Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry

Jingjing invited me to her office and asked me to wait for her to finish work before we headed out to dinner together.[1] At the time, she was working in a third-party payment company—what, in the jargon of the money-laundering industry, is known as a ‘gateway’ (通道, tongdao). Like another similar enterprise I had previously visited, their premises was in a dozen hotel rooms above a casino in Sihanoukville that were rented monthly. The managers had replaced the beds with desks and now the business was up and running. As I sat on the couch waiting for Jingjing, the office was filled with the rapid and frequent tapping of keyboards and the constant notification alerts of new Telegram messages. It felt like I had entered the trading hall of a traditional stock exchange, but the work being performed here was very different. The job of Jingjing and her colleagues was to match the right buyers (‘clients’, 客户) and sellers (‘account providers’, 账户供应商) and facilitate transactions in exchange for a commission.

Money-launderers call this type of ‘matchmaking transaction’ (撮合交易) process ‘moving bricks’ (搬砖, banzhuan), in which money is the commodity being moved from one place to another, sometimes through direct transfers between accounts and sometimes by withdrawing cash and then depositing it in other bank accounts. Jingjing told me that if a client entrusts them to receive a sum of money on their behalf, the company will contact an outside team that operates bank accounts, which they refer to as ‘motorcades’ (车队), to prepare to receive the sum. In the words of one of her colleagues with whom I had a chance to speak: ‘We are just natural carriers, acting as middlemen to earn a commission.’ But what is it that they broker?

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