How one of the world's major money laundering networks operates

Unfortunately, outlawing cash transactions really isn’t good for people. I know the cause sounds good here but the method isn’t wonderful.

I don’t understand why digital financial transactions are so heavily regulated and scrutinized while cash still exists. Governments have even basically soft-killed Monero which is pretty much the only way to get actual cash-like semantics digitally. Yet cash is still given preferential treatment over traditional digital payments.

Very simple.
1. Orders of magnitude. Digital transactions can be billions in single transaction. While making large cash transactions in cumbersome and unrealistic.
2. Because they can. Regulating digital transactions is simple. Regulating cash – next to impossible.

Cash is grandfathered but (in the US) it’s really essential for some old people who don’t use tech, homeless people, anti-government survivalists, and “mark of the beast” conspiracy theorists. (A similar constituency is blocking federal IDs and digital IDs.) You wouldn’t think that’s a powerful bloc but apparently it is.

That is fair and I thought of that “old people might legitimately need it” case too when writing my other comment. But even that might only be the case for another 10-20 years.

You generally cannot open a bank account without address. It is trivial for criminals to do with darks. Last time I was between addresses no one would open me an account even with a US passport as it failed kyc with no address.

Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with this. The fact that Sweden, Japan, and China went 99% cashless shows that it can be done.

Japan did not, a few things even require it.

Maybe India more than Japan

A lot of drugs are cash only. Even marijuana in legal states like Michigan.

It is not just for old people, homeless people, etc. I do not have a credit card or a smartphone and I always pay in cash.

You’re a survivalist (whether you admit it or not).

People get scammed out of cash just as easily. See “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.” https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w…

Cash is being made more and more inconvenient over time, presumably to push more people towards monitored transactions.

Cash transactions are vital under authoritarian regimes that would otherwise have potentially total surveillance and control over financial transactions, or for people who may be unable to open a bank account for whatever reason.

In most developed countries cash is too inconvenient for regular people to bother with it anymore except when they have to – it is just simpler to pay for things digitally or with a card. But even “free” governments already have total surveillance over digital transactions. So as the remaining legitimate uses (and users, since I think most regular people who would be legitimately harmed by going cashless are very very elderly people who would struggle to adapt) for cash die off pretty much the only remaining reason to use cash is to commit crime – the vast majority of which is tax fraud, which effectively harms every citizen who isn’t committing tax fraud.

>Basically, eventually cash will basically become the “crime mode” for its respective currency. I don’t see why it makes sense to continue to allow cash at that point.

This doesn’t really detail any money laundering scheme. This is just how to access scammed money. Simply cashing out a large deposit of tether isn’t laundering money. You still need a legitimate way to explain how you earned the money for it to be considered laundered.

Where I live, there is a chain of “vacuum repair” shops. There are like 4 – 5 of them in an area no bigger than 60 square miles. I’ve always assumed they were a money laundering front. Are that many people repairing their vacuums?

Doubtful, yet they’d probably rebuild your vacuum if you brought it to them.

Some of it might be a competition thing, where clustering is a Nash Equilibrium to prevent the other guy from taking unclaimed territory/customers.

So… I started scimming through the artcle, and they basically convert the money to cryptocurrency? Don’t know if the article really contained anything other interesting details.

The interesting bits are before that happens. You need money mules, you need brokers to find the mules for you, you need escrow companies to stop the brokers from running away with your money, etc.

So much work. makes me wonder why not just earn it legit. It’s like cheaters in school who use AI software and other tools. It would be less work to just study. I guess it does work or esle it the scams would not persist.

Not sure if I fully agree on that. Using AI as a tool can usually reduce the total time it takes to complete an assignment or project by like 50%, not to mention it also reduces the amount of time spent pulling your hair out feeling stuck by like 80-90%. Of course, you lose out on most of the learning experience but it’s not like the old days of smuggling in rolled up papers or writing inside a water bottle — “cheating” (if you can even call it that) has basically never been easier.

That’s why companies have leetcode interviews.

That’s great! Now try getting hired with nothing but a degree when everyone knows half the class did this shit.

> So much work. makes me wonder why not just earn it legit.

