The estimated amount of money laundered annually is around 800 billion to 2 trillion. That's 5% of the entire planet's GDP. With this kind of money, you can buy the entire NFL league 40 times, pay for 8.3 million students to complete their schooling, or buy an iPhone for every American. But before we talk about how money laundering works, you need to know about what money laundering is. Money laundering is the legal process of making large amounts of money generated by criminal activity appear to have come from a legitimate source. In short, it's a process that Criminals used in an attempt to hide the illegal source of their income money laundering is essential to the operation of any criminal activity that has long term and lucrative.
Most criminal transactions are handled in cash because only cash payments are assured to be untraceable at the point of sale, however, a major business problem of large, organized criminal enterprises such as drug smuggling operations is that they end up with huge amounts of cash that they need to conceal to avoid attracting investigations by legal authorities. Not only does cash draw the attention of law enforcement officials, but it's also really heavy, for example, Cocaine that's worth $1,000,000 on a New York St weighs about £70 or 30 kilograms, while a stash of U.S. dollars worth 1,000,000 weighs about £256 or 116 kilograms. That's about four times the weight of cocaine. We hope you have a clear understanding of what money laundering is, so let's find out how money laundering works.
Money laundering involves 3 stages. Placement, layering and integration in the first stage, money is inserted into a legitimate financial institution and is usually in the form of cash deposits. It's also considered to be the riskiest stage of the laundering process, because large amounts of cash are pretty conspicuous and banks are required to report high value transactions in the next step, money is transferred across the globe through various transactions to change its form and make it difficult to follow. Layering consists of several bank to bank transfers. Wire transfers between different.
Accounts in different names in different countries and sometimes even purchasing high value items like boats, houses, cars or diamonds to change the form of the money. This is the most complex step in any laundering scheme and it's all about making the original dirty money as hard to trace as possible. The third and last stage is integration. In this stage, the money is put back into the system in a way that looks as if it's come from a legal transaction. This may involve a final bank transfer into the account of a local business in exchange for a cut of the profits selling high value items.
The real estate, cars, diamonds, etc. At this stage it's very difficult to catch the laundry, provided there's no documentation during the previous stages. Now you know the stages involved in money laundering, so let's look at these stages and execution. One of the most common ways in which the money is introduced into the system or the first stage of laundering is smurfing. To avoid raising red flags, money launderers will break down a large amount of money into smaller chunks and have associates known as Smurfs. Deposit the funds into different accounts in different places. Because U.S. banks are required to report to regulatory authorities.
Any transaction of more than $10,000 launderers often avoid hitting that limit in addition to it, criminals can move funds across borders by engaging in seemingly legitimate international trade of goods and falsifying invoices to disguise their true value. The rise of online banking anonymous online payment systems have made the detection of the legal transfers of money even more difficult. The use of proxy servers and anonymizing software makes the third component of money laundering almost impossible to detect. Money can be transferred or withdrawn, leaving little or no trace of an IP address.
Moreover, the money can also be laundered to online auctions, gaming websites or virtual gaming sites where the money can be converted into gaming currency then back into real, usable and untraceable. Clean money. The newest frontier of money laundering involves cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. While they're not anonymous, they provide better anonymity when compared to the conventional forms of currency. Therefore, they're increasingly being used in blackmail schemes, drug trades, and other criminal activities. Phishing is also being used as a means of laundering money. In this scheme, the victim is asked for their banking account number under the pretense of depositing a fictitious lottery winning, which involves making multiple deposits into the victim's bank account, with the stipulation that a portion of the money must then be transferred to another account or laundered to prevent it. Anti money laundering laws and regulations are designed to prevent criminals from generating income through illegal activities. However, existing anti money laundering laws are slow to catch up with these types of cyber crimes since most laws attempt to uncover dirty money as it passes through traditional banking institutions.
As time passes, the laundering schemes will continue to advance, keeping them one step ahead of law enforcement. Thanks for stay with us .
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