Convicted ex-money launderer here.

It's easy. Never dealt with €20M but the principle is scaleable, you smurf the money in ~€10k amounts through a network of trusted money mules. You buy a cash-only/mostly business like a car wash, take-away etc., rent half-a dozen shops and pump the cash through those, banks won't usually complain about cash coming in like this. €5k * 52 * {y stores}. There are entire areas of shops in some cities where no-one goes in but the business has a healthy turnover.

There are lots of other methods too but those are trade secrets. "I could tell you but" etc. Easy 'big bang' methods like houses Rolls-Royces and art no longer work easily in most jurisdictions (oddly, apparently still in Oz from other comments). I miss the days when you could walk ito a bank with a shopping bag full of bundles of notes, I've done that - fun.

Here in Australia real estate transactions aren't covered by the national AML/CTF act. You can currently buy Australian real estate with millions of dollars stuffed into a duffle bag, and the realtor you gave it to is under no obligation to report who they got it from. You'd still need to declare your real estate assets for taxation purposes though. Our government has been so slow to fix this problem. There are new rules coming into effect in 2026. Long overdue. I've heard estimates from people working on AML in the banking industry that around 15% of Australian real estate transactions involve some form of money laundering.

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

You buy groceries and fake papers and a beater car registered to your fake identity. The point isn't to be rich. The point is that you can have a modest retirement while being off the grid. It's basically an insurance police that might let you have a life and freedom if the state wants to take those away, which of course is why the state goes so hard trying to prevent it.

I could live my whole life with cash easily if I rented instead of owned.

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.

Good question. In Switzerland you could buy real estate with cash until very recently.

You could also open a front, say a barbershop or a restaurant, though convincing authorities you earned a million or more through that could be a stretch.

Wall insulation?

The best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe not this one though.

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.

Isn’t that why it ends up in a wall?

Go on lots of vacations, booking modest hotels within your legitimate means but then live it up going to all the expensive restaurants/etc you desire. Unless you've got somebody following you keeping track of what you do, nobody would figure it out.

You'll probably never get through 20M like this but you should have plenty of fun.

Become a high class escort, where legal. Very high class. Accept only cash.

The articles notes he laundered a portion of the money through crypto and business fraud.

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...

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.

Slowly. Just pay for everything with cash. You can even buy a house with it. Real estates will accept it.

Start a car rental company by buying a bunch of luxury cars. Drive two or three yourself, and let your friends and family drive them. Once the cash is clean, sell them and close the business.

All you need to do is make sure you have an actual phone number that someone can call to rent a car, and make sure your prices are outrageous. Give the job of answering the phone to your sister's kid, or your girlfriend.

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?

Get an auto dealers license and buy a bunch of used cars, one at a time in cash, and sell them for less than you paid. But not too cheap to get other dealers upset and report you.

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

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.

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.

Many years ago I got paid a bonus with €500 notes. They were so rare in Spain that people used to call them Bin Ladens (since at the time he hadn't been caught yet).

> 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.

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.

These are positive feedback loops. Perhaps "anti-social runaway" would be a good description.

I believe one standard term is negative sum games. The losers lose more than the winners win.

Remember when Greece went broke 10+ years ago? Apparently no one was paying their taxes because they looked around and saw no one paying their taxes. It was a contributing factor because it impaired the nation's ability to get loans because it lowered the government revenue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis

Crypto was included in the laundering schemes.

"Part of the money Sánchez 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"

Cash is king. Bitcoin doesn't even come close to it.

Survivorship bias. Those who weren't doing something dumb don't appear in such news stories

Cash is less traceable and easier to use for most criminal applications.

So he doesn’t get arrested after €20M 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.

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.