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To be fair, Social Media is just like the "Letters to the Editor" section, except the social media company is the publisher and is the one doing the filtering.

Right, but that's kind of my point: someone else gets to do the filtering and they can't stand it.

> We're almost looking forward to this loophole being shut down to really make things a tad bit more challenging haha

This is a great attitude in the face of a pretty sad 2024 reality: that the manufacturer of a device is expected to intentionally go out of its way to remotely stop users from using the device they bought in the way they want to use it.


That’s a pretty wild definition of “fully shut down” that manufacturers (not just Apple) are pushing. When my device is shut down, I expect it to be fully de-energized and drawing zero current. How can a keyboard action re-apply power if the button itself is not completing the power circuit?

This is one of the reasons I’ve started putting all of my devices on power strips with physical switches that de-energize the AC mains. You can’t even trust devices to power off when they say they are off.

The number of devices in your home that draw current when they are “off” is too damn high.


Why should Apple care if I want to leave the device plugged in all the time? How does this choice remotely affect them?

Same with this power button: why should Apple care whether or not I power off the device when I’m done using it and turn it back on in the morning? This all just seems like pointless behavior control.


> Why should Apple care if I want to leave the device plugged in all the time? How does this choice remotely affect them?

Because the wireless-ness of the mouse (while also being a macOS-compatible multi-touch surface) was the selling point / feature / Unique Selling Proposition of this mouse vs. other mice (and vs. the previous Apple Mighty Mouse.)

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to see many "normal" people's home-office desks, but I have — I worked as a call-out computer repair tech as a teen. And it taught me something: a lot of people have a really small or cluttered "mousing area" — often arranged in such a way that, for a wired mouse, the mouse's wire gets in the way of the mousing surface.

Picture, for example, an old 18"-deep sewing desk up against a wall, on which the user has placed their laptop [effectively permanently, as its battery is long dry]; with a bunch of other things like tiny little speakers and an inkjet printer competing for space on that tiny desk, such that there is only a 8"x8" square of free space to the right of a laptop. The user's mouse is then plugged into a USB-A port of the laptop that's also on the right [mouse cable is too short to plug it in on the left!], with the port being at about the center of the laptop's side. This mouse cable now "wants" to lay directly into the center of that clear 8"x8" square of space; and even if you bend it harshly, there's at least two inches of USB-A plug + cable strain-relief that will still be poking you in the hand.

(Why do they use a mouse at all, if they have a laptop, which presumably has a trackpad? Because trackpads on laptops — especially smaller/older/cheaper ones — can be ridiculously awful [tiny, laggy, insensitive, jumpy, etc], such that this cramped mousing experience is still better than the alternative.)

In such setups, "erasing" the mouse's tether to the computer is not just for aesthetics; it's a genuine ergonomic improvement that makes it "feel" better to use the computer.

And that means that any average cramped-desk person who buys one of these new-fangled wireless mice (or a computer that comes with one) — and actually does use it un-tethered — is going to become not only an advocate for wireless mice, but also likely an advocate of whatever brand of the mouse/computer was, due to the novelty-capture halo effect. (I.e. the "if you only date awful people, you'll become obsessive about the first romantic partner to be decent to you" effect. Decency [or wirelessness] isn't unique; but if you only know it from one place...)

That viral halo-effect-induced word-of-mouth brand-advocacy created by being at the vanguard of the Bluetooth wireless peripheral transition, is the potential upside that Apple saw when creating the Magic Mouse.

And it wouldn't be one they could capture, if they allowed sheer incuriosity to lead that average cramped-desk user to never even try the mouse without the charging cable attached (or, worse yet, if the Macs that shipped with Magic Mice were set up by people who didn't even know the mouse was supposed to be wireless — thinking instead that the mouse was just a wired mouse with a "modular" cable!)

---

Now, admittedly, Apple had many other ways they could have achieved the same goals.

For example, they could have just detected that you're using a Magic Mouse with one of their computers for the first time, and forced you through a little software tutorial that gets you to unplug it — and use it unplugged — for a bit.

