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GANGLAND CRIMINALS ARE using online betting accounts to stash drug money, allowing users to pay for the illicit items without cash and withdrawing it online without coming to the attention of the authorities.
Gardaí believe a number of serious criminals are using these accounts to safely store cash before moving it to a safer location, where it can be withdrawn.
A number of bets are made on very short odds to keep the account looking legitimate. The money is only kept in an account for a very short amount of time before it is withdrawn. This is to stop many of the bookmakers’ built-in anti money laundering software from identifying the issue and moving on.
In many cases, well-placed security sources say drug money is brought into the betting shop and is then lodged into an account. The money is then gambled on a game or race which is heavily fancied to win. For example at odds of 1/50. This means for every €50 gambled on a bet – this means you would win just €1 along with your €50 stake.
Former staff member
The Criminal Assets Bureau is aware of the method of storing money. Debit card seizures as part of wider searches are now becoming more commonplace for these officers.
A previous worker in a Dublin betting shop told TheJournal.ie: “This would happen all the time. Lads would come in and put a few hundred quid into their accounts. Then they’d back a dead cert – something that’s maybe 1/50. Then they’d withdraw the money.
“Where I worked, you weren’t allowed withdraw the cash after depositing without betting. I would have seen first hand that guys would come in, especially during festivals like Cheltenham, and stick in a few grand. Because that would be nearly normal around that week. They’d just take the money out an hour later or whatever.”
This method of stashing money stops criminals being caught with large amounts of cash. It is also a very easy way to move relatively large amounts of cash without the worry that bales of money are going to be seized by gardaí.
And it’s not just an easy way for criminals to avoid carrying large amounts of cash. Prisons are also hotbeds for this method of transaction. This is because having large amounts of cash inside the prison is mostly pointless.
For example, if a user wants drugs when they are prison, they are given the product and told to have money lodged into a specific gaming account. The prisoner uses a phonecall and says to a friend or relative to transfer €100 into a certain account. The dealer rings a friend and asks to check the balance of the account.
Anti money laundering software
However, bookmakers have shut down a number of accounts they feel are being used to launder money. The vast majority of bookmakers operate sophisticated anti money laundering software which is used to scan millions of accounts to look out for suspicious behaviour.
In some circumstances, bookmakers will conduct what is known as a fund inquiry. This is where it asks the account holder for proof of income. If this can’t be provided, the account is usually shut down.
These checks occur when a bookmakers’ anti money laundering software flags irregular betting patterns.
Due to this software, the lifespan of the online accounts used by gangland figures is relatively short. They end up either being suspended or shut down.
Recreational drug problems
The online bookmakers is just one of a number of ways cash is being stored by drug dealers and this comes as no surprise to Phillip Jennings, the coordinator for Safer Blanchardstown, a group which is attempting to highlight the dangers of recreational drug use and its link to intimidation and violence across the country.
Jennings has been dealing with families who have been left devastated by drugs and has spoken directly with people who have had to deal with drug debts built up by other family members.
He told TheJournal.ie that dealers are becoming more savvy in the way they collect their money.
He said: “Any method possible is being used to intimidate families. This is no surprise. There’s all sorts of different ways people are paying for their drugs – it’s especially difficult when someone is in prison. If a family member is getting drugs in prison and then there’s suddenly a knock on the door for someone looking for money, then that can cause a lot of problems. A lot of families don’t have €200 or €300 in their back pockets to pay a drug dealer.
“That’s when the windows start being broken and shots start to be fired at people’s front doors.”
TheJournal.ie contacted a number of bookmakers to ask them about their anti money laundering protocols.
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If the first question is ‘explain how you rented and sold so many of your properties to the Russian mob at weird prices’ I can understand why he’d rather avoid the interview.
@alphanautica:
They should ask Clinton why she failed to declare payments to her foundation from the owner of a uranium business that was later sold, without objection from the State Department, to the Russians.
If you want to talk about collusion then let’s talk about real collisions.
@Thought for Food: Are you confused, colliding with a collusion now and looking for distractions?
@Thought for Food: Let’s talk about BOTH.
@Thought for Food: 1. She wasn’t in control of the foundation at the time 2. She wasn’t involved in the decision 3. The uranium is still exactly where it was before the deal.
@Thought for Food: oh look a Clinton squirrel
@Thought for Food: So your going by story brought by Stve Bannon then?
@Thought for Food: multiple departments approved that deal there have been numerous investigations who have found nothing wrong and not 1 once of uranium has left America
@bmul:those pesky facts hurt the Trump fans
@Thought for Food: WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT WHATABOUT….
Trumps own words
“the world is laughing at the stupidity they are witnessing” hes not wrong
@Itsme: lmfao!!!
President Trump is under investigation by Mueller team for almost 9.months….If there was any real proof of Russian links it would have been leaked to all their friends in Democrat party and CNN by now….Democrats will try and keep this investigation going as long as Trump is in White house ….Same as Republicans kept Kenneth Starr investigation going against President Clinton for 7 years…
@John003:
All true but the Starr investigation is one of the key reasons the Clinton’s are not back in the white house.