A lot of the people running these scams have been kidnapped and moved to lawless zones forced to scam people. They don’t really have the choice to do legitimate work.

> It’s like cheaters in school who use AI software and other tools. It would be less work to just study.

This is the plot of the movie, ‘The Beekeeper’.

Only partially. This is Scambodia. The plot of The Beekeeper is US-based, and the head of that operation is the son of the President (or candidate? can’t remember exactly anymore).

Seems like the easiest way to launder or bribe someone is still crypto. Might not be an investor’s paradise, but certainly a launderer’s.

or you can just bring a bag of cash to buy a condo in NYC https://theweek.com/articles/736313/how-foreign-investors-la…

The Brazilian media reported that the Bolsonaro family bought at least 51 properties with cash.

At least Germany recently changed their laws (initiated by the Green Party) that prevents buying real estate with cash. But this has been a money laundering practice for the mob for decades.

Australia just implemented laws where you have to show where the money came from when buying property, gold, and some other stuff with cash.

Are you referring to Australia’s AML/CTF Tranche 2 reforms? If so, these actually come into effect on 1 July 2026.

Nope, but you can’t buy property with literal cash, crypto, or precious metals anymore. In Germany people use SEPA payments as the primary means to transfer money, and that is the intended way to handle big transactions.

I believe there are numerous ways to transfer money without using physical bills; disallowing cash for large purchases doesn’t imply a loan. Personal or certified Cheque, money order , wire, interac / email transfer are some of the options, I’m sure there are others.

Paying for things in cash is banned over a certain price (usually $10k) in some parts of the world.

Vancouver is also more than happy to help you out https://www.sanctions.io/blog/the-vancouver-model-of-money-l…

There have been changes in recent years that complicate this model because you are now required to register the beneficial (meaning the de facto, not de jure) owner of real property in BC. There was also an investigation into the casinos which culminated in the Dirty Money report [0]. Quite a few reforms came about as a result of that, chief among them that a source of funds declaration is required on buy-ins of $10,000 or more and mandatory identity verification is required on transactions of $3,000 or more.

Spreading misinformation hurts everyone.

I wonder how much of these kinds of issues that we are told are “complex” and “multi-faceted”, “no easy solution” etc could be significantly reduced if there was actual political will to do so.

The political will has to be globally coordinated and needs to mandate a basic standard of living for all.

If we had political will we could just kill everyone who disagrees.

The politicians and the police get their cut of the money, and the victims are in other countries. There’s a reason the scam industry operates out of poor places with dysfunctional government, like Myanmar and Cambodia.

Yep, the gambling / casino industry is largely responsible. And they have their roots deep in the political system.

There seems to be political will to ignore it

Agreed. It seems like billionaires are buying more and more of our means of communication. Makes it easier to control the narrative.

This is missing the most important step though, which is to actually launder the money. Concealing the source of the money is only half of the ordeal, making the money seem legitimate is the second, usually considerably trickier bit. If you suddenly receive $100k from a crypto exchange with no trace of how you came to own it, your bank is going to ask you some questions.

If it’s a one-time $100k you can just slowly withdraw small portions of it and probably nobody would notice. It depends how much you’re trying to launder.

Where does your knowledge come from? With respect, how do we know you’re right and they’re wrong and not vice-versa? They spent a lot of time on it, went to Southeast Asia to see it for themselves, have editors, etc. That doesn’t mean they get it right always, but neither do people on HN.

you realise that something’s not just clickbait because you don’t understand it? Huione is a behemoth in the laundering-sphere; it’s intrinsically linked to Cambodian scam compounds, as well as handling every single step of the wash process in-house. These guys don’t just receive the stolen funds, but they link international clients with mules across literally thousands of Telegram groups before converting said currency into the Hui-one coin and then onto Tether. All of this is done within Hui-one’s infrastructure.

I have seen a few confirmations of this.

The article makes it pretty clear that China is the jurisdiction that is the hardest to evade.

> Interpol hardly does anything by comparison and have much less doggedness (it was the US who found Bin Laden for example). It typically helps the US, not actually initiates the investigation. At best its like a sidekick.