When you've spent as many years in the laundry industry as we have, you're bound to have seen some odd things thrown in machines. From stress testing with garden tools to a literal oven, we've seen it all. While some of these can cause serious damage to a machine, many of them just make for great stories, like the time one of our laundromats laundered money.
Money laundering 101
Before your imagination goes too wild, our laundromat was not criminally laundering money, instead, they literally washed the bills clean, shocking the employee who next cleaned the lint filter! (There's another reason to check your filters regularly!).
For those of you who aren't aware, money laundering is the process of turning 'dirty' or stolen cash into 'clean' usable cash, usually through a front business. It is thought that the term was coined during the Prohibition era in the United States of America, when Al Capone used a series of laundromats to "wash" the proceeds of his speakeasy's.
Australia has an entire agency dedicated to preventing money laundering. In the case of laundromats... many are converting to cashless operations at a rapid pace, so the term "money laundering" almost doesn't make sense any more.
But if you are seeking info on how to effectively launder money, this is the right guide for you! Fortunately, Australian dollars are very straightforward to clean as the polymer film gives them a high degree of protection against water, meaning your bills are unlikely to be damaged when run through a machine.
It doesn't stop at money laundering!
It's like something out of an Al Capone movie... the things that get found in our dryers... A bullet casing?
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