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
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Chips in modern casinos are tracked to help cut down on counterfeits so you coming back to cash out that same pile. Likewise, you would be reported to the IRS and lose 20-30% of it then and there (depending on if you provide social security info).
If you’re working with casinos involved in your organized crime it would probably go a lot easier, but otherwise you would lose a lot of it and have the high risk of getting caught.
A casino must report any aggregate transactions that exceed $10k. So, you buy $10k worth of chips, a report gets filed. You cash out $10k worth of chips, a report gets filed.
They also have to report anything that looks like structuring, where it appears someone may be attempting to avoid transactions over $10k (e.g. cashing $9,999 worth of chips, or two $6,000 transactions).
This is how it is detected and, to a degree, prevented, because it’s hard to launder any significant amounts of money if you can’t move in/out more than $10k at a time.
The casino/money laundering connection isn’t related to individual gamblers laundering their illicit money through the casino. It’s related to casino owners who have “side businesses” turning the income from their “side businesses” into legitimate taxable income.
You’re a person who owns a casino. You have your employees and that’s all legit. You also have some employees for your “side businesses” that “sell protection” to other local businesses. These people bring in the “protection fees” from the other local businesses, buy chips, play until they’ve lost it all, and go home. Those “protection fees” now exist as legal taxable income for the casino, and you as the business owner.
The Australian YouTuber Boy Boy made a video on this called “How Much Money Can We Launder In A Day?”
Watched hell or high water recently huh?
If you don’t play the chips and just give them straight back for cash, well that’s a massive red flag.
If you do play the chips, well then you’re an idiot.
In NZ you can get away with going to a slots room in a pub, insert a bunch of dirty money into the machine, play a bit and cash out. You could sometimes tell who were doing it, but they were people you would not want to confront lol
It’s funny cause they actually work with casinos. Maybe not for 500k but for millions. A lot of people here saying they would never commit a crime, casinos, the scummiest buisnesses on the planet would never commit a crime that WILL go unpunished.
Answer: it’s largely not. There are multiple KYC (know your customer) laws in place that provide a veneer of security, like the requirement of a CTR (currency transaction report) on buy-ins or cash-outs exceeding $10,000, or the option of an SAR (suspicious activity report) that is filled out at the discretion of an employee and/or at a lower cash-in/out amount set in policy.
These options are greatly fallible and quite easy for someone with even a baseline understanding of how they work to circumvent them almost entirely. Casinos check and operate at the level they are legally obligated to by US law, and not an inch further. Casinos understand their place in the dark money cycle, and do not wish to alienate gamblers with unsavory sources of income, as it negatively influences their bottom line.
I suspect that this charade will be blown open and closed in our lifetime as anonymous cash transactions are all but completely phased out and any gambling activity will be done 100% verifiably, electronically, and taxed accordingly.
This is why fixing sports is so popular with organised crime.
Used to be lots of it in Australian horse racing and boxing. You have a bunch of cash you need to clean, so you tell a bunch of your close mates to put it all on “She’s the fastest” in the seventh race.
Luckily, you’ve paid the right people to make that outcome happen.
Not only have you and your mates cleaned your cash, but depending on what sort of fix is in, you might have doubled it or more.
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