I'm guessing they didn't go with that solution for several reasons:

• it goes against the marketing of Macs as being "ready to use for productivity out-of-the-box". Forcing you through a hand-holding tutorial isn't very "ready." (And mark my word, if there was a skip button, even the people most in need of that tutorial — especially those people — would skip it. People don't read manuals on frickin' home CPAP machines, and then die; you think they're reading that?)

• Apple loves thinking of themselves as a design company first and foremost. (Apple products are all stamped "designed in California" — that's what Apple does there, they design things.) And if you know anything about "design" as an academic discipline, you know it's all about figuring out how to shape products or information in ways that cause people to subconsciously/intuitively make certain choices. The core of Information Design is visual hierarchy — "organizing and formatting text to ensure someone glancing at a poster gets the most critical information before glancing away." The core of Industrial Design is the concept of affordances — "putting push-plates on the push side of a door and pull-bars on the pull side." Apple doesn't want to stop you and tell you how to use their stuff; Apple thinks they are clever enough to design their products such that they afford being used in exactly the intended way. And when the product's design "fights back" from having a positive affordance to idiomatic usage... they just design more forcibly, actively de-affordancing non-idiomatic usage.

• A tutorial that pops up on Macs doesn't help someone who wandered into an Apple Store; bought a Magic Mouse (a perfect "this store is too expensive for me, but I want to buy something" purchase in an Apple Store ca. 2009); went home, and promptly plugged it into... their Windows PC. Yes, people really do sometimes buy Mac peripherals and expect them to upgrade their Windows-using experience, not realizing that Windows doesn't have the particular set of multitouch gestures mentioned on the back of the box (especially not back in 2009.) The "hardware tutorial", meanwhile, is platform-neutral.


Thanks for the really really long reply... You've exhaustively gone over the selling points for a wireless mouse and why people would want and buy one. I don't think any of it is in question. It's great to have a mouse that can work without a cord connected. I bought a wireless mouse (not Apple's) because I agree with you about the selling points. What I don't get is why not also allow it to be used plugged in, if the user wants to, assuming it costs about the same to put the charging port on the front, and can be done without compromising the industrial design? Why deliberately make it useless while plugged in?

Them succeeding at stopping users from doing a normal computing task does not make it good UX.

When a company’s products go from “helping user do what he wants” to “coercing the user to do what company wants” then the company has lost its way.


Important for who? I should be the one to decide what is important enough to install, not the developer. If I want to know whether patches are available for my software, I will poll their websites at an interval that makes sense for me.

And you're welcome to do just that. But do you really believe that should be the default behavior, expecting people to remember checking for updates regularly?

The default behavior should be to not do anything that the user does not command, but if that’s too extreme for 2024, then at the very least, the software developer should obtain the user’s consent before doing anything on its own.

To be fair, I've never had a Linux system that auto-updated, and even for the ones that do have that feature built-in, it's never enabled by default. But I'm sure most linux distros make network connections during startup that you didn't "command".

On the other hand, when I fly to Vegas, typically Spirit and Frontier are less than $100 round trip. Southwest is $250-$275, and the traditional airlines are over $300. And it’s for the same no-meal, shitty legroom, unpleasant experience. So what am I paying 3X for? A brand name?

>And it’s <garbage>. So what am I paying 3X for? A brand name?

I feel like this is true for the entry and value priced offerings in a ton of industries.


Sounds like the extra cost is paying to support a sustainable business model.

The low cost airlines in Europe are very sustainable though. They're doing great and even the old airlines are following their models now, like charging for luggage.

“I spend $100 more for the same flight” is not really much of a flex, but whatever floats people’s boats!

It's not the same flight. I avoid American, United and the discount carriers because they have the smallest seats. Spirit is also one of the only airlines without power outlets. Personally, I don't care if it's a 1-2 hour flight. I'd be happy to stand. But on a 4+ hour flight, a hundred bucks isn't so bad for bigger seats, a power outlet and maybe even a TV and free WiFi depending on the carrier.

