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> Has technology made money laundering through a restaurant any easier? > Actually, technology has made it more difficult to launder money. "Unless you’re usin
by carbocation 10y ago
> Has technology made money laundering through a restaurant any easier?
> Actually, technology has made it more difficult to launder money. "Unless you’re using virtual currency such as Bitcoin, it isn’t easier today today than it was forty years ago," says Myers. "In reality, every bank has highly sophisticated software that can flag transactions much more easily than they could in prior years."
I don't see how Bitcoin would make it easy to launder money, since it's completely traceable and publicly auditable.
- Neil44 10y agoBitcoins can be tumbled though I think?
- gruez 10y agoMost tumblers' implementation are flawed, allowing the senders and receivers to be identified. AFAIK the attack can only be prevented by forcing every participant to use multiples of a common, low entropy amount (ie. 0.5BTC), which most mixers don't do
- strictnein 10y agoYep. Theoretically they exchange your "dirty" bitcoin for one that has never been on the darkweb. https://darknetmarkets.org/bitcoin-tumblers/ https://darknetmarkets.org/bitcoin-tumblers/
- jandrese 10y agoIn practice, the people using those services are ones that are primarily on the darkweb. So you're just exchanging your own tainted bitcoins for someone elses tainted bitcoins. The point is to break the chain of evidence tying you back to the darknet transaction, which works, but still manages to look suspicious as hell. IMHO, it's only a matter of time before someone is convicted of money laundering for using a tumbler service.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoAlthough they aren't 100% untraceable, bitcoin mixers do a pretty good job of laundering bitcoins.
- carbocation 10y agoThanks - that's a good point. Sending the output to new addresses not previously known to be controlled by you does sound effective (prima facie, at least).
- venomsnake 10y agoTwo tumblers, two intermediate adresses, then to the final.
- tomjen3 10y agoThere are places where you can transfer your money, then they will mix it with other customers money, subtract a fee and send it out again. No real way to prove where your bitcoin came from.
- gwern 10y ago> No real way to prove where your bitcoin came from. That's exactly the problem. It doesn't help if your bitcoins are untraceable, your bank is still going to be suspicious when you deposit $1m out of nowhere from an exchange in order to buy a house. This is the problem the DNM sellers have: they have all this money from Bitcoin, and it is inherently suspicious since they can't account for where it came from and how they earned it legitimately.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Pitarou 10y agoBitcoins can be made almost as anonymous as cash. Bitcoin wallets (accounts) are anonymous, and bitcoin launderers claim they can obfuscate transactions by mixing them with other transactions and sending them through complicated webs of temporary bitcoin wallets. But bitcoin launderers aren't really money launderers. They conceal the source of your funds, but they don't create a plausible fake source. You still need to launder your money.
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoSurely bitcoin gives you plausible deniability? Anyone with a dubious source of BTC could say they mined them "back in the day".
- Pitarou 10y agoThat's a good idea, but it wouldn't stand up to blockchain scrutiny. Most of those dubiously sourced bitcoins were mined much more recently. You could invent more lies to explain all the turnover and transfers, but it would look suspicious as hell. Deniable, but not very plausible.