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The other comment about electronics is completely off the mark as well -- people often see financial transactions that don't seem to make logical sense (whether pricing bots that recursively keep pricing off of each other, as in the linked story, or prices that seem too good to be true, which more likely are gray market or arbitrage) and immediately explain it as money laundering. But consider the electronics sales, where the premise is that people are selling electronics that they apparently bought from Amazon using gift cards under the market just to launder cash.

There is an enormous financial black hole that is just as vulnerable to inspection as simply depositing $1,000,000 in cash in your account. The whole point of money laundering is not only to legitimize the output, it's to make the sources untraceable and arguably viable as well.

The components of a transaction, particularly for the sales of goods, cannot simply appear out of nowhere, or they've done absolutely nothing in the way of money laundering. The people who will ever care about this (the ones who money laundering is constructed to fool) aren't so naive, and if you're selling 100,000 hard drives to justify your income, they're going to ask where you got the hard drives, and demand a financial trail.

Cash businesses that have little variable costs outside of manpower (such as carwashes, laundrymats, even some small restaurants, or selling small crafts on Etsy) are absolutely lucrative tools for money laundering, and can only really get caught if put under heavy scrutiny (e.g. car wash with 10 cars over the week claims revenue of $100,000). As are casinos, and Vegas was built on money laundering -- there are few checks on how much you spend, so whether you spent $1,000,000 in unexplained cash to leave with $950,000 in legitimate winnings, or $10 in legitimate cash to leave with $950,000 in legitimate winnings, it's almost impossible to prove.

There are many, many financial vehicles that are used for money laundering, including life insurance. Selling hard drives on Amazon is not one of them.