Caring about seat size makes sense, but power outlets - for $30 you can get a good quality battery that will charge a mobile phone multiple times from its capacity, for $100 you can get one that'll fully recharge a laptop once or twice. So unless the price difference for flying is tiny, it's really not worth paying more because a plane has power outlets when you can pay less to get a device that's not only just as good for the one trip but that you can then use on future trips without paying more (except for the tiny cost of electricity to recharge it before the flight).

Yes, there are novel solutions to many problems, but an outlet is the most reliable and lowest effort solution. And nearly every plane has them these days, so why overthink it.

For me personally, taking into account whether or not a plane had power outlets is the overthinking option.

I've been on planes / trains / coaches that are expected to have them, but who had faulty outlets at my seat for that particular journey and I wasn't able to use them. So I just have a small battery pack (little bit bigger than a pack of cards), and a big one for laptop recharging, and I take one or both (plus my slightly bigger than a lipstick one that's light and fits easily in pretty much every clothing pocket I own) depending on the trip I'm going on, meaning no added complexity as it's just like remembering to take my laptop's power cable, and I no longer have to spend any time thinking about whether the transport will or won't have a power source for me.

I appreciate what works for me won't be the preferred solution for everyone, but for me it definitely leads to less overthinking per trip not more. (And personally I don't notice the added weight of these batteries in my bag; and I would want them for travelling even if I could be guaranteed every flight & train had working power outlets, as I've had times when they were useful to have when visiting a client's offices, or when staying in a hotel with a dodgy outlet, or when going hiking an nowhere near power outlets - so in my case it wasn't even an additional cost caused by not trusting planes to provide a good power supply.)


I thought I didn't care, but I chose Delta instead of Southwest on a flight and not having to think about it at all (did I charge my laptop? my phone? my headphones? it's okay, I have a portable battery, wait, is it charged? did I remember it? can everyone else get up, I left my battery in the carry-on?) makes flying less stressful. Plus, it's one less thing to carry around for a week. Same goes for assigned seats, it's one less worry while being shoved into a tin can and flung into the sky.

Fair enough - I elaborated here [1] on why it's by far the better option for me, but I completely accept that different people have different priorities and different weightings to the pros/cons, so whatever works best for you is great too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129966


Unfortunately, the more useless the signal the more effective it is, and the degree of signaling in recent years has only increased. This reminds me of an excellent article from almost twenty years ago: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aggressive-ostentation/

> You should still be able to continue gaming on your system as long as you don't forcibly update Steam, though how long that remains possible remains to be seen.

This is always the question when "drops support" comes up: Will users be able to at least stick with the older version of Steam, and just not take updates, or will users get hit with the usual shitty modern software catch 22: You can't use the software because it's not the latest version, and you can't get the latest version.

I hate to say it but I think we really need some kind of basic regulation in this area. Companies should not be able to just decide to remotely stop you from using your software just because they consider it old and icky.


This is like the Android environment. At some point apps require a newer Android than my phone has and I'm left sucking my thumb without even the older app's functions. (I'm looking at you CapOne)

I feel you, extremely frustrating when the phone is otherwise in good working order. I've started to get update prompts from apps, on my aging iPhone, even though no new versions exist for my OS.

>> I hate to say it but I think we really need some kind of basic regulation in this area. Companies should not be able to just decide to remotely stop you from using your software just because they consider it old and icky.

I totally agree, but also disagree.

I worked at a large corporation that designed and built lawn maintenance equipment. It sold both commercial and retail products.

I worked there as a front-end developer. This was in the mid aughts when it had already been 5-6 years since companies had dropped support for it and developers were already migrating to Chrome and Firefox. I was told everything I coded had to have backward compatibility with get this. . . . .IE 6. They said they had several vendors in China and overseas and the only way they could order their stuff was on a site that still worked in IE6. It was more or less just an order form they would print out, fill in, and then fax to our office for fulfillment. It was probably the most mind numbingly stupid experience I was put through and it felt like torture telling your dev friends you're still dealing with having to code stuff for IE6.

