一口气了解洗钱 它能玩得有多花

I'm dressing all white and clean today

Let us tell you something dirty.

On the evening of August 15, 2023,

more than 400 Singapore police officers

raided nine of Singapore's top high-end residences at the same time.

This was a large scale arrest operation after several years of

covert investigation.

One of the panicked suspects was still trying to escape

he jumped directly from the balcony on the second floor of his home.

His wrists and ankles were all sprained,

while limping he hid in the sewer.

In the end, he was found.

Ten suspects were arrested

Luxury cars, artworks, cryptocurrency assets

luxury watches, luxury bags, cash, etc.

Assets with a total value of more than $1 billion were seized.

Actually, there were a total of 27 suspects

but in this operation only 10 were arrested

and the remaining 17 suspects are still

at large in Singapore.

Later, it was found that

the total stolen money exceeded $3 billion.

This huge amount of stolen money mainly came from

an illegal online gambling platform based in Southeast Asia.

Some also came from some illegal loaning business

including online fraud, etc.

In the end, the flaws were exposed during money laundering in Singapore.

This is the Singapore money laundering case that shocked the world.

It is undoubtedly

the largest money laundering case in Singapore's history.

We have learned about the specifics of this case

and how the money was laundered

We'll talk about it in a while

Our video today is much more than that.

I want to expand on a topic that

I personally think is more interesting

and much more ambitious.

According to a very rough estimation by the United Nations,

the scale of global money laundering

will reach 2% of GDP every year to 5%.

Note that it is 2% to 5% of the global GDP

which is probably more than $2 trillion

Around us there may seem to be a lot of

ordinary economic activities in all walks of life

Art, luxury goods,

real estate transaction, corporate investment and financing

even ordinary deposits and transfers

may be hiding money laundering activities.

Let me tell you, for this video,

I have watched hundreds of money laundering methods

and hundreds of classic cases.

At the beginning, I thought it was a bit messy

I couldn't figure it out,

but slowly I found out that

I understood it

Let's cut to the chase

and get to what money laundering is all about.

Note, let me first emphasize that money laundering is definitely illegal.

You can't launder money. You can't launder money. You can't launder money.

This video is just for your knowledge

mainly to let everyone better understand money laundering

and better prevent money laundering,

and better understand the rules of how the world operates.

In order not to make it a teaching video,

I will not go into

many specific operating techniques

In simple terms, money laundering is the process of legalising

the stolen money obtained by criminals through a series of techniques

so that it can be spent openly and openly.

This is also the process of laundering the dirty money.

Someone may come up and ask

You can just spend the stolen money directly

Why do you need to launder it?

If you defrauded 3k to 5k or even 30k to 50k

you can indeed spend it directly.

This is no big problem

But if you have 3 to 5 million, 30 to 50 million

or even 3-5 hundred million stolen money?

This is like

for example, there is a student, let’s call him the Baddie

One day,

he accidentally picked up a wallet in school.

When he opened it, there were 10k

In the world of primary school students, it is considered a big deal.

Baddie came up with an evil idea.

He wanted to keep this huge sum of money for himself.

But if you think about it, if he took the money

to buy a new iPhone

and returned home, the regulatory agency, which would be his mother

would ask a lot if questions

So what's the ideal situation?

Baddie wanted to spend the money

openly under his mother's eyes,

he needs to explain to his mother

in a very rational way where the money came from

Here, money laundering is needed.

So now

can you understand a little bit?

When the amount of stolen money becomes huge,

money laundering is very necessary.

As a criminal who has obtained a huge amount of stolen money

He needs to solve two problems.

One is that he needs to try his best

to make this money becomes difficult to trace

Wipe the footprints clean.

The person he defrauded will definitely report to the police,

so he has to find a way to make it

difficult for the police to follow the money and trace it to his account.

This is the first

The second is to rationalising the money

because even if the police may not be able to trace

to the bank account,

But as an ordinary clerk,

who earned 2k-3k a month

suddenly went and bought a yacht

This is definitely not possible, isn't it?

