[HN Gopher] Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after EUR20M fo...
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Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after EUR20M found in walls of
his house
Author : c420
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-11-12 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| 1024core wrote:
| Why would he use physical currency? Why not a Bitcoin wallet?
| close04 wrote:
| So he doesn't get arrested after EUR20M worth of Bitcoin is
| found in his Bitcoin wallet. Maybe there are better privacy
| preserving cryptocurrencies.
|
| Not being tech savvy or not wanting to rely on volatile
| cryptocurrencies are also legitimate explanations for staying
| all cash. And he may very well have a few crypto wallets too.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| Nontrivial to use. Still need to pass it to someone to convert
| fiat to crypto. Bitcoin is a public ledger, would be even
| easier to tie to him in some ways.
| newsclues wrote:
| Trade the entire wallet, that isn't registered to anyone's
| name? Seems easy enough to move money illicitly with crypto
| crtasm wrote:
| So now at least two people - who I'm going to assume don't
| have 100% trust in each other - both have the private keys.
| How is this going to work?
| mmerlin wrote:
| Crypto was included in the laundering schemes.
|
| "Part of the money Sanchez 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"
| codegeek wrote:
| Cash is king. Bitcoin doesn't even come close to it.
| some_random wrote:
| Cash is less traceable and easier to use for most criminal
| applications.
| throwaway313374 wrote:
| Survivorship bias. Those who weren't doing something dumb don't
| appear in such news stories
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| You keep calling someone a "Fraud Chief" long enough...
| INTPenis wrote:
| There has to be a personality test to see if someone is short-
| sighted enough to take 20 million euros in cash without any plan
| for how to launder it. Right?!
|
| Seems like every single IT job is littered with personality tests
| these days but what about government?
| fakedang wrote:
| Reminds me of the ending of Street Kings.
| metadat wrote:
| I'd forgotten Europe has EUR500 notes, whereas in the US everyone
| now gets to deal with $100 bill spam.
|
| Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
|
| What's the long-term plan here? Perhaps it's to add maximum
| physical friction to moving larger amounts of fiat than you can
| spend in a single visit to Costco on a food run for your family
| of of 4.
|
| :)
| pavlov wrote:
| The 500 euro bill hasn't been produced since 2019.
|
| Apparently 25% of them were in circulation in Spain, despite
| the Spanish economy being only a fraction of the eurozone.
| mattmanser wrote:
| In the UK they heavily discourage even the PS50 note (roughly
| EUR60/$63). We basically only use 5/10/20.
|
| Most shops won't take them and cash machines don't give them
| out.
|
| Which is pretty odd now given how high inflation got here for
| the last few years.
|
| Here's an article from 5 years ago saying that PS50 notes
| were widely regarded as just used by criminals.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48993008
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Yes I found this strange coming from Ireland where (during
| the Celtic Tiger at least!) the minimum I ever seemed to
| get from cash machines was 50 euros.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Few people bother to pickup loose change anymore.
|
| My favorite head scratcher is the US penny. It would be so much
| easier on all involved if we rounded so everything was MOD5
| friendly, and just eliminated the penny.
| bagels wrote:
| Canada did it.
| nickff wrote:
| There has been a long-running campaign to get rid of the
| penny, to the extent that there's a "West Wing" episode that
| features the campaign. Ironically, Canada got rid of the
| penny in 2012-2013, after relatively little debate.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The West Wing episode is what I always think of when I
| think about the penny, and I almost referenced it myself
| CalRobert wrote:
| I don't like it, but I think the long term plan is to eliminate
| paper money, and with it privacy.
|
| I live in the Netherlands and you can really live 100% cash-
| free here. A lot of places are card-only, even.
| sneak wrote:
| I refuse to patronize places that are card only. Not everyone
| can use electronic payments.
|
| New York and some other cities actually made it illegal, as
| it's discriminatory.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| How on earth is requiring card payments discriminatory?
| Providing cash payment options is absolutely not free and
| implies extra risk on behalf of the business.
|
| Refusing to take part in the banking system is not worth
| penalizing businesses for. Let the free market work.
| sschueller wrote:
| Switzerland has 1000 Franc notes which is around 1140 USD. The
| central bank just decided that the next series will also
| include the 1k note although the EU doesn't want it (not that
| they really have a say) and some others are opposed to it as
| well.
|
| CHF 1000 is worth less than it ever was so the whole claim
| about it being used for crime is bullshit. People keep cash at
| home and safety deposit boxes. When we had negative interest
| rates it made sense to keep some money in cash.
|
| A bigger debate that is coming is the elimination of the 5
| rappen coin. The 1 rappen coin was killed a long time ago and
| the golden colored 5 may soon also go.
| ryandrake wrote:
| How does one even expect to use EUR20M 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 EUR20M 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?
| CommanderData wrote:
| The best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe
| not this one though.
| daveguy wrote:
| And a good fraud chief probably isn't going to tell you what
| they're looking for. :)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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
| jknoepfler wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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"
| dumah wrote:
| "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.
| HnUser12 wrote:
| 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
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Wall insulation?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Isn't that why it ends up in a wall?
| netcan wrote:
| Become a high class escort, where legal. Very high class.
| Accept only cash.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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.
| rapnie wrote:
| You can put money in the bank as legal income and pay your
| mortgage with that.
| dgfitz wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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...
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| chucksmash wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| The articles notes he laundered a portion of the money through
| crypto and business fraud.
| sneak wrote:
| 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?
| bagels wrote:
| Can you name the top three ways to convert it in to crypto? I
| don't think there are literally one million ways.
| javajosh wrote:
| There needs to be a word for when someone does something bad in
| their own interest, and as a result the wider society degrades
| far more than the individual profited. Corrupt anti-corruption
| officials, yes, but also college professors issuing passing
| grades to customers, er I mean students, news networks that give
| in to the urge for sensationalism and ideologically driven
| attention, lawyers who escalate conflict for profit, and so on.
| The individual act is (relatively) harmless, but over time if
| left unchecked these acts degrade institutions and eventually
| society itself (or confidence in society, which is the same
| thing). These actions cause a society to move from the good nash
| equilibrium to the other. A healthy society can endure a certain
| amount of malefactors, has an immune system for them ranging from
| "stink eye" to "prison", but when the violations gets higher than
| a certain threshold, across a certain number of industries and
| institutions, when the immune system starts failing to catch even
| a fraction of it (or the immune system degrades completely), the
| host society begins to weaken and the majority of the herd flips
| from "cooperate" to "defect".
|
| How about "enshittifiers"?
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