So yes, I agree, but we should at least have some kind of limitation on how long a company needs to support their software since it eventually ends up costing the company a lot of time and energy. The company I worked for had spent a lot of money to deal with all the issues associated with supporting IE6. Developer churn was pretty high because devs would get there and think they were having to work at some clown show because this company had made the decision to stick with this very outdated technology.

So yes, I agree we need regulation, but we also need some decent guard rails so what happened to me at the above company doesn't continue to happen.


Totally. Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting companies be obligated to continue developing new code for older systems. Just that they not be allowed to pull the rug out from under existing users who want to simply continue using the software that already works for them.

I used to use the "FlightAware" app on my iPhone to look up information about airplanes, airline flights and stuff. Last "update" they pushed out was a single modal dialog that essentially says "You can no longer use this application on your device. You need to buy a new phone." The software was working perfectly one day, and then bam, sorry not sorry. That's what FlightAware means by dropping support: Pulling the rug out from under existing users who would be happy to just continue using their older version.


How does one even expect to use €20M of physical paper cash? You're going to get scrutiny from the government and/or financial institutions if you try to deposit it into a bank. I guess you'd "launder" it somehow, but does that even work anymore? Major purchases with cash put a giant government bullseye on your back these days. That is if you could actually make those purchases. I'd imagine most major purchases that someone legitimate might make (like buying a house or a car or a private jet) cannot be done with physical cash. Does the local Mercedes dealership really accept a suitcase full of cash? Even if you were to use it for all of your normal routine spending like groceries, you'd never go through €20M in your entire lifetime. So, career-fraudsters, I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?

Convicted ex-money launderer here.

It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}. There are entire areas of shops in some cities where no-one goes in but the business has a healthy turnover.

There are lots of other methods too but those are trade secrets. "I could tell you but" etc. Easy 'big bang' methods like houses Rolls-Royces and art no longer work easily in most jurisdictions (oddly, apparently still in Oz from other comments). I miss the days when you could walk ito a bank with a shopping bag full of bundles of notes, I've done that - fun.


In your opinion, what fraction of the small restaurants in a typical city are engaging in money laundering at this scale? And if weighted by volume, what fraction?

I think it's not so much restaurants, as the setup and operation costs are higher, but countertop takeaways I think. I'm not aware of any data but I'd guess from conversations & experience it was just a fraction - single percents? But I have no clue really. For a good ML operation you need agility: easy quick and cheap to set up & teardown and move - hence takeaways, hand carwashes etc.

Money laundering conviction to tech worker sounds like a great story, I'm sure plenty more than just me would love to hear more about your background if you were willing to share.

They were sorta related, but I'm not saying more.

Here in Australia real estate transactions aren't covered by the national AML/CTF act. You can currently buy Australian real estate with millions of dollars stuffed into a duffle bag, and the realtor you gave it to is under no obligation to report who they got it from. You'd still need to declare your real estate assets for taxation purposes though. Our government has been so slow to fix this problem. There are new rules coming into effect in 2026. Long overdue. I've heard estimates from people working on AML in the banking industry that around 15% of Australian real estate transactions involve some form of money laundering.

In Spain that was basically the case till a decade or two ago. There was a big case "53 guilty in Spain corruption trial" which signalled a change https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/434384/53-guilty-in-Spa...

I'd assume the same way they collected that much cash. Illegal deals. You want to bribe someone? use cash. Buy something of high value, put low value on the books but pay the rest in tax free cash? This is pure guess work

You buy groceries and fake papers and a beater car registered to your fake identity. The point isn't to be rich. The point is that you can have a modest retirement while being off the grid. It's basically an insurance police that might let you have a life and freedom if the state wants to take those away, which of course is why the state goes so hard trying to prevent it.

I could live my whole life with cash easily if I rented instead of owned.