It 's unreasonable

So money laundering is to solve these two things at the same time, eliminate

traces and rationalize income

We will see various money laundering techniques in a while.

Its ultimate purpose is to solve these two things

Let's start with some classic and simple methods.

We need to know that in the early days,

most criminals, such as drug lords,

actually had

their dirty money in the form of cash

So the most classic method of money laundering

was to take advantage of industries with a large amount of cash transactions,

such as opening a restaurant or a laundromat

or if you want to go bigger, you can open a casino or a gold shop,

because these industries themselves will have

a large amount of legal cash coming in and out every day.

Then it is actually very easy

to mix this dirty money in.

For example, if your laundry actually makes 10,000 yuan a day, and

you mix in 5000

it is reasonable if it becomes 15,000

It is actually very difficult for regulatory agencies to count

how many customers you have every day

or check your invoices one by one.

The 5000 will be laundred away without anyone noticing.

So you see, it actually solves

the two problems of eliminating traces and rationalising income

In the 1920s,

There is indeed a mafia boss in the United States

who opened a laundromat to launder money this way.

That's how the word "Money Laundering" comes from.

You see it is very vivid, right?

Opening a laundromat and laundering money

It is a pun. The word has been passed down like this,

so in the early days, many mafia bosses

or drug lords

would have their own legal businesses.

If you launder dirty money directly,

it may be easy to get exposed

It would be much easier and more concealed

to mix clean money together.

This method also has its limitations.

First of all, you have to have a physical business, right?

For example, if you have a restaurant

and there are not many customers in the restaurant

then how can you rationalise it by saying

that I can earn 100,000 a day,

so it depends very much on the business volume of this entity.

The efficiency of money laundering is very difficult to achieve.

It is also impossible for drug loard

to work very hard to run his laundromat every day right?

At that point he might not sell any drugs

and became an entrepreneur with his laundromat

It will be quite funny

So later on, as the amount of criminal money laundering increased,

supervision became more and more intense.

This method can only be used

as one of the entrances to the entire money laundering chain.

In order to isolate risks, these criminals

generally do not hold it themselves.

They may hold it on behalf of others

or set up some shell companies.

There is also a method of using cash transactions method

It is also very classic called casino money laundering.

Instead of opening your own casino

you go to the casino

because the casino is actually a place where it is

very easy to explain the inexplicable sources of income.

It is easy to rationalise the stolen money

and most casinos can accept a lot of cash,

they will take the money to the casino and exchange it for chips.

Then they can play for a token amount of time

It doesn’t matter if they win or lose.

Then they can convert the chips into money or checks

Then the money is laundered.

Later, if someone asked you where the money came from

You can say that yesterday I went to play blackjack

and was lucky enough to make three million.

In fact, this method of money laundering in casinos

was still quite popular

However, as far as I know

large casinos have become more and more formalised in

the past 20 or 30 years.

The act of taking cash directly to the casino is becoming more and more strict

which is equivalent to taking cash directly to the bank

so now it is becoming less and less

Most of them are relatively small amounts of money laundering

Next, let’s talk about several money laundering techniques

which actually use the conversion between different forms of assets

to greatly increase the difficulty

for regulatory agencies to track the money.

The first one is to rely on art to launder money.

If you look at auction of art

generally, there will be privacy protection for both parties

and can be done very well.

At the same time, many can accept cash,

which is very suitable for money laundering.

And as for the value of the art

it may be worth 10,000 or 100 million.

It can fluctuate greatly,

so a lot of money laundering

is hidden in large-scale art auctions.

The Mexican government

introduced an "Anti-Money Laundering Law" in 2012,

which strictly limited

the amount of cash used in art transactions.

As a result, once this law was implemented,

The art trading market that was booming in Mexico

was cut.

Many works of those rising artists

are no longer valuable

Is this a reasonable speculation

that the art market is

a channel for money laundering

Of course, this does not mean that all art related transactions

are all about money laundering.

It’s just that there is indeed a possibility

that dirty money

is hidden

there.

