Breaking Bad & Beyond
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2024
4:07 · 8.5M views · Apr 13, 2021
A short clip from Breaking Bad in which Saul Goodman teaches Jesse Pinkman how a cash-heavy business like a nail salon can launder drug money.
HN uses it as a quick, memorable illustration of how money laundering works in discussions of crypto seizures and mixers.
4 comments from Hacker News
> This is called "layering" I believe it is actually "structuring". Layering is a step in money laundering where layers of legitimacy are added as money moves around. Structuring is breaking larger transactions into smaller transactions in order to avoid detection. Smurfing is also similar to structuring and honestly I don't understand the difference well enough to explain, but they are often used interchangeably in my experience. edit: Here is a short educational video on the topic of money laundering: this video
Poor analogy. Speech and ideas are constitutionally protected in the U.S; accommodations are not (well, other than quartering of soldiers). A better analogy is that the government can prosecute people for doing the actions described in the Breaking Bad scene on money laundering [1], but they cannot prosecute the writers of Breaking Bad, the networks it's shown on, YouTube, or people who link to it. [1] this video
> Why do you think it money laundering? What’s the exact mechanism? this video Replace "nail salon" with "candy" and you're there. Candy is a great product for this because it's high-margin, and very low value.
That's right; your comment brings to mind this scene where the character Saul Goodman explains money laundering in Breaking Bad (this clip is supposedly shown as part of university lectures): this video