Soldato
Arrest him! 
50 pound notes !!
- Thread starter Moonpie2
- Start date
Man of Honour
But by your definition giving the Post Office £500 and asking for it in Euros is also money laundering...
Soldato
I agree with that, and see the point you're making - my view is contradictory in that sense. But in my experience (nearly a decade working with banks & building societies, albeit not for a decade) changing money like this would not be permitted. Forex is a commercial transaction.
Permabanned
So how do shopkeepers get change from a bank then without criminalising themselves and the bank? And the coin machines in some supermarkets that eat small change and regurgitate bank notes, should they be re-named Money Laundering Machines?
Soldato
Shouldn't really be a problem with national chains but still expect the note to be scrutinised. Especially if you use a £50 note for a small <£5 purchase.
Still surprised that a bank would give you them for only a withdrawal of a couple of hundred pound unless of course you ask for them. I've seen much larger cash withdrawals being in £20s unless the £50s are asked for in advance.
Still surprised that a bank would give you them for only a withdrawal of a couple of hundred pound unless of course you ask for them. I've seen much larger cash withdrawals being in £20s unless the £50s are asked for in advance.
Soldato
When ever I travel back to the UK to see family I normally get a bunch of cash out, mostly 50's and I get it from a bank here due to the exchange rate being lower (don't have a UK account anymore). Places are fine with 50 pound notes, they will just check it. However, if you go into a corner shop and buy a pack of chewing gum, they may deny it. Just get something at the airport a couple of times to break a couple of 50's up to get some smaller notes. Or ask for 20's but then you'll be carrying a lot more paper around.
Well they might say no, since he isn’t a customer and they’re not obliged to. But the money laundering arrest thing is a bit far fetched, he could always bring the receipt etc.. from the bank he got the notes from that and his presumably either foreign passport or UK passport + residence visa for that country ought to explain why he’s asking to exchange some notes.
I can back up that bit about having an account or not.
A long time ago, my wife and I were in Westfield, Shepherds Bush, and I owed her £5.00.
I went into a Lloyd’s branch, (think it was Lloyd’s), and asked them if they would break a £10.00 note.
The teller asked, “Do you have an account with us?”
I could have lied, but I guess that he’d have asked for a Bank Card, so I said, “No.”
He said, “Sorry Sir, I can’t do it then,”
Man of Honour
Wrong scale in those cases, but any form of exchange can be money laundering in some circumstances. Fruit machines, for example. Take £1000 in notes obtained illegally, put it in a fruit machine, press the collect button, get a ticket for £1000, cash the ticket et voila! You can now provide a legal source for the money, so it's laundered. More prudent launderers will play the machine for a while so that they don't seem suspicious. Average return on a £2/£500 fruit machine will be ~90%, which is very good for laundering money. People who work in fruit machine areas should be trained to look out for potential money laundering, so someone who just walks in, feeds notes into a machine and immediately collects the money will attract attention sooner or later and some systems automatically flag that up as suspicious and won't automatically cash out the ticket. That's annoying for people who work there because it's almost always a false positive(*), but it's increasingly common.
* The most common reasons for money in/out with no play on a fruit machine are people changing coins to notes and people who've been playing, printed 2 or more smaller wins and want to combine them before cashing out so they get fewer coins, e.g. cashing a £97 win and a £56 win seperately will result in £13 in coins, combining them first will result in £3 in coins.
Soldato
How do you prove where the money came from to actually go into the machine? Presumably the number of cycles on the machine to be checked so the odds and expected winnings over the period of time the dude was playing can be worked out by authorities if need be.
Yeah it doesn't stand up to scrutiny if the authorities were to take a closer look at their actual gaming activity and see that they have been steadily losing small amounts while pumping in thousands through these machines but it is apparently used - some big chains will allow you to transfer the cash to an online account or to your debit card etc.. They do need to gamble a big chunk of the cash they've put in, can't just gamble say £10 and then try to cash out.
