It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault. Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje, two of those charged in Brooklyn on Thursday, posed in March with approximately $40,000 in cash that the authorities say they were
laundering. The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating financial information with the stroke of a few keys, as well as common street criminals, who used that information to loot the automated teller machines (
source). The type of criminal activity does not matter when bringing a charge of money laundering, but the most common sources of illegal money is from illegal drug sales, fraud, corruption and tax evasion. The crime of money laundering usually consist of three steps: placement, layering and integration. The cash obtained illegally is placed into the financial system, a financial transaction takes place to disguise the source of the funds and then the money can be used as legal funds.