Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house

108 pointsposted 8 months ago
by c420

56 Comments

ryandrake

8 months ago

How does one even expect to use €20M 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 €20M 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?

davidwritesbugs

8 months ago

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.

bigbones

8 months ago

Money laundering conviction to tech worker sounds like a great story, I'm sure plenty more than just me would love to hear more about your background if you were willing to share.

adtac

8 months ago

In your opinion, what fraction of the small restaurants in a typical city are engaging in money laundering at this scale? And if weighted by volume, what fraction?

ajxs

8 months ago

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.

HnUser12

8 months ago

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

sneak

8 months ago

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

8 months ago

Can you name the top three ways to convert it in to crypto? I don't think there are literally one million ways.

potato3732842

8 months ago

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.

toast0

8 months ago

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.

CommanderData

8 months ago

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

daveguy

8 months ago

And a good fraud chief probably isn't going to tell you what they're looking for. :)

lupusreal

8 months ago

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.

ano-ther

8 months ago

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.

pessimizer

8 months ago

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.

user

8 months ago

[deleted]

jknoepfler

8 months ago

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

Waterluvian

8 months ago

Isn’t that why it ends up in a wall?

chucksmash

8 months ago

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.

gosub100

8 months ago

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.

user

8 months ago

[deleted]

yieldcrv

8 months ago

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

netcan

8 months ago

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

Cthulhu_

8 months ago

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...

dgfitz

8 months ago

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.

hoppp

8 months ago

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

stonesthrowaway

8 months ago

You keep calling someone a "Fraud Chief" long enough...

metadat

8 months ago

I'd forgotten Europe has €500 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

8 months ago

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.

CalRobert

8 months ago

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.

pier25

8 months ago

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).

dylan604

8 months ago

> 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.

sschueller

8 months ago

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.

javajosh

8 months ago

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"?

bbwbsb

8 months ago

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

gosub100

8 months ago

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

bryanlarsen

8 months ago

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

user

8 months ago

[deleted]

user

8 months ago

[deleted]

fakedang

8 months ago

Reminds me of the ending of Street Kings.

shiroiushi

8 months ago

This arrest is ridiculous: how is the head of the anti-money-laundering organization supposed to remain an expert in his field if he doesn't practice money laundering himself? /s

1024core

8 months ago

Why would he use physical currency? Why not a Bitcoin wallet?

mmerlin

8 months ago

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"

close04

8 months ago

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.

codegeek

8 months ago

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

throwaway313374

8 months ago

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

some_random

8 months ago

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

user

8 months ago

[deleted]

bongoman37

8 months ago

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.

INTPenis

8 months ago

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?