We have to be more rigorous.

However, spending such a huge sum of money to buy art

and put it at home or use it to appreciate

is not the way how the game works

Some criminals

may not be interested in art.

What is the common method?

I buy it at a low price,

for example, 100,000

Then I go to an expert,

who will appraise the painting for me

This painting is good it's worth 10 million.

Then I sold the $100,000 painting

to a shell company of my own

for 10 million.

Seems reasonable

so I successfully laundered 9.9 million

turned into a legitimate income from art investment

Maybe I can also get title of

Master of Art Appreciation

Many people will use art to pay bribes

Generally, if you want to pay a bribe, you don't just give people cash

it's not easy to spend

But if you give a piece of art

it is both eloquent and difficult to detect.

It can also be very secretive if you want to cash it in later.

As far as I know, bribery through art

and money laundering

are quite common in Brazil.

It can also have some variants of gameplay.

For example, if a criminal wants to bribe Lao Wang,

Lao Wang can take out a painting of his daughter

and put it up for auction in this auction house.

Then the criminal registers a company

and take a look and say

this is a master-level painting,

the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci

This is postmodern art

10 million

it was all done in one step, both money laundering and bribery.

The price we mentioned

was just to give an example

so that everyone can understand easily

The actual case may not be so extreme

In addition to art,

there is another asset that almost all money laundering

and all criminals are involved in,

which is real estate.

Therefore, real estate is not as

volatile as the price of art,

but criminals generally really like it

They can enjoy it, invest in it, and launder money.

Not everyone can appreciate artwork

but who doesn’t like mansion

In many cases, this property

is a terminal for criminals to launder money.

For example, the Singapore money laundering case mentioned at the beginning

involved as many as 207 properties

in Singapore alone.

This may be just the tip of the iceberg of their global money laundering.

According to incomplete statistics

two of them posses

properties worth $3 million in Dubai.

Real estate can also play different roles

in the process of money laundering

For example, the most direct one is that it can consume your cash.

In some countries, it

accept buying a house with a large bundle of cash

and will not conduct an investigation on your income and identity.

For example, just like the Dubai case

What else can real estate do?

It can be used as a proof of the source of your wealth

For example, if you use the stolen money from a shell company to buy a house,

and then you sell the house

then the money obtained from selling the house

becomes part of legal income

When you deposit the money in the bank and

people ask you where does the money come from

I got it from selling my house. It's legal and reasonable.

Most banks will not continue to ask

how you got the money to buy the house.

They won't ask you that.

In short, these money launderers love real estate very much.

You see, such a large amount of money laundering goes through real estate,

and these money launderers actually

does not care about the absolute value of the property,

it may not have that big an impact on him.

They are most willing to increase the price unscrupulously to buy it.

So let me tell you, this is actually

an important reason for raising housing prices in places

like Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and New York

We mentioned about art and real estate

There is another

very common method of asset conversion,

which is gold laundering.

What are the advantages of gold?

It is easy to transport, easy to carry

and has better liquidity than art and real estate.

It is very easy to buy and sell.

Let me give you a practical example.

let’s take a look at a Moroccan money laundering gang.

How he helped British drug traffickers launder money.

First of all, in the UK,

the drug lord would put hundreds of thousands of cash

in the trunk of the car.

Usually he would find a public place,

such as Starbucks

and meet the money laundering contact person A.

they will look at each other and exchange code

Once matched

the drug dealer will secretly

give the car key to the contact person A

A will drive the car filled with stolen money

and start his money laundering journey.

A, who is an airport cleaner on the surface, has

an inconspicuous role.

He will physically bring the money from the UK to Paris

and give it to contact person B

an ambulance driver

B will give the money to his brother C,

C is responsible for counting the money at home.

He would count all the money

and then pack it into

bundles of 10,000 each.

The entire process is done in extremely careful way, closing the doors and windows the whole time

and would also turn on the TV very loud

to cover up the sound of counting money.

