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Both WOW Gold and Second Life "linden dollars" were and are major black market currency tools online. A cursory google search would prove your statement quite f

• ryanlol 9y ago
  Neither of those articles contains anything even hinting towards my statement being false. Their contents are merely speculation. I've got a decent amount of experience with this, and I'm certain there's never been any large scale money laundering activity using Linden dollars. The idea is simply ridiculous, the economy isn't large enough to support it.
  • mustacheemperor 9y ago
    Sorry, was the arxiv paper[0] linked in the Wired article not sufficient? I'm not regional expert on this subject myself so if you've got contrary information I'd be interested in reading it. It's my assumption Wow's economy is much larger than SL's, and I'd also assume that in aggregate these different digital economies are more than large enough to hide transactions. That's speculation on my own part, though, and if you have any actual evidence other than claiming "decent experience" I'm interested. I'm not sure what the definition of "large scale money laundering" is in this situation. [0][https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1310/1310.2368.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1310/1310.2368.pdf
    • ryanlol 9y ago
      Did you actually look at the paper? The primary sources are videogame cheating forums like Ownedcore, not really where I'd go for money laundering advice. The posts seem to be mostly related to laundering stolen ingame money, not funds acquired elsewhere. There's also one entirely speculative post (again from a videogame cheating forum) proposing a completely unrealistic, and ridiculously expensive approach to money laundering by buying and reselling videogame money. The paper seems to have been written by mostly clueless people with little understanding of these communities or money laundering.
      • mustacheemperor 9y ago
        You've sufficiently attacked the source, but I'll reiterate that I'm not looking to pick a fight here, I'm asking for actual evidence or even a supportive argument for what you're saying. I've heard for many years that money laundering is common with online currencies, but as I've said I'm not an expert. If you're that much less clueless and have more understanding please share it. There's a lot of discussion in crypto threads that assumes the opposite of what you're saying so it'd be nice to have the tools to disprove incorrect assumptions. Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative.
        • ryanlol 9y ago
          >I'm asking for actual evidence or even a supportive argument for what you're saying It's hard to prove a negative, there's simply no evidence at all that anyone has ever used videogame money to launder the proceeds of unrelated crimes. The idea also sounds fundamentally unlikely as videogame currency markets are pretty small¹ and actually getting the currency sold is a long and risky process. >I've heard for many years that money laundering is common with online currencies It is. But when people have purpose built solutions like Liberty Reserve and Perfect Money, nobody chooses to waste their time and money on messing with videogame currencies. >Bitcoin mixing is also pretty expensive but people still do it, and prior to bitcoin or bitcoin mixing existing presumably people were using a more expensive alternative. Bitcoin mixing has historically been very cheap, right now it still is below 1% cost if you're mixing more than a couple of coins at a time. ¹even for WoW, I used to sell gold