I dunno about Eurozone, but I bought some land from my US county recently, and they told me I could provide a cashier's check or come with about $50,000 in cash. I went ahead and paid my bank fees to get a cashier's check.

Good question. In Switzerland you could buy real estate with cash until very recently.

You could also open a front, say a barbershop or a restaurant, though convincing authorities you earned a million or more through that could be a stretch.


Can you not, still? It may be reportable under AML rules, but it's still possible?

You are right and it seems I misread the media articles.

Wouldn’t recommend it to GP though because they asked about circumventing AML and this would catch the fraud chief from the article.


Wall insulation?

The best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe not this one though.

And a good fraud chief probably isn't going to tell you what they're looking for. :)

Local dealerships will take cash but if you show up with enough of it (even a very large down payment amount), it's not uncommon that the person you try to give it to isn't sure they are allowed to accept it and will disappear to run it up the chain to get permission.

Isn’t that why it ends up in a wall?

Go on lots of vacations, booking modest hotels within your legitimate means but then live it up going to all the expensive restaurants/etc you desire. Unless you've got somebody following you keeping track of what you do, nobody would figure it out.

You'll probably never get through 20M like this but you should have plenty of fun.


Become a high class escort, where legal. Very high class. Accept only cash.

I dont think people believe a man whore can make that sort of cash.

What is that responding to? The problem is how to safely spend/clean that much cash. You're describing how to accumulate cash, which makes the problem (in the parent comment) harder.

You can put money in the bank as legal income and pay your mortgage with that.

If the idea is to claim to be an escort that only accepts cash, and then report already-possessed cash as income, while also depositing into a bank, then that could have been phrased more clearly. As it stands, it says to actually be as escort and get more money that you have to launder.

Plus, there has got to be more critical information -- left out of the comment -- on how to get such a scheme to work. I highly doubt that most countries have left a massive hole in their anti-money-laundering systems that allows a person to simply claim to have massive transactions in cash with no (or easily fakeable) documentation.


You might have to do the deed occasionally, to sell the ruse. I never said this would be easy.

Plus, have fun convincing the authorities that you, a middle-aged man, are a high-class escort.

Haha there's an episode of Better Call Saul where nerdy, middle-aged Dan is noticed by the authorities as spending far more than he earns, and he explains it away as being an escort for rich fetishists who like seeing him sit on pies.

The articles notes he laundered a portion of the money through crypto and business fraud.

I'd be happy just paying groceries with cash for the rest of my life tbh. Although I can imagine a lack of grocery shopping on anyone's bank account would be suspicious. But moving to a country where nobody knows you / nobody cares would be an option too. Of course, then you get the challenge of moving 20 million in cash abroad...

why? i never pay with card except for online purchases. i withdraw cash from an ATM. pretty much my whole withdrawal history on my bank account is ATM, rent and utilities and almost nothing else.

I think the point you're replying to still stands, it's just moved "up" a level: If someone cared to look into the financial history of someone with no grocery store payments on their credit card (why are they looking into this person's spending history? Maybe because they're suspected of embezzling a lot of cash, I don't know!), found no credit card payments, looked further and found not enough ATM withdrawals to account for the amount of groceries the person presumably would've needed, the suspicion is still the same. The "investigators" just had to take it a step further.

I doubt the person you're replying to thinks not a single person in the world pays cash at the grocery store, but I think it's reasonable to think that a lot of people do use credit cards at the grocery store (for points/rewards OR for actual credit; not to mention the convenience of not needing to have the cash on hand).


Lack of data is also a data point, and could be considered suspicious if most "normal law abiding" profiles produce data. Imagine you're the IRS and you see 1,000 people living in the same neighborhood, with comparable lifestyle profiles. 999 of them report similar incomes and have similar banking/investment profiles, but 1 of them reports drastically lower income and has little-to-no banking presence. Who are you going to apply more scrutiny to? Not saying it's fair, but I know an outlier when I see one.