After that, B will go and get the money that has been counted

into bundles

and give it to the two middlemen D and E

D and E are two middle-aged women

who will drive the money to Belgium

found a black market gold merchant F

who converted the money into gold

and also had some forged receipts

This way, carrying gold would not be as ostentatious

as carrying large amount of cash.

Even if the customs finds out, you still have receipts,

it will not be so suspicious, right?

Then D and E will

fly from Belgium to Amsterdam

and then from Amsterdam to Dubai with the gold

We mentioned before that Dubai is the city of gold.

They will

convert the gold into clean cash in Dubai

The cash is taken to the bank, deposited in batches, and

transferred to anonymous accounts of shell companies around the world.

Look at this whole thing.

The whole process is very complicated, very secretive

and very professional.

This gang has been using this method for several years.

and laundered $250 million

As to why there are so many steos

selling and buying, exchanging, moving

I am not clear either

Most probably to avoid some regulations

in these countries

But we know the underlying logic,

which is to use the physical transportation of cash

using the isolation of national borders

and use the conversion of assets between cash and gold

to eliminate traces

and create difficulties for supervision.

So how did such secretive method

discovered?

It is true that the longer the chain,

the more potential loopholes there are.

At that time, an Ernst & Young auditor

was checking the accounts of a jewelry giant

called Kaloti in Dubai.

He discovered how this company

is spending so much cash to buy gold each year

more than three tons of gold.

How come there are so many customers who need cash

instead of transferring money

After reporting to police, the police

followed the clues and uncovered the entire money laundering chain

in 2017.

25 people were arrested from a gang of 27 people

but the two bosses of this gang

have not been caught yet.

You see, we just said

that I can launder money in the form of converting money into art,

into real estate, and gold.

Actually, there are many forms,

such as luxury goods, diamonds and even topup card

NFT has become very popular in recent years.

We can also call it an asset form of art in the metaverse.

Every time it is converted,

the difficulty of investigation will increase exponentially.

The criminal must be looking for someone who can remain anonymous.

Leaves as few traces as possible

He even has to hide from the camera

to participate in the conversion between asset forms.

Next, let’s talk about

how you can rationalise the income

Just like Baddie in the beginning

he wanted to rationalise the 10,000

he can tell his mother

that this is my income from tutoring my classmates.

This is a rationalisation method.

The ways to rationalise income

can are varied

and is even personalised

Because in theory,

any investment you make anonymously,

for example, if you use stolen money to buy a consulting company

a trading company, a restaurant, etc.

then the money earned by these entities

is clean money.

But investing for the purpose of money laundering,

they are very eager for quick success and quick benefits.

They don’t want to make the business bigger and stronger.

They just want to launder the money

Therefore, economic activities for the purpose of money laundering

generally have very obvious characteristics

that is not aiming for profit

The goal is to maximise cash flow as much as possible.

For example, you can use film and television companies to launder money,

because making movies and TV series,

the money involved is very detailed and complicated

It is very suitable for disguising

For example a criminal may

invest in movie making in the name of company A

and then asked his company B

to build a scene and blow it up.

When you blow it up

the cost may be just 1 million

but I can say that the total cost of this project was 5 million

It's all blown up so there's no way to prove.

The 4 million is then laundered

Of course explosion

may indeed be a relatively extreme form,

but during the entire filming process,

you can make false invoices for any part of it

You can fake it, right?

Or you can make a movie

and then when it is released,

you can book the entire theater

and make the box office so high.

Then the box office revenue is equivalent to laundering money.

This is for film and television company.

For example, you can also launder money through a football team.

For example, there is a Russian businessman named Tolstikov.

In 2014, he

acquired a Portuguese

club called Leiria that was in financial crisis.

Then this football team became

a very important part of the Russian mafia money laundering network.

They will launder money through player transfers, TV broadcast rights transactions

or betting.

As a result, in 2016,

the Portuguese police launched

the so-called Russian Doll Operation.

The name is quite interesting,

and they raided the football team

arrested three members of the Russian mafia

do you know how the Portuguese police

suspected this football team?

