Three money-laundering techniques most often seen in Brazil’s investigated cases

Money laundering keeps the same basic logic: make illicit funds look clean and legitimate. In Brazil, fraud-prevention specialists say three methods show up most often in investigated cases, and two of them map directly onto the payment flows high-risk operators already spend their lives trying to monitor.

1. Structuring of amounts — also known as smurfing. The idea is to split a large amount into many smaller deposits or transactions so each one stays below thresholds that trigger automatic suspicious-activity reporting. A R$ 100 mil amount, for example, can be broken into twenty deposits of R$ 5 mil, spread across days or weeks and often routed through different accounts or different people. Each transaction looks ordinary on its own; the pattern only becomes visible when the flows are analyzed together.
2. Third-party accounts — accounts opened in someone else’s name, the Brazilian “laranjas.” These accounts act as intermediaries between the illicit source of funds and the final beneficiary. In many cases, the account holder lends their CPF for a small payment, or does not even know their name is being used. In a common laundering chain, money moves through three or four different third-party accounts before reaching the real destination, which makes tracing harder for police and compliance teams. Fraud involving Pix has helped popularize this method in Brazil, since accounts that are opened quickly and used briefly can receive scam proceeds and then be abandoned.
3. Mixing with legitimate businesses — injecting illicit money into the turnover of a real business until clean and dirty revenue are no longer separable. Businesses that handle a lot of cash, such as restaurants, laundromats, and parking lots, appear often in investigations because it is hard to audit the true sales volume. In digital commerce, the same logic shows up on betting platforms and e-commerce sites when a business reports transaction volumes consistent with a legitimate operation, but part of that volume comes from illicit funds.
4. Why these methods still work — according to Thomas Hannickel, Director of Compliance and DPO at Legitimuz, all three techniques exploit the same weakness: the difficulty of connecting isolated points that look normal on their own. A R$ 5 mil deposit does not look suspicious, an account opened with apparently valid documents does not either, and a business with strong revenue does not raise eyebrows by itself. The problem only appears when someone can see the full pattern across different data sources at once.

For PSPs, acquirers, and banks serving Brazil’s high-risk verticals, the practical takeaway is familiar: transaction-by-transaction controls are not enough on their own. The fraud and laundering patterns described here only become visible when account behavior, beneficiary links, and payment structure are analyzed together.