But, what is money laundering? Money laundering is basically turning illegal money into "clean" money through a legitimate (typically smaller) business. You´re lying to the authorities as to where the money came from. Money laundering is commonly used among drug dealers or big bank robbers. They might put a small business like a restaurant and mix the money from the restaurant with the drug money so in the end of the day it all gets mixed up and the authorities have no way to find out if the money is illegal.
One great example of money laundering occurs in the TV series "Breaking Bad". Walter White is a big time methamphetamine dealer that makes huge amounts of money for a person of his social standards and the current job that he has (chemistry teacher). He buys a car wash (the small business) and mixes the money from the car wash with the drug money. Even this is a huge problem because he´s making millions of dollars which a car wash would never make (otherwise everyone would open a car wash). He needs to put the money into small fractions in order for the police not to notice. So even though, he is laundering the money, he still has a little bit of trouble because the amount of money is so big, if he would put it all together nobody would believe him.
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Examples-of-Money-Laundering-Investigations-Fiscal-Year-2014
This is a web page in which there are a lot of money laundering examples in which we can see that the people involved are usually people involved with drug, that make a lot of money that everyone would ask questions about where it came from. Just like Walter White.