Actually from money laundering perspective

they are very cautious

but someone found that

a football club that is about to go bankrupt

and its owner living such an extremely luxurious life

and then spend so much money on buying and selling players

and most importantly the football players don't play

This is too strange.

Hence, the Russian doll operation,

There is a more common way called

Trade based money laundering.

It even has its own abbreviation, TBML

Why is it common?

First, the volume of trade can be very large

and the amount of your funds can be very large.

At the same time, it is actually very difficult for customs

to check the goods one by one.

At the same time, it also has the advantage of

allowing funds to flow across borders.

The method is actually not complicated

For example, you can do over-invoicing

For example, if I ask a foreign country to send me a ton of wood

its value may be only 10,000

but I can say that this is good quality wood

I bought it at 10 million

The customs don’t know whether the wood is good or bad,

If they say it's 10 million then it's 10 million

In this way, it’s very reasonable for me to transfer the 10 million

Or you can go the other way and under-invoicing

For example, if I import a batch of high-quality wood,

which its actual worth 10 million

but the invoice is worth 10,000

and then selling the wood

for example, for 10 million,

then the 10 million becomes legal income.

Of course, as we just mentioned,

the opponent you are trading with in this example

must also be your criminal partner.

Moreover, the number in the example we gave is quite extreme.

It definitely cannot be

10,000 and 10 million

In reality, for example, you can issue invoice of 1 million for 500k

This is more realistic

Many countries do not have cross-border capital controls

so there are many money laundering techniques

specifically targeting cross-border transactions.

One trick is quite insidious called mirror trading.

From 2011 to 2015,

A Russian broker

his name is Volkov.

He will often contact the trading department of Deutsche Bank to help him

buy a Russian blue-chip stock with rubles

from his Russian company’s account.

It doesn’t matter what the stock is,

but he will buy about $10 million

worth of stocks

At the same time Volkov will ask trader to

sell the same number of stocks

in an overseas account

registered in the Virgin Islands

and sell it into US dollars or Euros,

because these two transactions are carried out at the same time,

so the price is almost the same.

You see, for Volkov,

the domestic stock purchases and overseas stock sales actually offset it,

but what is spent domestically was rubles and sold overseas for US dollars

Deutsche Bank

made a profit in the middle.

This transaction lasted for four years.

By the time it was discovered in 2015,

more than $10 billion had been transferred.

Volkov's brokerage company

became an underground Russian money transfer agency,

helping many wealthy Russian or the oligarch

transferred its assets overseas.

Later, Deutsche Bank was also fined miserably.

British Financial Supervisory Authority fined it for £163 million

US Department of Financial Services

fined it another $425 million

This method to put it bluntly

it is converting fund into certain assets

and then selling them overseas

It is equivalent to completing a cross-border currency exchange

without being subject to various regulatory restrictions.

In fact, you can use not only stocks.

Xinhuanet has previously reported that there are some criminals

will use game currency or game point cards

to carry out similar money laundering operations

to avoid China's RMB exchange controls.

The cumulative amount of money laundering is nearly ¥ 40 billion.

We have just talked about so many

money laundering techniques to rationalise income and asset isolation

Actually I deliberately hide a most common

and can be said to be

the core of contemporary money laundering techniques

The use of shell companies to launder money.

What is a shell company?

Simply put, it is a company with no actual business.

Generally, these criminals will remain anonymous in tax havens,

such as Virgin Islands, Bermuda,

Cayman Islands, Panama and so on, registered many companies

and then went to banks to open a large number of anonymous accounts

in the name of these shell companies

It is very easy to register company

in these places.

Just spend 2-3 minutes clicking on the internet

and it doesn't require any personal information.

The person in charge of the company can just hire one locally

because there are agents to help you with this matter

and basically it won't trace back to you

Opening a bank account may be a little troublesome.

You have to find an agent or set up a trust company

and let the trustee help you open an account .

In short, the establishment of this shell company

and the opening of a bank account are very easy

and do not require any personal information

Criminals will use the

shell companies registered all over the world

and these bank accounts

to become the basis of their asset network.

