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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“Let’s say I have 500k in cash ”
Then the first thing the casino says is “Get the hell out of here!”
If you overpay REO Speedwagon to play at your casino, that’s definitely not money laundering.
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.
There’s been a lot of good comments here about how it’s prevented on the casino floor and how casinos track chips.
But what is stopping someone from taking your hypothetical 500k, dividing it by 2, and then placing a 250k sports bet on one team, and then placing the other half on the opposing team at a different casino?
You’re guarunteed to win one of the bets and come close to even overall, and to each casino it would look like a legit bet? Especially if one was breaking bets up and keeping it under 10k?
On a smaller scale, Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (fruit machines) are very commonly used for money laundering in the UK.
The way the random payouts work, if you make enough bets, then the return is very predictable, so you’ll lose a small percentage.
So someone just stands there and feeds in cash, and the machine prints out a ticket with the amount of their winnings, which they can exchange at the counter.
If you have a payment from a betting shop, the receipt will look the same if you bet £1 and get a £500 jackpot as if you bet £600 and get a total “winnings” of £500.
This works great for someone who makes a few thousand a month dealing drugs, but obviously doesn’t scale very well.
Of course, there’s a lot that betting shops *could* do to prevent this, but it’s an important revenue stream.
Sometimes it isn’t. [Scathing report highlights multiple failings that led to laundering of billions of dollars in B.C.
](https://bc.ctvnews.ca/scathing-report-highlights-multiple-failings-that-led-to-laundering-of-billions-of-dollars-in-b-c-1.5947725#:~:text=Millions%20laundered%20through%20B.C.%20casinos%3A%20report&text=Billions%20of%20dollars%20in%20cash,Supreme%20Court%20Justice%20Austin%20Cullen.)
Here’s the real answer. If you do it slow enough, with reasonable amounts of money each time, and do it at different casinos, you will get away with it.
In the case of $500, it would be easy to launder it.
Set up a lemonade/food stand.
Sell lemonade/food.
At the end of the day, add the $500 to your till.
Claim the money was from sales.
It’s now ‘clean’ as there is a ‘money trail’ showing how you ‘legitimately’ got the money.
Rinse and repeat.
Sometimes it isn’t.
[Scathing report highlights multiple failings that led to laundering of billions of dollars in B.C.](https://bc.ctvnews.ca/scathing-report-highlights-multiple-failings-that-led-to-laundering-of-billions-of-dollars-in-b-c-1.5947725)
By law, establishments that deal with financial transactions must follow tracking and reporting procedures. Establishments such as banks and casinos have AML/BSA (anti money laundering/bank secrecy act) teams to ensure the establishment is compliant with the law so they don’t get shut down. They’re required to report when an individual’s transaction amounts hit the law’s amount trigger, whether it’s the total of small transactions in a certain time window or a single large transaction, or if anything else about the transaction seems suspicious. The staff member handling the transaction(s) fills out a form called “Suspicious Activity Report (SAR)”, those reports get sent to a government agency called Financial Crimes Enforcement in the US (FinCEN). That agency is the one that collects reports from all the banks, casinos, etc. to analyze and investigate the likelihood that illegal shenanigans are afoot.
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