> ...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.
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.
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.
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.
Shouldn't law abiding citizens have the right to possess and carry cash?
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
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.