Also can be said to be one of their money laundering network

Most of their economic activities are

basically based on these companies and accounts

as key nodes.

For example, let’s look at a Mexican gang

in the 1990s.

He used shell companies to launder money.

First, I deposited a large amount of stolen cash in Luxembourg

as fixed deposit

in the name of an overseas shell company A

Then use this certificate of deposit as a guarantee

to go to Paris for a loan in the name of a Gibraltar company B.

This adds another layer.

Finally, company D transfers the money to

the name of a Panamanian shell company C

Isn't this confusing

If the regulatory agency wants to investigate this drug trafficker,

it must first find out what shell companies it has in Panama.

Panama has a bank secrecy law,

and then you still have to go through the Paris customs.

Even if you check carefully enough to find the mortgage,

you still have to pass through Luxembourg

It will be very difficult to recover the stolen money after

several move in this network.

Even if you can recover it, there may not be much left.

Speaking of this, I think many of you may have questions

since there are so many criminals are using these shell companies

to hide information and conduct some illegal operations.

So why do these shell companies exist

Can't I ban them?

Because this shell company

is actually very useful in legal operations.

For example, in terms of the company's management structure,

For example a few people join forces to control a company

then I can set up a shell company to hold the company

Or in terms of tax planning, I can set up

different shell companies in different countries for cross-holding.

We actually talked about tax avoidance

in tax haven video

In short, shell companies are indispensable

to contemporary business.

Although these criminals are using shell companies

to exert some control

But the problem

is not on the mechanism of the shell company

For example these criminals

are also transferring money between accounts.

You can't ban all transfers

right?

The problem still lies in the supervision of shell companies

in some countries and regions,

especially I would say that the regulation of those tax havens and islands

is indeed very inadequate.

In the name of protecting privacy, they have hindered anti-money laundering investigations

and attracted a large amount of funds and business from various overseas countries.

However, after 2017,

they were also forced to follow anti-money laundering regulations such as those of the United States and the European Union.

Little by little they strengthened their anti-money laundering

supervision.

But generally speaking,

if you push him, he will move forward half a step reluctantly.

That's how it is

Did you notice that

in this step, its main features

is that it takes advantage of the differences in regulatory rules

between countries.

If you want to put all these shell companies

in one country,

it is very easy for the government to get hold of them.

But once it involves transnational borders, things change.

In fact, if these regulatory authorities

want to investigate, they can dig in.

However, the layer-by-layer investigation

involves very large labor costs and time

launderers and regulators

are essentially a cat-and-mouse game

Mouse wants to run faster than cat

run further and add layers of buff

As far as I know,

a very common way to stack buffs in China

is that criminals

will first establish multiple bank accounts in China

Although these accounts In theory need real-name authentication

but he can steal information.

Even the person whose identity has been stolen

may not know that

these accounts are actually opened in his name.

So sometimes,

for example, you may receive something in your mailbox

asking you to confirm the account opening

It may be that your identity information has been stolen.

Once the stolen money is received by these fraudsters,

for example, an old man in Beijing

was defrauded of ¥ 300,000 over the phone and transferred out.

The money will be moved around

in these bank accounts that are not

under his name

This is layering.

First buy some time

and then transfer it overseas.

For example, a bank account in Panama

It will be difficult to get it back once there's overseas layer

Even if the old man calls the police immediately,

let’s be more practical with it

Would you ask policemen to call Panama government

Can you help me check this 300k/?

Not possible

This is why terrorist group, drug lord

or some big corrupt criminals

would alert all countries

to jointly investigate.

if you read this incident in a textbook,

it will tell you that there are three steps to laundering money.

First, open the refrigerator door.

No no

First is called Placement

which is to let the money enter the financial system.

Then Layering,

which is to let the money be transferred multiple times.

It is very difficult to trace it like this.

The third step is Integration

and legally transfer the money to your own account

or spend it

Why I didn’t introduce this to you in detail

because when I was researching, I found that those actual cases

are very difficult to correspond to each of these

and to be honest, these words sound quite obscure.

