> ...and a few million more dollars worth of cash in eight suitcases...
> ...In October 2020, two other women weren’t so lucky. They were questioned at a Heathrow departure gate by officers of the Border Force, the agency in charge of U.K. customs and immigration. One of the women told officers she checked five suitcases to Dubai because she wasn’t sure what to wear...
I'm utterly baffled at why a money smuggling operation would be done with a conspicuous 5 to 8 suitcases at a time, rather than just 1 or 2.
They were offered "around $3,750" to fly suitcases containing around $500,000 each. Which is not a high percentage even for just a single suitcase.
So even besides the extra risk of attracting attention from so many suitcases, you'd think they'd want to spread them out more just for risk reduction generally -- in case the checked luggage is lost, in case a courier decides to abscond with the cash themselves, etc.
We also don't know how much of that 500k is profit - maybe the margins in organised crime aren't what they used to be. Each $3,750 saved is money they can put straight into their pocket as their boss might never find out how many mules they ended up using.
Or maybe the reporting is fishy
Or coercion.
I think a lot of people would be relatively unaware of how illegal a given thing is and would instead see the amount of money being offered as representative of the risk. Too much and they would get suspicious.
Incentives seem lower than we all think?
Given that it seems reasonable to assume risk is correlated to the number of people caught rather than the amount of money caught (which is the same either way) it seems like fewer largers trips could be rational.
I guess the more trips you make the more people you have to involve as well. If you have 1 person make 10 trips a year that's a lot easier to hide than 10 people making 10 trips a year etc.,
What? No it doesn’t. It just increases variance.
Let's say you have 100 trips to send money vs 1 trip. If there's a 10% chance to be caught on each trip, then with 100 trips 10 people are caught on average, whereas with 1 trip a tenth of a person is caught on average (more realistically, I'd look at the probably that more than N people are caught using a binomial, but I don't thinks it's important).
Although that said, maybe it's worth it. With a 1% chance to be caught and 100 trips, there's a 63% chance at least one person is caught, and a 26% chance that more than 1 person is caught. With one person, there's a 1% chance they're caught.
The average money caught is the same though (and as you note the variance in money caught is higher, which is undesirable).
But money caught doesn't land you in jail. You could imagine that with multiple people caught it's easier to track back who they met with. With 1 person caught, there's no other cases to cross reference against.
Probably you would want to balance these factors out.
Out of that you have to manage all the logistics (as they said his fee covered it). - Pickup of the cash - Counting - Hiring and managing mules (which means paying for Clarke’s salary and expenses who lives between Dubai and London, with, I assume, lots of flying and housing for her and her family required) - Getting mules to your location - Paying for things like Covid tests, a few expenses (I assume some food, and other little things) - Driving them to the airport - Flying them in business class to Dubai - Paying for a local resort while they stayed put a few days - Flying them back to the UK
Now they flew two people at a time, so all of the above is doubled for each trip.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this added up to around $50k per trip, which is 20% of the $250k fee for just transportation of the cash (does not include the actual laundering being done locally).
Margins are likely still “respectable” in the end, but you can’t have mules taking 10% of the suitcase’s content if you’re to run a profit.
I think the high number of suitcases is simply because it went well with two, and the organizers saw how many people actually bring a lot of suitcases, so they kept upping the number every time they made a successful move.
> They were offered "around $3,750" to fly suitcases containing around $500,000 each. Which is not a high percentage even for just a single suitcase.
Couriers aren't really the value-add part of the operation, so this makes sense to me. Nearly nobody gets paid as a % of the value they are handling. A legal operation could move this for an order of magnitude less so there is actually a hefty premium here.
This is the only shocker for me. Can anyone elaborate? I've always assumed x-ray scanners can't figure out the amount of cash, but shouldn't they be able to detect giant stacks of cash?
I don't think he suspected we were money launderers. My guess is that upon hearing both of us speak, he easily determined that we were not natives of Russia and thus not, for example, carrying but not declaring a substantial amount of cash intended for family back home.
> The machines can be programmed to find cash, but they aren’t because they are operated by airport-security agents, responsible for passenger safety, not customs and immigration officials.
As to why the UK government doesn't pass a regulation that airport security is also responsible for detecting large amounts of cash, I have no idea.
