This video¹ discusses ways assets can be concealed via money laundering.  As the video observes, billions are thought to be laundered worldwide & “laundering takes place within our everyday world of routine business transactions.”

Looking for laundered assets can be critical to a successful asset search, my last post says. The video embedded above explains how the laundering works.  As more fully set forth at the video, the 3 laundering stages are known as placement, layering and integration.  The video also mentions that criminals involved in terrorist financing; drug trafficking; weapons smuggling; fraud; theft; Ponzi schemes; etc., hide their illicit proceeds by laundering them.

Criminals are not the only ones hiding assets by washing them.  Others with high-value assets, (including some divorcing spouses; judgment debtors; etc.), may conceal assets in money-laundering-like schemes.  These schemes typically obscure who the true beneficial owners of the assets are.  In other words, the schemes attempt to hide assets through a lack of financial transparency.  Companies on the Internet like Capital Asset Mgmt. Assoc. Inc. seem able to add to this lack of transparency.

Capital Asset Mgmt. Assoc. Inc’s website promotes “bullet proof asset protection” as a countermeasure to “specialized ‘Asset[sic] search’ agencies.”  One of its webpages apparently asserts that beneficial owners can conceal assets by establishing offshore bank accounts with anonymity.  It hints that one can supposedly open a bank account with anonymity in Panama “as no one will be able to find out to whom exactly has the money gone to.”  The webpage also discusses using bearer shares & nominee directors to open an apparent secret Panamanian bank account.  Meanwhile, these are the same elements some money launderers have successfully used to wash their funds.

¹Video courtesy of The Egmont Group Of Financial Intelligence Units

Copyright 2015 Fred L. Abrams