iPhone 4 and Money Laundering

Before I start this I better make a very big disclaimer, I am by no means suggesting that Apple is condoning, purposefully or willingly the act of money laundering but bugger me if people aren’t buying the iPhone 4 with this in mind!

I have recently been to two Apple stores in the UK for various reasons one of which ill be honest was to buy an iPhone but from what i could see this was occurring in both stores. Strange for someone running a blog for HTC mobile phones maybe but you have to keep up with the competition and the best way was for me to buy an iPhone 4. What amazed me was the number of people in the queue and again i’m making a sweeping statement here that didn’t exactly look like they could afford to buy one iPhone 4 let alone the two that virtually every single person was buying.

After some generic banter between the two of us, him telling me about how wonderful curry was back home and asking me if I had travelled I got down to business. “So what are you looking forward to most on the iPhone?”, he gave a meek reply “oh the apps”, “yeah cool, their are plenty to be had”, I said “yeah it is very cool but I wont be keeping it”. “Oh really?” yeah they will be sold and so his very brief explanation started. Yeah I just buy them for this guy, he gives me £50 for queuing up and the cash I need to buy them he then sells them on! Nothing wrong with that in the eye of the law, a bit of private enterprise!

€500 notes in the UK were once the note of choice for money launderers but you can no longer use these notes at currency counters making it harder for criminals to dispose of dirty money.  Therefore criminals have been left needing new ways to dispose of large amounts of cash. They will already be exchanging as much cash as possible into high denomination notes usually £50 in sterling. But taking a large amount of £50 notes to a UK bank or bureau de change would raise alarm bells. So what can they do? Well how about buying high cost small products which currently have a resale value higher than there recommended retail price on the Grey Market? Yep you guessed it the iPhone 4!  Once in possession of the iPhone they can either send the phone off to a mobile phone recycler and receive about 4/5th of the retail value or sell it on an auction site such as Ebay. Current resales of BNIB iPhone 4’s are going for over £700!

And blow me what did nearly every person in front of me do, buy two iPhone 4′s and pay with £50 notes now that isn’t proof of money laundering, far from it in fact but it does raise the question, are people buying iPhone 4′s to launder money? What do you think?