Comment by imglorp

Here in Colombia it's almost a staple to find perpetually-empty restaurants that never go broke. We call them "lavaderos" - kinda like "laundering-stations".

I've always wondered if Baskin Robbins is a front, I used to see them everywhere in Oregon, where they were always empty even during the summer made me wonder how they stayed in business. as a kid I always thought it was a mob front.

This is interesting to me and I see why it would work in a place with lower state capacity but in more developed countries it’s not a great strategy. You want your money laundering to operate through high volume cash businesses. When I lived in Seattle I used to sometimes go to a sketchy cash-only teriyaki joint. The food was great and they were always filled with paying customers. Sadly, they were later caught and shut down.

Laser tag.

The same thing is happening right now with cases.

You can thank Cryptic Studios for the loot box virus...

Trying to stop money laundering via mass surveillance of people's transactions is futile and creates far more losses than gains for society. It is what's responsible for the epidemic of debanking that has emerged over the last decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debanking

"The Financial Conduct Authority reported that banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.[4]"

Money transfer is a basic utility and should not be rationed out and gatekept by government regulators.

this works quite well even at small scale. In my country you can just go to any tobacconist, buy 1000 € worth of scratch cards with cash, and happily keep whatever comes out. And since they're heavily regulated, you can check winning probabilities in advance so you already know the expected return!

A prominent Belgian political figure laundered cash for years using the lottery https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/11/revealed-how-t...

> Then there is the case of international terrorism, where bands like ISIS have been noted for their laundering of cultural antiquities.

Reminds me of True Lies.

The expression goes back to the Roman Republic. Coined by former consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, who 'gained fame for formulating the question "Cui bono?" ("Who benefits?") as a principle of criminal investigation.'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

And for a specific example:

In my local neighbourhood there are a couple of commercial spaces that keep seeming to become new businesses, go through the expected few months of rebranding and outfitting, stay for a couple more months, then shut down. Only to become new businesses doing the same thing. Repeat ad nauseum.

Which would be fine, except it’s always the same owners. I’m not sure what the grift is, but I’m sure there’s one. Perhaps its simply taking advantage of business loans. Perhaps something more involved with contractors and business expenses charged differently on paper. I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m curious.

In the same way that buying a company and taking out business loans for expenses isn’t itself fraudulent, but can be done for that purpose, I can’t help but feel like there’s something going on.

This is a fairly common view, but it overstates people's rationality abd assumes you have perfect information, leading people to pretty conspiratorial views.

Often the actual answer to things not making sense is that most things in the world are done poorly and many things are some mish mash of various interests rather than a singular actor.

Incompetence is far more common than malice, and many observers are themselves incompetent.

Is that laundering or just retail drug sales?

> which legally evade taxes and

If it's legal I think it's "avoidance".