There's still quite a gap between "suspicious" and "probable cause". Just having a large amount of cash isn't by itself illegal. You could easily have enough cash to live on for quite a while having inherited it or earned it decades ago, etc.

There is a gap, but in my country, the AML regime is concerned with the bar of "reasonable to suspect" rather than "probable cause". This is the only way you could catch any laundering of any sophistication.

What even is the goal of such a speculative dragnet based endeavor? Instilling fear?

Enough of those "one in a thousand" cases are going to be legitimate people with oddball reasons to do what they do, and the minority of those who shoot back will still be enough that you'll get your guys killed faster than you find real headline grabbing criminals. Sure you'll roll up a bunch of petty dealers (these will be most of the people who shoot back) and you'll slander all the innocents but this sort of big dick of the law dragnet based stuff isn't an effective use of resources. It makes two people hate you for every useful idiot it makes respect you.

Reminding everyone that none of this is voluntary and it all hinges on violence is highly counterproductive generally. If the goal is to get everyone to goose step in line and pay their taxes doing positive things to legitimize the government is a far better use of resources. Build a bridge or renovate a port or something.


The idea of paying cash doesn't hold up when you account for changes in the currency notes over time. What would you do with a suitcase full of 1990s hundred dollar notes? Eventually they go out of circulation and using them looks highly suspicious. A casino tried giving me one and I asked them to swap it.

I’d probably “dig it up from my backyard because I’m a newly minted metal detector hobbyist” or something. If the bills were marked though I think your point is solid, it’s hard to make bad money clean.

Find some millionaire to pay you your own money for a job or something, give them 10%? I guess you still need to launder the money somehow.

Now I want to know how people can turn illegal cash millions into clean laundered money in 2024.


Ozarks

The TV show seemed fairly incoherent in its treatment of money laundering. They're explicit about the mechanics, sort of: the idea is that Marty shows up in a rural area with a big bag of cash and he needs to make it appear legitimate - and he does this by taking ownership stakes in local businesses. So far so good.

What you'd actually want, in that kind of setup, is to hand the active owner of the business you just partnered with a big bag of cash, see that distributed into the flow of legitimate income from the business, and then have it returned to you as dividends or whatever on your ownership stake.

But in the show, the goal is to then book a bunch of fake expenses against the business. So:

1. Purchase ownership stake in a hotel, for cash. The cash doesn't need to be legitimate. Money is transferred from you to the active owner.

2. Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.

3. Now you have a piddling amount of legitimate money from the hotel, and a big bag of illegitimate cash that you still haven't laundered.

We've skipped the step where you hand the owner some of your illegitimate cash under the table and then the owner gives it back to you above the table, which is the part of money laundering that launders the money. If you want to embezzle from a running business while making your expenses look like business expenses, you can just do that; you don't need to start with a pile of illegitimate cash.


The part they likely obfuscated for reasons of both brevity and not wishing to give a blueprint to wanna be criminals is also having a stake in the other businesses that invoice for the fake expenses.

eg: Your (say) hotel | bar falsely inflates customer income and then spends the illegitimate cash (supposedly from customers that don't exist) on rennovation works and "new" carpets, plumbing, etc that don't exist - the shell trades companies (carpentry, plumbing, labor hire) can report that money as legitimate washed income from the hotel.

There are a number of variations of this.


I don’t understand the scheme you are describing. If you have a hotel/bar and you falsely inflate the customer income then you are done. The previously illegitimate cash is now legitimate.

Why would you want to complicate it more with the fake rennovation works? Especially when a hotel is so much easier. You can just put fake guests on the book. (Or report longer stays for your real guests.)

With the renovation business you have to somehow cook up bills for the “new” materials and the workforce. So many more things the authorities could check there and thus so many more chances to slip up and get caught.


Without getting into the nitty gritty of trace back forensic accounting the added layer is akin to why people use proxy relay's in networking, diffusing cash outwards through layered shell companies makes the origin point(s) less visibly "hot".

The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).

