
6 Money Laundering: A Guide for Criminal Investigators, Third Edition
Many placement mechanisms are directed at positioning
the funds in a bank or nancial institution. This represents
a trade-off for the launderer: The upside is that all that cash
has now become just another electronic blip in that vast sea
of money; the downside is that, once in the bank, a paper trail
is automatically begun—a trail that leads in two directions
from the initial deposit. (See Figure1.7 for an early example
of a paper trail.)
In the layering stage, launderers attempt to hide their
tracks on the paper trail. As the name implies, layers of
transa ...