"News flash: you're not supposed to launder money. No, no one will come get you if you accidentally leave a $5 bill in the pocket of your jeans on laundry day. ""Laundering"" in the financial sense refers to the process of making dirty money clean in a more metaphoric way. If someone earns a buck doing something illegal, they need to be able to account for it in some legitimate fashion in order to spend it. Otherwise, the government is going to get wise.
There are lots of ways to launder (and yes, it's legal for us to tell you about them). In the good ol' days, the system was very straightforward: A bootlegger made a ton of money selling illegal alcohol but wanted to find another way to show that he had ""legitimately"" made the dough so the authorities wouldn't catch on. Well, a theater could show a cheap film but still be ""sold out."" So a bootlegger buys a movie theater and—voilà—the theater business shows itself to be hugely profitable with repeated ""sold out"" showings (even though there's never really more than a handful of people there)...and the bootlegging profits are now disguised as profits from the theater.
Today, money laundering usually involves fake accounts, fancy transactions faked on computer screens, and offshore accounts. The idea is the same: you create falsified documents in some way (called ""cooking the books"") to hide what you're doing from the IRS and the government. Anti-laundering laws are out there to catch people who do it and make sure their goose is cooked if they cook the books."
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Painting The Tape?26 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is painting the tape?
all right tape as in ticker tape should be white with black letters and numbers [New York Stock exchange ticker tape appears]
on it and that's it painting it is clearly a sign that you're painting over
something or hiding something and in fact painting the tape is an illegal way
to try and manipulate stock prices in essence it works like this
Moe and Larry decide that if they show tons of volume
suddenly traded in a given stock that "somebody will think something's up"
like a takeover is coming yeah yeah that's the ticket [Moe speaks to Larry]
Google's buying them for a big price for sure and note that painting the tape is
actually a common phenomenon in social media since those stocks are ones that
they talk about where one lonely bitter and angry former postal worker can buy a [Man panting at a computer]
dozen old used Dell computers to be that social media promulgator and those
tie differently into the internet with different IP addresses so that remotely
it looks like they're owned by twelve different people with twelve different
opinions all coming at you at the same time recommending you buy this stock or
sell that stock right well that blogger a social media person then posts on a [Social media post of basketball game appears]
given topic like curling sucks and then their second fake account replies yes of
course it does curling is for idiots and their third
account replies, well curling should be banned from the Olympics you see that
guy's gut and well you get the idea things get incendiary in the stock
market this way as well so if Moe and Larry trade tons of shares [Moe and Larry throwing shares at each other]
back and forth and a big spike of volume lots of other institutional investors
like the big ones may be enticed to buy in and then they drive the stock from
say twelve bucks a share to eighteen at which point Moe and Larry will get out
having made a fast tidy and very illegal profit they would have painted the [Moe and Larry celebrate as money falls on them]
ticker tape to look like there was tons of activity on it
tons of exciting takeover rumors and other forces to make the stock go up up
up with lots of demand from investors all over the world when in fact
there wasn't they were clearly fishing for someone else to come in and bid [Stock on a fishing line appears]
things up so that they could sell make their dough and move on to some other
scheme and well here's where that scheme usually ends you up....
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