Also, as noted by SilasX in a peer comment the books for the fake work can include higher than normal payments for "supplies" to cartel owned suppliers .. yet another (fake but) documented trail to explain income and profits.

As the pooled money grows larger it's increasingly better documented.

It's literally a full time occupation to generate a mountainous pyramid of a paper trail to "explain" a million or so a week.


> The ideal here is to have many injection points that can be inflated to a degree that doesn't quite raise suspicion .. and fewer collection filters (fake plumbing businesses, etc) that each 'charge' several injection points for non existant work and pool money that's invoiced and trackable (from hotel to plumber).

You might note that this scheme doesn't involve you owning the hotel to any degree. You only need to own the plumbing business. That's the opposite of the situation on the show.


Control of the hotel is required - that's the cash business that fabricates fake customers and orders non existent repair and upgrade work.

The work is billed by fake (or better, partially fake) contractors who do no work but charge for time, labor and supplies.

It's a funnel with many cash casual customer locations inflate their intake and spend the excess on illusionary busywork "performed" by the next tier in the pyramid.

The entire paper tiger is controlled by the same entity .. who likely firewall and partition sections away (eg: the part that Marty did in Ozark (I read the synopsis) would be the cash flow in and a good number of lower level shell companies that he indirectly controlled) from each other and only are connected in a legal way to the upper layers that have documentation for their inputs from below.


Control of the hotel is required in a sense. Ownership isn't. It's actually much better for you if you come to an informal agreement with the owner of the hotel than if you take a legal ownership stake.

Nah I get it. If 100% of a hotel clientele only ever pays in cash, are you really any better off?

That's wrong on two points.

First, they haven't obfuscated that; it's not present at all.

Second, your first step is that your hotel falsely inflates customer income. Then you follow up with some pointless additional steps. But if you can falsely inflate customer income, your job as a money launderer is already done. There are no additional steps. Spending revenue from your company on spurious invoices from another company is how you'd pay a bribe, not launder money.


What was the scale of total income per month to wash again?

You might want to dwell on the bookkeeping scale required to soak up that volume in a diffuse manner and then "legitimitely" consolidate that upwards.


As I recall, the scale was eight million dollars in one month.

I'm with you that a sleepy rural hotel can't handle that.

However, charging fraudulent expenses to the same sleepy rural hotel can't fix that problem. (It aggravates it!) The hotel can't spend more money than it has. And if you can make it look like the hotel has enough money to suit your needs, your job is already done. Fake expenses don't help.

After a long time spent on various dramas related to this initial problem, the show addresses it by having Marty found a casino, which seems plausible.


>Book fraudulent expenses for the hotel, making it look like it's spent a lot more money than it really has. No actual money changes hands anywhere.

As I understand the show, they were buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises, and that step was getting the money laundered to the client.


That would make sense, but I don't think it's ever mentioned.

It is specifically mentioned that Marty books expenses that he hasn't actually incurred, notionally buying things that he never receives, which will stand up to an audit much more poorly than "buying overpriced things from cartel-owned enterprises" would.


There’s the scene where Marty takes rooms at the Blue Cat Lodge off the market for renovations, against Rachel’s objections that he wait for the off season, suggesting real stuff is actually being done to them. Then later she confronts him over paying ridiculous prices related for said renovations. (Where she also threatens to report him.) His cartel contact Del is mentioned as running a construction and remodeling business.

Yes, he does real renovations. But he notes to his wife that he's purchased X square feet of carpet at $Y per square foot, while accounting for it as XXX square feet at $YYY per foot. (Both figures much higher than the reality.)

The difference between $YYY and $Y is money that was claimed to change hands, but never did, and the difference between XXX and X is carpeting that Marty has recorded himself purchasing, but not actually purchased.

If he was buying the carpeting from a cartel-owned supplier, he'd just pay the inflated prices that he's so proud of booking without paying. Instead, he's buying real services from a real third party, and then booking fake expenses for unclear reasons.


Hm, okay, you're right, that part doesn't make sense, I'll have to review it and get the context to see what they were trying to establish with that scene.

