for a few hundred bucks and loses it, nobody bats an eye. If they don’t put down a player card the money isn’t *really* tracked to them. The casinos have legal obligations to try to watch for people laundering money by changing dirty cash into “gambling winnings” so they’ll have systems to monitor for that to appear legitimate.

However they’re not required to be watching for people who come in and just lose a few thousand at a couple different tables.

So what you can do is have some of your organized crime cronies come in with $5,000 go and make some bad cash bets, nothing too big to draw attention, and then walk away. With 10 people you could launder $500,000 into the casino like this in 10 days. You pay each of the 10 guys a bit of money for their efforts, pay taxes on the money you earned and the money is clean. If you’re just partnering with the casino then they’re going to take a pretty substantial cut and you’ll be hired as a security consultant or something like that. So you take $500,000 in dirty money that you can’t use easily, and lets say after everything walk away with $250k in consulting fees.

This is obviously hypothetical, and uhh if you approach a casino to try to do this they’re probably just gonna call the cops on you lol.