In Louisville, Kentucky, a woman with the initials M.M. plead guilty Monday for embezzling over $300,000 from a charity and using it to buy herself a Ford Fusion and a Mercury Grand Marquis. The woman was the bookkeeper for a Catholic charity ministering to the aged, but she was pilfering money from the account. Another nun who was involved with the charity suspected M.M. of dishonesty when she received a call from Third Bank. The bank wanted to verify a $14,742 deposit. M.M., the pilferer was on vacation, and her stand-in took the call. As a result, the women filed a criminal complaint against M.M.
M.M. admitted to forging the names of various nuns on 43 checks and rerouting the cash to her personal bank account. Many times, she would send the money on a long trail of transfers before she received it in order to obscure its former source. She now faces 16 charges, including forging checks and money laundering. According to the U.S. District Court in Louisville, this lady will serve 27 to 36 months in prison. She plead guilty on her own account, and then left the court room without speaking to reporters or comrades. M.M. pledged to repay the stolen funds to the charity and waived her right to appeal the case. While she could have been sentenced up to 160 years in prison, the U.S. District Judge guaranteed that he would not give her such a harsh sentence for her crimes.
This is just one example of the crime of money laundering. Money laundering, by definition, is the act of transferring money through several locations in order to obscure its origin. U.S. prosecutors normally deal with about 1,000 money laundering charges in a year. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the aggregate size of money laundering on an international scale is probably between two and five percent of the world's GDP. Using this figure, it can be estimated that between $590 billion and $1.5 trillion are laundered by criminals. This is a serious crime, and one count of laundering normally carries up to six years in a Federal prison.
Money launderers have one goal: to make their money look like it came from a different source than it actually came from. This deceitful tactic allows thieves to get away with stealing thousands of dollars without banks or authorities detecting the danger. If a thief embezzles money without laundering it, then the bank would notice right away that the cash came from an illegal or suspect source. Laundering makes it look as if the cash came from an appropriate medium. To start the process, a criminal may choose to break up his sum into smaller, less conspicuous increments of cash, or use checks to divide the balance. This money is deposited into various accounts at different localities.
Next, the "layering" begins. The launder may convert the money into different currencies, or simply move the sum all across the world to take it farther and farther from the original source. Sometimes the accounts are wired, other times they are channeled through investments. In other cases, the payments are disguised as the profit of goods and services, which make it look more legitimate. Many drug dealers, prostitutes, or other persons involved in illegal activities will use laundering to conceal their crimes. Because of the rise in technology and the globalization of our nation, laundering is now extremely easy. Criminals can electronically transfer their cash from one country to another, scrambling the path so that it is untraceable. Eventually, the money circles back to their account, and it appears to come from a perfectly normal source. Without fear of suspicion, people are able to commit all sorts of injustices. If you have been convicted of money laundering, you will want to contact a criminal defense attorney at once to discuss your case.