If I kept telling you

that this is placement, this is placement and layering,

and this is integration and layering,

I would probably make you dizzy.

So these 3 steps

is just on need to know basis

I think it’s better to understand

the two underlying principles I just summarized:

elimination of traces and rationalisation of income

The round-trip transfer between shell companies we just mentioned

is actually a very good way to eliminate traces

also corresponds to

the second step of layering

in the three-step method we just mentioned.

This kind of layered money laundering through financial transfer

actually has other variants

In addition to

stealing your identity or log in secretly

these criminals can trick you to

assisting him in laundering money without your knowledge.

This will make it more difficult for regulatory agencies to investigate.

For example,

what would a money launderer think if you were an ordinary good person

The criminal would try to dip this money

into your bank account

You transfer it to him and after some time he transfer it back to you

This makes you a layered point in the money laundering process.

Of course not everyone is stuoid

Who would want to do anything with money laundering

Therefore, money launderers

usually package it into a topup form.

For example, if you want to topup, you have to transfer him the money first

either for game coins or for mobile phone credit

After receiving the money for a period of time

The money will be transferred to your phone account

or game account.

Usually, they will also provide some benefits

to attract more people to participate

For example, top up 80 and get 100

it is very tempting right?

Many people will take the bait

You click on the link and paid 80

You though it goes to the operator's platform,

but in fact the money is transferred to a money laundering intermediary.

This money laundering intermediary will match it to the other end,

for example, the money obtained through fraud

or some illegal gambling platform money

and then transfer the 100 to your account,

forming a closed loop

you unknowingly become an accomplice of money laundering.

Because it takes some time

to match the stolen money here

so this is called delay credit top up which takes one or two days

to get into account

The intermediary may tell you

that there is a queue and the server is currently congested and busy

Actually behind the scene the might be busy defrauding

This is an example

money laundering intermediary may disguise themselves as various forms of top ups

to deceive you,

so please don’t take advantage of such thing

Otherwise, when your account is blocked

or the police come to find you,

don’t blame me for not reminding you.

When you look at the shell company transfer,

it is actually using national borders as a barrier,

using privacy protection as layers and erase traces

this delayed credit top up is using

strangers' accounts

for layering and erase traces.

What is the advance model of layering?

That is even the peopple involved becomes different

You send money to A, but B transfer it to you.

Actually A and B are accomplice

but on the surface they may have no relationship at all, and

they launder the money without knowing

The gameplay is

an underground bank.

An underground bank is a hidden underground banking system.

the accounts of a large number of individuals and companies

appear to have nothing to do with each other

but in fact they are a community of interests.

As you can imagine, this kind of underground bank

is very troublesome for regulatory agencies.

It takes advantage of

the illusory trust between people,

so you can't detect some clues

from transfer information.

Of course, regulatory agencies

are also constantly upgrading their monitoring technology.

For example, Singapore

applied a new AI-based detection method

to network various payment systems as much as possible,

and then cross-checked to find some suspicious behaviors.

For example,

why did your device log in to thousands of accounts at once

or why so many devices and so many accounts

connected to same WiFi?

Why these 2 accounts

keep doing reverse transactions?

They try to find the patterns from these complicated information.

We have talked about so many ways of money laundering today.

Let’s take a look at the

largest money laundering case in Singapore

First, these criminals will

transfer the stolen money

among various shell companies around the world.

Then, do you know

how he bypassed the review of Singapore bank regulations?

It seems particularly low

they forge certificate

They forge a statement of

a major domestic bank

as proof of their wealth.

They also forged proof of selling a house

saying that I got the money from selling a house

they even forge employment confirmation

That's it, it's passed.

Actually forging certificates is also a common trick of money laundering,

But I think it is a bit

too simple,

so when I talked about those tricks just now,

I didn't mention it at all

Then these assets were transferred to Singapore,

transferred to Dubai, transferred to the UK,

hundreds of properties were

purchased, luxury cars, yachts, cryptocurrencies, etc.