Few believe they will oust Trump before the next election and any thing could happen in three years.
It’s a long game they are playing.
@John003: “f there was any real proof of Russian links it would have been leaked to all their friends in Democrat party and CNN by now”
So, for an investigation to have any validity, it has to be wrapped up within 9 months? How dumb. It took over two years for the Watergate investigation to get Nixon to resign, learn your history.
You won’t quit with this idiotic comparison to the Starr investigation, will you? You’re a broken record.
The Starr investigation uncovered the shady behaviour of Bill Clinton in the White House and tarnished the reputation of a bad President forever. If you’re implying it wasn’t worth doing, you’re wrong.
@John003: You Trumpanzees, are like sheep and would follow your shepherd over a cliff.
@Malachi: no, I think he’s saying for it to be legitimate they have to leak every piece of information they get. They keep forgetting that it was Papadopoulos that got this investigation started.
@Dave O Keeffe: The point about Watergate stands, so. There was no “real proof” leaked to the media 9 months that directly incriminated Nixon, either. I’m not exactly convinced Trump had anything to do with the collusion, but the premise of the argument makes no sense.
@Malachi: ya, that’s what I was trying to say but badly. Hús argument seems to be “if they were good at what they do they’d be leaking everything and destroying the integrity of the investigation”
@Dave O Keeffe: Yeah, then if they leaked anything they’d be criticised anyway by the same people… that’s how this works.
Israel has huge influence on him……but nobody wants to talk about that…..ehh em…
@Johnnathan Biskalero:
That’s probably because Jerusalem doesn’t have nukes aimed at Washington and doesn’t compete with US interests on a global scale.
@Johnnathan Biskalero: Nobody has any problem talking about those links. It’s the ONLY thing you ever talk about, though.
@Thought for Food: Israel is doing to Palestine, what the US has done to the Native Americans and that’s what make them great friends!
@Stephen murphy: Remember Vietnam, when America almost single handed wanted to stop the spread of Communism throughout south-east Asia. How many lives did that cost. Then there was Iraq and WMD, another Republican gaff…!!
Maybe, just maybe we’ll have one day without a Trump story from The Journal. Maybe they’ll consider it for lent and give it up for 40 days
@Senan O’Keeffe: You have a lot off time on your hands yourself, go read the the sun or the mail.
@Shane Fleming: When there’s a pre-Alzheimer’s patient with narcissistic personality disorder at the helm of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, guess what?? It’s going to be news every day.
@Shane Fleming: I’ve an idea STOP READING THE ARTICLES!!!! And leave the rest of us in peace.
It was the multi billionaire Mercer family which put Trump into the Presidency. Russian interference contributed but was not the prime factor.
It is quite possible that Trump was unaware that he was give the Presidency by means of manipulation. Certainly, Trump’s ego would lead him to prefer to think that he won the Presidency as a result of popularity.
The US got a dismally bad President although Trump is good at look8mg after his fellow billionaires.
The US is almost at the point of being a plutocracy.
I continue to be bemused that people, especially Trump, can still say, and with a straight face, that “nobody’s found any collusion at any level”. They have. Several members of Trumps campaign have admitted that they”colluded” with Russia, where the lifting of sanctions and getting illegally obtained information on Clinton, were both discussed. Three senior members of his campaign team have been charged with offenses all linked to Russia. Trump has also been accused of interfering with the investigation by the head of the FBI who he then promptly sacked. What more do you want FFS?
Another lie :)
First it was racism, then it was “his tweets”, then it was Russian collusion, then back to racism, then back to collusion, last week it was “mental illness” and now back to collusion. Jesus the anti Trump crowd are desperate. @Journal, How about the story of the twitter engineer and executives busted trying to sell the private Twitter DMs of Trump, espionage by Twitter staff.
@Eleanor of Aquitaine: Not desperate looking at facts first, before allegations before mouting off in early morly morning tweets in capitol letters while haing a big fat burger from mackyd’s. He is a racist while earlier on he offered to pay investigators to look into Obams’s birth cert and found no proof but he (Trump) would not accept that.
@Ossi Fritsche: Sorry for the typo’s very bad day.
@Eleanor of Aquitaine: There’s a story about his gross ineptitude every day, isn’t there?? And the James O’Keefe twitter crap is debunked.
@Ossi Fritsche:
Got proof to back up your racism claim?
No one accused Donald Trump of being a racist until he decided to run for president and became a threat to Hillary Clinton’s return to power.
In 1986, Trump joined several other prominent Americans, such as Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, as recipients of an “Ellis Island Award.”
One suspects if Trump was a racist, there’s no way he would have posed for a photo with those two.
https://goo.gl/images/DmEMzR
Trump is trying to manipulate the direction of the investigation and send a not too coded message to Mueller that a trump will not be a pushover for the holding of an interview.
Translation
“You better have a damn good reason for interviewing me and a very solid basis for putting any questions at all to me or I’m coming after you.”
Trump is vengeful.
There was Russian interference in the Presidential election but, unless anyone admits that it was so, it will nit be possible to establish that Trump was knowingly complicit.
have your say