Hair salons are perfect for money laundering; The salon sells a service and not a physical product, nobody ever asks for a receipt, there are no mandatory sales recording machine (SRM), haircuts can be very expensive when special services such as color or others are provided and the government is not going to sit on a chair counting the number of customers the hair salon processes in a week.
Let's say you have drug money to launder, a hair salon is perfect because it sells a service.
Contrary to a bar that must purchase an equal quantity of alcohol and beer to match its sales, a hair salon sells a service. There is no way to demonstrate how many customers a hair stylist can process in a day, as a good hair stylist may be able to manage a $50 haircut in 15 to 20 minutes.
so you hire 5 real hair stylists and 5 "ghost" stylists, the "ghost" stylists only pretend to work for you, take a paycheck, pay their taxes, while they stay at home.
the first 5 serve real customers and the 5 "ghosts" serve "imaginary" customers.
Having 5 "ghost" making imaginary haircuts @ $50 every 20 minutes gives the salon $150 per stylist per hour, a total of $750 per hour, $6,000 of drug money laundered per day and $2.1 million per year.
So, the owner enters in the cash register those fake haircuts, put the drug money in the register which was just magically laundered. The owner can then deposit that laundered money in the business's bank account.
The owner then has to pay salaries and social charges and its profit taxes and usually ends up with over $1.6 million in "clean cash", plus the real haircuts its real employees did.
Now, hire 10 ghost stylists and launder $4 million a year.
Most ghost stylists are recruited from immigrants who lack the language skills or paperwork to find a job, single mothers who can't work and don't get child support and others such as students who get offered that "deal" of free money.