Illegal Money, Front Company, and Money Laundering, These things work together to become one. Someone was talking about a company that rakes in billions in profit but then asked the question of how this business rake in this amount of money when in reality, he doesn't see people drive in and out of the business area and then he mentioned Money laundering. I heard a lot of things about money laundering and I was alarmed by the whole thing and I decided to share on this post. So what's money laundry?
Is it making illegally obtained funds appear legitimately even when it was gotten from illegal deals or embezzling of public funds. There is something known as AML (Anti Money Laundering Laws) and as there are improvements to these laws, so does the people involved in money laundering improve their skills. With people who are laundering money, the launderers first look for a placement where the dirty money is introduced into the legitimate business.
Once this is done, another process known as Layering is done where these people begin to perform series of large transactions that actually do not exist in reality in the company and this transactions are usually unclear and the reason for this process is to obscure the source of the funds. Once this is done, another process known as mass integration is introduced after the money has been cleaned. These are just the simple steps.
On twitter, I see a lot of people who say they won certain large amount of bet after putting a large amount of money on the bet. Funny enough, these people continue to put large amount of money into the platform, and somehow get bets that win even if the winning is less than 1 odd which just mean that they do not bet so as to increase their money, they just bet so they can win or sometimes, the money laundering is done by the owners of the betting company themselves and so when the money is lost, it becomes a profit for the company but in reality, it is just their money being paid into their company to be cleaned. Someone shared this with me and I was shocked because I never new people created betting platforms for that purpose at all, but we learn everyday.
I also learned that another way people launder money is by structuring which means that the money is split into smaller amount so as to prevent flags by banking system, and it is deposited into the bank but while this might work at the beginning, it might get flagged up over numerous deposits. To beat this, people use Smurfing which is a system similar to structuring but with this, multiple people's accounts are used instead of a person and in doing so, each of the people involved agree to take a percentage of the cash they deposit into their accounts.
I listened to these things an I was shocked. The one that shocked me the most was using Non-profit organizations like Churches, Mosques, and Charity organizations. In my country, churches are not required to declare how much they make and how much they spend. With this, people who steal money especially public officials put the money in this church for while and the church is required to run a project which can be charity or construction with 5% of the money, the church keeps 5% and the owner gets the remaining money. The owner owns the company that gets the contract and the organization writes the full amount of money in the ledger instead of the 5% which means everything for the project is inflated and so, the person is able to claim the money legitimately.
When I heard these things, I was shocked and the one that shocked me the most was the religious centers because as a country, we are religious people and we so believe in our clerics but it looks like there is more to what is seen in the surface as these clerics are not required to publish what they make.