Financial institutions, real estate agents accountants and casinos are the most commonly utilised vehicles for laundering money, according to Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) research.

However the AIC’s research also found that aside from using complex structured transactions to disguise money laundering and accounts with false names, cash smuggling, cash and wire transfers are the most popular ways of effecting money laundering through Australia.

There was some use of credit cards and electronic payments, but the use of gold and precious metals for money laundering is not common, the AIC said.

Laundered funds themselves were most likely to be invested in real estate ($651 million), further crime activities ($600 million), gambling ($449 million), luxury goods ($424 million), legitimate business ($345 million) and professional services ($191 million).

The AIC study also looked at the impact of money laundering on the Australian economy. “If a figure of $4.5 billion is taken as the value of money laundering in Australia, and that of this, approximately 23 per cent is invested into real estate, nearly $1 billion is reallocated from other sectors (that is, the normal consumption of victims and drug users) to real estate,” wrote John Stamp and John Walker, authors of an AIC paper accompanying the research.

“The ownership of dwellings sector yields the lowest economic benefits for each dollar invested in the sector of all sectors, in terms of output, income, imports and employment. It is therefore possible to consider the economic multiplier effects of this reallocation, in terms of the changes to economic output, demand for level of income, imports, and employment. For each $1 million reallocated to real estate, there could be average net losses to the economy of around $1.436 million in output, $576,000 in income and 20 jobs.”

They added that launderer’s needs to launder funds can also result in distortive effects on the prices of investments such as real estate, because the need to find a safe investment is more important than price.