Money-Laudering is sometimes confused with different crimes because, in the modern world, it is often a necessary adjunct to financially motivated crimes. Crim

Money-Laudering is sometimes confused with different crimes because, in the modern world, it is often a necessary adjunct to financially motivated crimes. Criminals often do business in cash and can't report it on their income taxes. Money laundering is getting this "dirty" cash safely into a bank account or legal investment without revealing the crimes that caused the accumulation of cash. In the US, banks are required to "know" their customers. Moving between cash and bank accounts is only possible with an account at the bank and every cash transaction over 10K is reported to the government. Furthermore, traveling with more than 10K into or out of the country requires paperwork to be filed with the government. All of this makes it difficult to use the cash sourced from criminal activity. AirBnB appears to be an easy way to launder a modest amount of money. Heidi Fleiss was the Hollywood Madam and would have had a "dirty" money problem, not a huge dirty money problem like drug cartels, but nevertheless, lots of cash and no way to explain it to the banks: one million dollars in her first four months[1]. It doesn't seem like AirBnB would be practical for such a large operation; however, think of one of her operatives, they might be able to hide a couple of thousand dollars a week of cash income by pretending to be renting out their place as an AirBnB. The challenge would be on the payment side to AirBnB, setting up enough cards under fake names, etc. because the government also tracks these and would detect any trivial cycles between a set of cards and or people. The Netflix TV series Ozark, a Breaking Bad kind of show, but staring an accountant rather than a chemist, revolves around this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Fleiss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Fleiss