launder

To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary.

The act of changing the name of the purpose of a venmo transaction to hide the reason the transaction was made. Generally used for narcotics transactions or other illegal purchases

Reputational laundering - the act of appearing to do good publicly in order to offset a negative image. A technique usually employed by individuals or corporations who have made their money in a morally questionable fashion and who wish to appear to have a moral conscience.

Reputational laundering often comes in the form of Corporate Social Responsibility, where a relatively trivial sum of profits are donated by the corporation to fund socially oriented activities in order to suggest that the corporation is socially responsible.

An example, often sited, would be major oil companies giving charitable funds to communities in the Nigeria Delta whose original livelihoods they were implicit in destroying through the extraction of crude oil.

However the practice of reputational laundering is by no means exclusive to corporations. Many morally bankrupt individuals donate money to charity in order that they are seen to care about social or environmental issues. As an added benefit to their undeservedly improved public image they also enjoy significant tax breaks on their donations.

The process of running illegal proceeds through a supposedly legitimate business, to turn your "dirty" money into "clean" money, and, uh, fuck it just go watch season 4 of Breaking Bad.

When Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, and Elaine Chao say they are leaving the Trump Administration because they have principles, but we all know it’s less than two weeks before they would be out of their jobs anyway and they just want to save their social standing and careers in the future. Plus, they have no principles or integrity.

(n.) The process of hiding the source of illegal income by processing it through a large-turnover entity, who takes a premium from it, and then receiving the income from that entity to avoid suspicion.

This definition has evolved to include any form of hiding income (or sources of income) in the interests of avoiding tax, although the problem posed by non-specific 'cover-all' statements means that it is open to loopholes because of the vast grey areas.

Money laundering has been practised for over 6000 years, but the term itself comes from the prohibition era of american history.

Where a clothes-washing-service employee intentionally adds a really muddy/greasy garment or towel to your merely-lightly-soiled laundry, causing the entire load to not get sufficiently cleaned when washed the first time, and therefore "obliging" the worker to throw said wash back into the machine for another full laundering-cycle, which of course you end up getting charged for, and thus the establishment dishonestly makes extra money that way.