I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff. A few minor comments.

I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff. A few minor comments. My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were accepted without question or comment. To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance. You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist, because the state assumes that anything it can't see must automatically be suspicious. And there's so much street crime, and the police care so little about burglary, it would be very dangerous to hold such notes. But in Switzerland it's safe and the government doesn't try to wipe cash out, so paying with high value notes is common. (Although bank notes are in no way as private as people assume and can be tracked quite well, because they don't tend to circulate far.) This situation makes a mockery of the recommendation to fight crime by removing high value bank notes. The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care. I looked into the case of George Cottrell once. The case against Cottrell collapsed because it was founded on entrapment (the eight months was a plea deal in the usual American fashion, and doesn't mean much). It boiled down to undercover FBI agents asking Cottrell, "how could we launder money" and he explained how to do it, in the way anyone familiar with the topic could. He didn't make any offers to actually do it, didn't do it, and that's why "could be jailed for up to 20 years" turned into an eight month plea bargain to let prosecutors save face. Then after he was released he trolled US LE by writing a book called "How to launder money". Usually not given is the subtitle: "A guide for law enforcement and politicians". It's not written for criminals but people love to omit that detail. Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it and fear that by talking about it, they'll just teach more people how to do it. It's an infinite money glitch but in the real world. It's interesting that the UK thinks they solved it. I suspect they didn't, rather, enforcement collapsed elsewhere and it became easier to just go back to other ways of scamming the government.