Imposing such duties onto airports will be expensive. Smaller airports in Britain are already running at a tiny fraction of their capacity, with only London, Manchester and Edinburgh operating any serious services. A particularly striking example is Cardiff Airport: it can accommodate A380s, but you'll have to be patient if you want to spot a widebody airliner there. It's not really worth the extra equipment and staff to search for money laundering in these quieter airports, and the costs would probably force them to shut down entirely if not funded by the taxpayer.
This situation of reduced capacity is not entirely theoretical, either. Before boarding Eurostar railway services through the Channel Tunnel, passengers have to go through security which includes passport control, customs and X-Ray (for luggage) and millimetre band scanners (for passengers). The introduction of these checks reduced capacity by a third, meaning that the Eurostar trains run with empty seats, when other trains running domestic services on the very same line can be crowded. It's about to get even worse now that Britain and the EU are introducing incompatible facial recognition systems that gate the entrances.
As you can tell, I'm rather passionate about this issue :) I just think it's important that borders don't become the de-facto location on which all types of law enforcement converge, and for border security to be so entirely out of proportion with domestic policing.
It doesn't seem expensive -- it's literally a configuration option on the scanners already installed.
It doesn't have anything to do with stolen goods generally, it's simply about detecting stacks of cash that there's already a specific law stating that you must declare when leaving the country.
By definition this isn't regular domestic policing, because it's inherently an issue that can only occur at the border.
Turning airport security into customs and excise agents would be legally challenging.
Same way TSA in America largely don’t give a flying fuck when Amercians from legal states board international flights with cannabis products such as gummies or vape pens - that’s a problem for the customs people on the other side.
I should note here that some places do mix the duties - the airport security guys at Schipol will make a vague effort to stop you from taking a big bag of weed through, and will politely take it off your hands.
maybe there are laws regarding privacy or just bureaucratic challenges that prevent this though
Shouldn't law abiding citizens have the right to possess and carry cash?
If you're a law abiding citizen, why wouldn't you declare it? If you don't, well congrats, you're no longer a law abiding citizen.
And it absolutely is a crime to export huge amounts of undeclared cash. Again, a major part of the article.
Think about it -- if large amounts of undeclared cash are being exported, then they're probably both criminal proceeds and haven't had taxes paid on them. And the government wants to stop both.
It's actually the government on the import side that may be less interested. As in this very article. Governments are less likely to be complaining about money coming in.
I think this is false. Anytime I've flown with cash in my checked in luggage, it was always stolen and it was obvious someone went through my suitcase. Then I stopped doing that obviously. (happened in U.S. and Indonesia)
Airport security, the world over, is a magnet for criminals to self-organise, or be replaced by those who do.
As a funny counter, I recently traveled through 6 TSA checkpoints with a loaded magazine in my bag. I had it from when I was at my farm, oops. Was a little concerned because I was in Boston when they found it (I’m based out of Tennessee). But they let me go and confiscated it.
Point being, if they can’t find a loaded magazine, I doubt they’d be able to find money intentionally. Then again, might have more incentive to find the money
That said, there’s a couple things:
1. You’re technically allowed to travel through anywhere with any firearms in the US (I only had a magazine, not a firearm) legally. That includes planes, but you have to check the bags. That said, they can still arrest you and not follow the law.
2. I carry a conceal carry permit with reciprocity with most states for this very reason. I actually showed it to them and it made things much smoother
Lots of examples of traveling with ammunition either loose or in magazines and it not being caught on airport x-ray. But also stories of people grabbing something from a carry-on and realizing they forgot their loaded handgun was in there.
Normally it's not that big a deal if you're flying within the US (though NY and NJ can be dicey), but I also recall a story where someone flew international and the destination was a country that would put you in prison for a long time even if you came forward (I think it was Japan or China).
They were asking advice on what to do and I think in the end they unloaded it, took the gun apart (barrel, slide, frame, etc) and dumped each part in a separate trash bin far, far apart.
Tie then all to owners and halt much of this.
So it seems like the game continues, now in 6 month installments.
Finally, I don't think any country/regulator cares about all of that; they are just (in my opinion) using this as a scapegoat to remove cash.
