Well they have worked for many years for some pretty major vendors so I think that says something. Never touching the money, never touching anything that cashes out the money, that is hardly practical for most people if it is even possible to do and spend money at the same time. The goal is for it to be anonymized by the time you pick it up, and then you pick it up with these methods simply to avoid having it tied to your name, so theoretically law enforcement never gets to the camera and you avoid ever giving them a reason to pull footage of the cash out. There are ways to cash out at ATM without being identifiable though, although some are fairly sketchy in themselves like wearing masks. People get away with robbing people at gun point in front of ATMs though, so its not a stretch to think you can get away with disguising your face for a short period of time while you cash out your own money at one, and again law enforcement are theoretically never going to make it back to the cash out point to pull footage anyway. Western union is much harder to adequately disguise yourself at, but how long these places keep video for varies if you find a place with a 24 hour loop you will be hoping that law enforcement can't get to it before the footage is overwritten or that they never get to it anyway, knowing how long the loop is for is tricky though and these days it isn't expensive to keep months worth of video footage. I think you are confusing the reason to cash out with an ATM or fake ID wire though, it isn't necessarily to make it harder for you to be traced (although it certainly is beneficial here as well) but rather to make it so there is not a record of you having the money, or you using a mixing service. By the time you cash out it should already be either virtually impossible for LE to follow the financial trial from their dealings with you to your cash out point (as is the case with proper mixes), or at least very difficult (as is the case with multi international jurisdiction layering). But even if it is impossible for them to follow the money from them sending it to you cashing it out, you don't want to suddenly have unaccounted for deposits of thousands of dollars showing up under your name, and you don't want to be tied to a mixing service either if you can help it. That is where the anonymous ATM cards and fake ID for wire pick ups come into play, although they both do also aid in untraceability. There are two types of money laundering, the first type aims to make transactions untraceable, so law enforcement can not trace their money back to you. The second type aims to disguise illicit profits and licit profits. It can be seen as a multi step process really, since both compliment each other. Mixes make the money untraceable, cashing out with ATM card or WU with fake information takes care of part of the second goal of disguising illicit profits as licit. You can spend quite a bit of cash fairly secretly and never risk being identified as living outside of your means, buying fancy cars and expensive houses and such are a different story though. I know a few techniques for disguising illicit funds as licit, but this is an area where I think it is more important to not discuss the techniques publicly (versus making transactions untraceable to you from LE perspective, and not drawing attention to yourself by suddenly having ten thousand dollars deposited to your bank account straight from bitcoin-money-laundering.org). You will likely need to have a legitimate front business to pull this off for large amounts, is the most that I will say on the matter. And again, you don't need to legitimize all of your money, if you spend a hundred bucks eating at a fancy restaurant there is no need to spend clean money that you paid taxes on. Some people employ bums or kids to do cash out for them and then they get the cash handed to them in a location that isn't under surveillance, then pay them like a hundred bucks for their trouble (assuming they hit the maximum limit on a bunch of anonymous debit cards or something, to make it affordable). This risks being robbed, but they have tricks to make this unlikely as well. This has always seemed too exploitative for my tastes though.