My understanding of money laundering is the baddies have huge truck loads of untaxed dirty cash and they need to somehow legitimize it to get it into the bank. E.g. from Breaking Bad: drug money → car wash with phony sales → bank. Once it’s in the bank, it’s on the radar.
The linked article says that withdrawing cash is a money laundering red flag. Can someone please explain why that is? AFAIK, if the money is in the bank it must already be clean (or appear so), no?
“Anti-Money laundering” is a carte blanche for: 4th amendment does not apply; all decent privacy safeguards are null & void; even your own criminal defense attorney is /required/ to report suspicions of money laundering as an exception to attorney-client privilege (unlike crimes as serious as rape, for example). Non-money laundering-related activity is apparently getting shielded under this increasingly broad umbrella of no privacy protections. And IMO no one is paying attention to this.
Prediction: they’ll start putting arbitrary drug offenses under “AML” law just to keep the 4th amendment out of their way.