Tony Talks Business
How Money Laundering Works
Washing a drug cartel's dollars used to cost about fifteen cents on every one of them. Today it can cost a single cent, and the people doing it are making more money than ever. One American bank let eighteen point three trillion dollars move through it without checking, and its staff were paid in gift cards.
This is how money laundering actually works, and why the cheapest launderer in the world does not make his money from criminals at all.
The numbers in this video
13 to 18¢What the old brokers charged to launder each dollar, on deals that took weeks or months.Source: ProPublica
1 to 2¢What Xizhi Li charged the cartels on each dollar, 1 to 2% on average, with delivery in a day.Source: ProPublica
10%Li charged wealthy Chinese clients 10% or more to get their dollars, far more than the cartel paid.Source: ProPublica
$312BAbout this much was covered by bank reports on these networks from 2020 to 2024. It is what banks flagged as suspicious, not a proven total.Source: FinCEN Financial Trend Analysis, August 2025
$18.3TThe transactions that passed through TD Bank without being monitored over about six years, 92% of its volume.Source: US Department of Justice, October 2024
$61BWhat financial crime compliance costs in the US and Canada each year, roughly.Source: LexisNexis, February 2024
Every number has a source
Chapters
- 0:00The Price
- 2:21The Problem
- 3:55The Front
- 5:04The Tax
- 5:47The Myth
- 6:09The Ceiling
- 7:06The Report
- 7:34The Smurfs
- 9:06The Fee
- 10:39The Mirror
- 13:00The Supplier
- 14:19The Bank
- 15:59The Cap
- 16:46The Branch
- 17:43The Tower
- 18:40The Casino
- 19:54The Chain
- 21:08The Catch
- 23:05The Verdict
What we left out
Claims we found and could not stand behind, so they are not in the video.
The tale that the word comes from Al Capone washing money through laundromats. It is most likely a myth, and the video says so: the phrase came into common use in the 1970s with Watergate.
The wider 200 billion euro figure for Danske Bank's Estonian branch. That is the branch's total non-resident flow, so the video uses the sourced $160 billion that went through US banks.
A detail about HSBC cash boxes built to fit the teller windows. It could not be checked against a source, so it stayed out.