Also simply having a receipt showing you've cashed out £XXX recently is perhaps useful to have if you're stopped by the police while carrying around a roll of cash.
It likely does have some utility for the street level drug dealers/petty criminals etc... as a very crude method of money laundering.
Associate
I had a friend come from germany who got it changed at a bureau de change and they gave him 200 quid in our old tenners, he was not pleased when landing here
Man of Honour
That would be difficult, though possible, if the machine was covered by surveillance cameras and the video was still available at the time of the investigation (i.e. so it would be provably tied to a specific person).
Odds and expected winnings would be useless in this context because money in and out has no effect on that - all that's counted is money staked and wins paid. If that wasn't the case, it would be possible to manipulate the payout percentage to provide false readings. For example, an unscrupulous operater could put £2000 in the machine set to pay 90% and collect that £2000 before opening up and if that was included in the odds and expected winnings then it would show as 100% payout over £2000 and would pay on average significantly lower than 90% for a while afterwards to get down to the 90% target payout. You could rip people off 6 ways from Sunday if money in and out counted towards the payout percentage, so it doesn't.
What you'd need to do is examine the complete machine logs for the times matching when the surveillance video shows the suspected launderer on the machine. Which is possible - everything is logged and the logs are kept for ages because they must be made available to the gambling commission on demand whenever they feel like it.
The point is that it's time consuming. It'll be done if the police already suspect someone of money laundering and are actively investigating it. But it won't be done routinely. Small scale laundering could be done that way by someone who took care to not attract attention.
What's starting to happen more often is that the software itself is being changed to attempt to detect potentially suspicious activity and block automatic cashing out. Print ticket, put ticket in cashing out machine, get an error message. That gets a person involved, who'll check and find out that the ticket has been flagged for potentially suspicious activity. The problem with that is the same as with most if not all such things - false positives. It's like overly sensitive antivirus software in that respect. The point is really to bring it to the attention of a person, though, and it works for that.
Soldato
Do you have any friends in China? If so get them to transfer you some money from their WeChat account to yours. This caught me out once trying to buy food with cash and nobody wanted it
On a thread related note I had my £3500 expenses bill reimbursed in cash whilst in China - all £50s!
Soldato
That's "Sexy Cyborg". She's been around for a while. By all accounts a really nice person. That anti-White NYT columnist Sarah Jeong broke journalistic integrity with her and got her in a lot of trouble in China and cost her a lot of her sponsorship. One more reason I will no longer read the NYT.
Soldato
A pub in Scotland tried to give me an old english £10 note a few months ago. When I said they had been withdrawn from circulation in March they said they hadn't. Soon changed it though when the manager came.
Don
Governments hate cash, it fuels the black economy. It's no wonder that China are so keen on electronic systems of
When I drove a London taxi, every once in a while I’d pick up an American fare who’d had a holiday in U.K. years back, and gone home with some of our notes, which were now out of date.
In all innocence, they’d proffer them to pay the fare, I’d politely point out that they were no longer legal tender, and show them a new one so that they could see the difference.
If they had insufficient real ones to pay the fare, I’d take it via a CC, or in dollars (at my rate) if they wished, and advise them to take the old notes to a bank, and change them.
Sometimes foreigners would give you a handful of change as a tip, and there’d be old larger 50p coins in there, or brass 3d bits, once I got a 10 shilling note!
I’d put them in charity boxes, or give them to kids in the family, who collected coins.
Once in Portugal, with a bunch of guys in our 30s to 40s who’d rented a villa in Carvoiero, one of my friends had around 200 escudos in old currency, which naturally bartenders and cab drivers rejected.
We went out to dinner one night, and I ended up paying the bill.
When we got back to the villa, everyone paid me their share, but Billy gave me his old escudos, I said, “Gimme a break Bill, do I look like a mug?”
He took them back, and came up with the real stuff.
