Why do some people claim to not believe that modern art is for money laundering?

>itt: people who don't know what money laundering is or how it works

Can someone explain how I can use modern art to launder money?

Let's say I just robbed a bank and have $2,000,000 cash sitting around. If I spend it, I will arouse the suspicion of the IRS. So what do I do next? How do I use modern art to clean the money? I just need a vague, step-by-step summary.

You give an artist cash and then use his checking account.

You wouldn't use modern art.
You would own legitimate cash generating businesses (Al Capone owned laundries).
You put your ill gotten gains in the register of the cash generating business, then make up the paperwork to look like you got $2mil of customers paying in cash, then bank your cash.
It's very easy, they couldn't catch Capone, even though they knew which laundries he owned. They couldn't prove the money wasn't legitimately earned from those businesses, so they did tax evasion instead

Won't it arouse suspicion when you purchase a painting for $2,000,000 cash, without any explanation of where you got the cash?

I know I probably wouldn't, I'm just interested in hearing the logic behind how Modern Art would be used.

It's an investment thing, like it has happened in violin-space. Probably because art has a use value of zero.

Why not just stake the place out with detectives night and day to surveil it and prove that Al is fabricating it all by observing actual foot traffic?

Money laundering seems relatively easy to root out.

>Won't it arouse suspicion when you purchase a painting for $2,000,000 cash, without any explanation of where you got the cash?
Yes it will. If the IRS are auditing you it won't help.
Art could be useful for avoiding tax, tariffs, transaction fees, stuff like that. Much easier to move a painting to a different territory than $50 million. Rich chinese are doing this to stop the chinese govt being able to access their cash - buy a painting, ship it to a secure storage in US, and you've got a $10 million asset your government can't touch

t. accountant

>Won't it arouse suspicion when you purchase a painting for $2,000,000 cash, without any explanation of where you got the cash?
Straw purchases.

You're going to put a man on every business this guy owns, search everyone going in and out, independently verify every single transaction in their ledger?
In a free society it's not tenable, and you would never have the time and resources to do it.

It shouldn't be too difficult to prove in theory, money laundering fronts are usually pretty obvious on some level or another. Can't you raise suspicions purely on the amount of detergent being purchased and actually used vs what is being claimed?

That doesn't work at all, for a start you want to do money laundering quietly and a piece by an unknown artist unexpectedly changing hands for 100 million would cause big news. Secondly in your scheme the Russian mob still ends up with nearly a 100 million (in fact less because the artist would need to pay tax on the sale) that they can't legitimately account for.

that just sounds like doing business in russia

>Secondly in your scheme the Russian mob still ends up with nearly a 100 million (in fact less because the artist would need to pay tax on the sale) that they can't legitimately account for.
Why not? If the artist is just forking over control of "his" checking account to them, it is basically free and clean money. Or the artist could simply set up a foundation that the people cleaning their money draw a salary from.

I'm reading more about this now. Apparently there is very little oversight when it comes to buying and selling art.

>It is hard to imagine a business more custom-made for money laundering, with million-dollar sales conducted in secrecy and with virtually no oversight. What this means in practical terms is that “you can have a transaction where the seller is listed as ‘private collection’ and the buyer is listed as ‘private collection,’ ” said Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. “In any other business, no one would be able to get away with this.”

So after robbing the bank, you buy a piece of art under "private collection" in cash. Then I guess you can just say you found the valuable art in some dumpster, and you're home free?

>It shouldn't be too difficult to prove in theory,
Trust me on this, if properly done, money laundering is almost impossible to prove. Any competent accountant could do it. People get caught because they get lazy, or they fuck up.

It's impossible to fully audit a large organisation. You have to check a percentage of the files and extrapolate from that. Consider a bodega. How many transactions does it do a day, Hundreds? Thousands over a year. All in cash, small bills. It's just not feasible to audit every single transaction. And for a big company it gets exponentially harder.

They would have much prefered to get Capone for laundering rather than evasion, but they literally couldn't get the evidence.

Say that your son is a brilliant child artist and that somebody paid you a million for his latest study in ketchup.

Why can't you nab a person laundering money via a bodega on the basis of volume alone? Wouldn't deviating too significantly from the amount of product they stock be enough?

