If you assume that there's an even chance of getting caught (e.g., if searches are random based on the traveler) then fewer larger trips reduces the number of times your agent is caught.

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.,

> If you assume that there's an even chance of getting caught (e.g., if searches are random based on the traveler) then fewer larger trips reduces the number of times your agent is caught.

What? No it doesn’t. It just increases variance.

Yes it does.

Let's say you have 100 trips to send money vs 1 trip. If there's a 10% chance to be caught on each trip, then with 100 trips 10 people are caught on average, whereas with 1 trip a tenth of a person is caught on average (more realistically, I'd look at the probably that more than N people are caught using a binomial, but I don't thinks it's important).

Although that said, maybe it's worth it. With a 1% chance to be caught and 100 trips, there's a 63% chance at least one person is caught, and a 26% chance that more than 1 person is caught. With one person, there's a 1% chance they're caught.

The average money caught is the same though (and as you note the variance in money caught is higher, which is undesirable).

But money caught doesn't land you in jail. You could imagine that with multiple people caught it's easier to track back who they met with. With 1 person caught, there's no other cases to cross reference against.

Probably you would want to balance these factors out.

Amazing analysis.

Survivor bias? maybe they just don't catch the ones that only had two suitcases of cash.

This. + Hastiness and overconfidence. When you do it over a long stretch of time, you try to stretch the limits occasionally

From the fraud cases I've worked on, greed does factor in and you can often see a point in time within the data where it seems like they realize they are 'getting away with it'.

My best guess is a lack of willing participants combined with pressure from up top to move money to keep the operation going/meet targets.

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

3750 for committing serious crimes seems so low, one can only imagine the desperation or lack of value understanding involved with participants.

Or coercion.

I think it’s pretty simple. To many people, $3,750 is a huge amount of money. It’s easily several months salary.

I think a lot of people would be relatively unaware of how illegal a given thing is and would instead see the amount of money being offered as representative of the risk. Too much and they would get suspicious.

This was the UK. I don’t think $4k is “many months salary” for a lot of people in the UK.

It's certainly the case in the US for many people, why would it not be in the UK?

Even at effective minimum wage of 11.80 an hour[1], that’s only 2 months of salary. That’s not life altering in any way and wouldn’t be worth prison time to people in general. People have to have been tricked about the risks or were coerced.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

People on minimum wage don’t get a chance to build savings are probably living month to month. Though it’s not an earth shattering of money it is meaningful to a lot of people.

Further to the same point, there's a cost of living crisis in the UK, so many people even above minimum wage are having to use food banks.

I can easily believe someone in such a position would jump (well, politely queue, they are British) at a chance for a "mere" few thousand.

Because we have a national minimum wage which works out to over 2k once converted in to USD.

Even at the minimum legal level and without a raft of government hands outs which a person could expect its maybe 6-7 weeks salary.

If we take the average salary then take home per month is pocket change short of $3000

The "kia boys" are out stealing car after car for $100 from interviews online.

Incentives seem lower than we all think?

> Incentives seem lower than we all think?

The income for most criminals is a pittance. [1]

1. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-apr-24-oe-dubne...

Sometimes they don't even get/want the $100 and just joyride until they run out of gas to post the footage on social media.

I remember some very sad news about a drug smuggler, a poor woman from the Philippines, condemned to an insanely harsh sentence in Singapore (perhaps even death penalty?). At least, the UK justice system should be less cruel.

One?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapor...

Surely this was an advice from one of the Big Three consultancy agencies, following the cost-structure analysis

Ockhams razor suggests they do it constantly and almost never get caught.

Life imitates art: the ending of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956):

https://youtu.be/8J3dbXEBjOA?si=wZ0yK7iPuSAAC84r

In money laundering there is generally a problem of too much money and a chain of people too dangerous to say no to. This leads to stupid mistakes like this.

Article is paywalled, but the headline says billions (10^8) and a suitcase has hundred thousands (10^5), and therefore we might be talking of around 10^3 suitcases. I can see why a 4x increase in the number of trips might be operationally significant. They might even be doing a trial run of 5 suitcases to check if they can make that their usual mode of operation since it'd be a substantial cost reduction.

> 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.

A billion is 10^9, billions around 10^10, thus one or two orders of magnitude more suitcases.

The article gives some details we can go off of. 5 suitcases with $500k each, is $2.5M. Alfassi charged 10% so $250k.

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.

The mules generally don’t know that they are moving this much money. I think the risk of them running off with the cash would be quite high.

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.