Why do criminals engage in money laundering?

When you have a little cash it is okay to spend it. You can walk into stores and spend it. When you have lots of it, it gets challenging. When you have a whole lot of illegal money, think millions of dollars, then even spending it becomes an issue.

Questions are asked if you try to spend the money. Many establishments are trained to report excessive cash activities. If you go and say spend $8,000 in cash in an Apple store - that may/may-not raise an eyebrow. Do the same for $30,000 in cash at a car dealership and it would definitely raise an eyebrow.

So if you were stopped by a law enforcement officer and asked how you came in possession of $30,000 in cash, you had better an air-tight story that checks out from every angle.

You might get away with it once or twice, but repeatedly, the odds are stacked against you. Sooner or later, you would be busted.

Now if you were somehow able to convert this money into white-money and show that it came from a genuine business, the game changes. So how does that happen? How do you figure out how to launder your money.

Well, money laundering in itself is a business. Finding innovative ways to launder money is a much need skill, especially in this day and age, where anti-money laundering efforts are becoming the norm and it is getting more difficult by the day to make black money white.

With everything going cashless these days, and cash being less accepted in more established locales or not being accepted over a certain threshold, criminals, are literally forced to launder money, else they would go out of business.