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Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house
- 1024core 2y agoWhy would he use physical currency? Why not a Bitcoin wallet?
- close04 2y agoSo 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.
- mmerlin 2y agoCrypto 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"
- bongoman37 2y agoNontrivial 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.
- newsclues 2y agoTrade the entire wallet, that isn’t registered to anyone’s name? Seems easy enough to move money illicitly with crypto
- crtasm 2y agoSo now at least two people - who I'm going to assume don't have 100% trust in each other - both have the private keys. How is this going to work?
- newsclues 2y agoPhysical hardware key, so neither party knows it, but possession of it is the authentication. Essentially crypto can be untraceable like cash or gold, it can be traded off the books, until you ‘launder’ it into someone’s name.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codegeek 2y agoCash is king. Bitcoin doesn't even come close to it.
- some_random 2y agoCash is less traceable and easier to use for most criminal applications.
- throwaway313374 2y agoSurvivorship bias. Those who weren't doing something dumb don't appear in such news stories
- stonesthrowaway 2y agoYou keep calling someone a "Fraud Chief" long enough...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- INTPenis 2y agoThere 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?
- fakedang 2y agoReminds me of the ending of Street Kings.
- metadat 2y agoI'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 2y agoThe 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.
- mattmanser 2y agoIn the UK they heavily discourage even the £50 note (roughly €60/$63). We basically only use 5/10/20. Most shops won't take them and cash machines don't give them out. Which is pretty odd now given how high inflation got here for the last few years. Here's an article from 5 years ago saying that £50 notes were widely regarded as just used by criminals. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48993008 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48993008
- anonymousDan 2y agoYes I found this strange coming from Ireland where (during the Celtic Tiger at least!) the minimum I ever seemed to get from cash machines was 50 euros.
- nitwit005 2y agoThe same attitude is present in the US. You can occasionally find signs in stores in the US indicating they won't accept bills larger than $20: https://www.amazon.com/SmartSign-V-shaped-Businesses-Restaurants-Double-Side/dp/B0CCVTG6C4?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/SmartSign-V-shaped-Businesses-Restaur...
- mjevans 2y ago
- ryandrake 2y agoHow 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?
- CommanderData 2y agoThe best person to ask would be the an good fraud chief. Maybe not this one though.
- daveguy 2y agoAnd a good fraud chief probably isn't going to tell you what they're looking for. :)
- yieldcrv 2y agoVery 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
- jknoepfler 2y agoSo the suggestion is that uh... the former fraud chief of the Spanish police... become a highly connected event promotor... with access to high profile clients who will actually spend 20,000 euro for a concert ticket... which we inexplicably demand and receive IN CASH... in exchange for VIP tables at high profile events that we magically have access to... while supplying 20,000 worth of services to the one VIP that did attend... and then repeat this how many times? While forging receipts for cash payments, which will sustain scrutiny from a cursory audit? Is there a missing /s? Like this is neither easy nor a plausible way to get away with financial fraud.
- javajosh 2y agoThere 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"?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 2y agoI believe one standard term is negative sum games. The losers lose more than the winners win.
- bbwbsb 2y agoThese are positive feedback loops. Perhaps "anti-social runaway" would be a good description.
- gosub100 2y agoRemember 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
- throwaway313374 2y ago[dead]
- shiroiushi 2y agoThis 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
- telchior 2y agoJonathan Wild would be proud! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild)
- angela466 2y ago[dead]
- zacharydustin 2y ago[dead]