I guess this might be possible, I don't know enough about deeds of sale etc in the art market, what kind of escrow accounts they'd use.
But the old fashioned way of money laundering is so easy and straight forward I don't know why you'd risk this art thing. Buying world famous paintings which will raise eyebrows everywhere they go makes no sense.

The artist would basically have to fork the cash back over to the buyer minus a small fee for his troubles. Otherwise there is no point.

You're right OP, the entire modern art institution is actually just a giant secret money laundering scheme, not that rich hipsters just like to make, buy and sell crappy pictures.

In fact, anything you don't like that sells is also just a giant money laundering scheme, there's no way that you can't not be the world's arbiter of taste.

Nice strawman.

No shit, I'm making fun of him.

If you're smart you keep it within the realms of the possible, and you own like 20 bodegas.

Here's an example.
I buy 10 widgets for $10, which sell for $10 each. I stick $100 crime proceeds in the register and dispose of the widgets, maybe I give them to local kids. You can't now prove I didn't sell the widgets to the kids, and I have $90 clean money.
Or even better, I just forge an invoice for 10 widgets to save myself the 10%.

You're Mr Audit Man from the IRS . Can you find the fake invoice? Bear in mind I legitimately order widgets every day from a variety of companies. It's not possible for you to check every single transaction in my ledger, ring up the company I ordered from, to check it was a legit order of widgets. Even if you chance upon it, maybe we just say we lost the paperwork or something (which happens all the time) and I've got plenty of legit invoices I can give you.

Except the point of money laundering is when the government checks your books you have legitimate sources for the cash, what's the legitimate source here? A random artist just randomly gave us all his money for no reason?

>Drive a few hundred miles to a rural gas station.
>Fill tank
>Pay with a hundred dollar bill
>you can now freely spend that change

The trick is to slowly trade out the money you stole for money you didnt. Then slowly that money into a bank account, but keep at least 95% in hard cash.

A few years ago, the police investigated a certain politician of my country. They found that his bank account had an unexplained incoming transfer of 500 000 €.
He said that this was a payment for the sale of two paintings by Andries van Eertvelt, to a Malaysian lawyer...
Paintings by this artist are usually valued under 50 000 €.

I think the investigation is still ongoing. The internet offers no information regarding its conclusion. But the fiscal administration sent him a bill of 535 000 € for the 50% tax on the sale, plus penalties for the delay in this payment and a fine for "fraudulent maneuvers".

Would you call that money laundering or rich hipsters with shit taste ?

The money in this situation hasn't been laundered. Unless he is able to sell the painting again for 500,000 (which being over the value, seems unlikely).

>>Serial Numbers

OP you are getting shit on because of your lack of nuance. In that last thread you used a pretty bad example of bad art and you show that you don't even have a plebs understanding of art by saying modern art instead of contemporary art.
Renaissance style paintings aren't the only art form.

What is the mechanism (with evidence please) for modern/contemporary/ yucky art that I don't like being more vulnerable to money laundering than other forms?

It's difficult to determine how much a piece of modern art should be worth just by looking at it. A white canvas with a black triangle painted on it could be worth nothing or millions, and that flexibility allows for a lot of financial chicanery.

What are the mechanics of that incredibly vague "financial chicanery" and what is the evidence?

I still don't get how money laundering via art would work on a practical basis. I'm not saying it doesn't happen I just don't understand how it would work.

Can somebody draw a diagram please?

Over a long period of time, you can do the following:

>find modern artist with cheap paintings
>buy all his paintings
>make deal to buy all his future paintings
>over a period of several years, begin selling paintings at auctions, introducing fake bids to increase the apparent value of the artist's work

What was once literally a $50 painting can now be plausibly auctioned off for millions, and nobody can say "hey but that painting isn't good enough to be worth millions" since it's modern art.

Quit spitballing dumb fucking ideas worth more effort than reward. That's not even money laundering, and very few people have the cachet to increase the value of artists they buy and promote, even then the market still has to agree that they have worth. Also where is your evidence.

If me don't like it no1 can !!111111!!!1//

>I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece, I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead.

Art doesn't really have a reason to exist anymore, clearly all the good stuff has been done and now they're just throwing shit at it until something sticks. It's all over, they should just give it a rest

Still waiting.