But let me tell you,

they were exposed because of this forged certificate.

In 2021, a bank found

a fake property certificate

and began the investigation

that brought out

a shocking money laundering case worth $3 billion and 27 people

In the end, the ten people who were arrested

were sentenced to thirteen to seventeen months in prison,

and 95% to 100% of their property was confiscated.

Basically, from May to July this year,

they were paroled early for good behavior

and permanently deported from Singapore.

The sentences only targeted

the money laundering part in Singapore.

Does not include fraud and illegal gambling

The confiscated assets

were sold through auctions and other channels

and entered into the Singapore government's funds.

But as far as this case is concerned,

on a narrower point

the Singaporean government has made a lot of money

It has confiscated billions of dollars.

But the reputational cost of such a large money laundering case

to Singapore

is immeasurable,

so Singapore has also quickly strengthened

its review and revision on banks and real estates

and amend Singapore's Anti-Corruption and Anti-Money Laundering Act

Especially strengthened the asset review of overseas wealthy people

making it very troublesome

for many wealthy people to transfer their assets to Singapore

or open a family office in Singapore.

This has led to a very interesting phenomenon.

You know what is it?

In just the past two years, you will find that

setting up family offices in Hong Kong has become very popular

Some wealthy people will even choose to

transfer assets from Singapore to Hong Kong.

This has also brought such a large wave of capital inflows to Hong Kong.

See how interesting this is

This is a game that affects all

Note that I am not saying that these rich people transfer their money to Hong Kong

or choose to go to Hong Kong,

saying that their money is dirty

I do not mean that.

I also asked some people who are engaged in

wealth management

these rich people find it troublesome.

They chose Singapore and Hong Kong

because they wanted capital to flow freely and smoothly.

hoping it would be more efficient and faster.

Now Singapore has added so many regulations

checking this and that

so some people choose Hong Kong

because they find this troublesome

This actually explains that

why those tax havens are so uncooperative with

the advancement of global anti-money laundering

See we talk about global game again

when talking about money laundering

This global anti-money laundering system,

especially in financially developed areas,

I feel like it is a bit like a balloon.

It seems airtight and perfect

but it may burst with a poke.

Do you know what is the first principle of money laundering

it is called Know Your Customer

It is also called KYC.

Those of you who work in banks,

especially some European and American banks,

must be very familiar with the term KYC.

If you want to know your customer,

how do you understand it?

You need to understand

their business and intentions.

This is actually reasonable

because the methods of money laundering is changing rapidly

Bank regulatory rules

are difficult to keep up with the speed of money laundering evolution.

They can only rely on front-line account managers

to conduct subjective judgement

There are many loopholes in this

Otherwise, how could such a big money laundering case

$3 billion

almost got through with forged certificates?

including the mirror transaction we just mentioned.

One of the very important reasons here is

Deutsche Bank traders did not report it

so that these money launderers could do cross-border transactions.

Bank supervision that seemed very strict

actually relies on

the front-line account managers and sales staff.

There is actually an interesting conflict of interest here.

If you think about it, as an account manager,

my performance is mainly aimed at

attracting customers’ money.

Anti-money laundering supervision

requires me to chase customers all day long, ask a lot of questions,

and check a lot of information about them.

This is actually very detrimental to attract customers, right?

So when the compliance departments of some banks

want to promote some anti-money laundering reviews

the account managers are the first to get upset.

If you do this, making customers go through so many processes

then we wont be having any customers at all

So what will happen sometimes?

These account managers may not implement

or implement very laxly,

because many things here are very subjective

and some would even work with clients to fool supervision

So you see it is a conflict of interest

We won't go into details

Why anti-money laundering is not going so well

money laundering is now so rampant around the world

because it is actually a huge gaming field.

There are games between money launderers and regulators,

and there are also games between countries

Even within a country,

there may also be a game between supervision and banks.

It is actually very nuance.

Finally, let me emphasize again that

Money laundering is a crime. Money laundering is a crime.

Do not launder money. Do not launder money. Do not launder money.