Slowly. Just pay for everything with cash. You can even buy a house with it. Real estates will accept it.

Start a car rental company by buying a bunch of luxury cars. Drive two or three yourself, and let your friends and family drive them. Once the cash is clean, sell them and close the business.

All you need to do is make sure you have an actual phone number that someone can call to rent a car, and make sure your prices are outrageous. Give the job of answering the phone to your sister's kid, or your girlfriend.


This is literally what our Fraud Chief did.

> "Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives"


I know lots of people who live very nice lives ($300-750k/year spend) using nothing but cash and never showing ID.

There are a million ways to convert it to crypto, and a million ways to convert crypto to many of the other things one might want to use: gift cards, airline miles, etc.

Same goes for gold. There are lots of shops in many countries that will buy gold for cash. Many countries still have hotels that accept cash.

You can pay for a surprising amount of things in cash. One friend of mine simply has a rich buddy buy his cars and insurance, and he gives him paper cash each year for the sum of payments+insurance.

Many landlords are happy to accept cash, especially if you are willing to pay a year in advance.

Why do you think someone with that much money would be driving a car that's titled and plated in their own name?


Can you name the top three ways to convert it in to crypto? I don't think there are literally one million ways.

This is one of those "if you don't already know" topics.

The feds cracked down on it earlier this year leading up to the election, but it's back.


Why can't anyone say what it is?

Because it’s just a provocative fiction in their minds.

I can, but I won't. The state doesn't like it, because it bypasses the points at which they control the system (largely without due process) and I don't wish to make their jobs any easier for them.

In most countries I think you'd need to know someone with crypto who could use the cash and do a swap. The website localbitcoins that used to sort that is closed. Cambodia has cash to crypto dealers on the street if you are over that way.

Get an auto dealers license and buy a bunch of used cars, one at a time in cash, and sell them for less than you paid. But not too cheap to get other dealers upset and report you.

Very easy to launder 20M

Be a promotor or promotion company, sell VIP tables at big event or music festival for 20,000 euro each, 9 out of 10 clients don’t show up (because they don’t exist and you made them up)

Do it all summer, our economy is big enough to support this

Your money is now clean from selling VIP tables

Deposit cash, pay taxes, move on


So the suggestion is that uh... the former fraud chief of the Spanish police... become a highly connected event promotor... with access to high profile clients who will actually spend 20,000 euro for a concert ticket... which we inexplicably demand and receive IN CASH... in exchange for VIP tables at high profile events that we magically have access to... while supplying 20,000 worth of services to the one VIP that did attend... and then repeat this how many times? While forging receipts for cash payments, which will sustain scrutiny from a cursory audit?

Is there a missing /s? Like this is neither easy nor a plausible way to get away with financial fraud.


“I ask: in case I ever get my hands on millions in cash, what is my plan for using it?”

The question wasn’t how the Spanish Anti-Fraud chief would launder.

A number of high-profile acts in the US have had managers convicted for this in connection with drug trafficking and other organized crime.

It’s absolutely plausible.

I’m not sure why you think a cursory audit would reveal that a cash receipt was forged.


The actual truth is not very far from this. He actually had a cab / private ride company. Most of his rides were fake.

How did it go from that to cocaine bust?

TAM?


the answer was how to launder it, not how the fraud chief could launder it

but either way, the answer is yes, and yes, and no sarcasm

first, the investigation is never going to happen. but okay, lets play auditor

the auditor is like “wow you paid your taxes on time and properly, but I hate that you have made money, so lets check the receipts”

“hmmm, big cash, who are these clients?”

“What!? you didn't do KYC on a transaction of 20,000 euro cash, 1,000 times!? ah but the parties were in Luxembourg and Austria and Monaco where such cash transaction limits don't exist, well Monaco’s is 30,000 euro per transaction, sorry for the inconvenience, on behalf of the King of Spain I apologize for our hubris in thinking this had anything to do with our ridiculous AML regime”


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