We’re talking about drug money, right? In my residential California neighborhood, there were constant illegal drug dealers racing around in loud mustangs paint

We’re talking about drug money, right? In my residential California neighborhood, there were constant illegal drug dealers racing around in loud mustangs painted with their phone number and web site to deliver orders made on an app, and when I called the police about it because they were intentionally crossing the road to scare cyclists, they wouldn’t even take my statement. So if this KYC/AML crackdown stops those assholes, then great, but I only care that it is reducing the amount of drugs that come into the country, and the profits for individual street deals are getting wiped out, and the gangs are disbanding and violence is decreasing. Otherwise, it seems like it’s just being used to exclude Americans from Coinlist. Money tracing is an extremely valuable tool for criminal investigations. But I think the strategy around it is all wrong. You’re supposed to use the money trace to find more criminals. It seems that all resources have shifted to hunting down financial crime itself. This is based on the kingpin theory, which is questionably valid. In crime and terror, nobody works for anybody. Kingpins are essentially getting paid to increase the efficiency of the network in the highest-risk job. The network doesn’t need them at all; it just works a little better with them taking that risk. And if you think about it that way, you see the futility of simply restricting their ability to spend that money. There will always be somebody ready to take that risk just for the ego boost. Maybe it increases the amount that that position demands, like a small tax on the network. I have experience in this (CO-IN, not drugs, although that’s where a lot of the money came from), and I could easily quantify big statistically-significant drops in violence by going after the physical product, and by local police presence. These operations were simple, cheap, and safe. But all anybody ever got excited about was the person-targeting operations. These are extremely dangerous, and it’s always a risky bet on whether more intel will be discovered in forensics/interrogation, or lost due to the network reorganizing. Another problem with financial crime enforcement is that it’s looking for the money on the wrong side of the violence cycle (right of boom). Crime starts with clean money moving up the pyramid to pay for physical product, and only the top portions are targeted. At that point, it’s nearly irrelevant how it gets spent. Physical seizure is preventative (left of boom), and disrupts the network with real financial losses. Possibly most effective, is physical presence of local police. Story: Alice pays Bill for a legal job. Bill buys drugs from Charlie. Denise kills Charlie for the money. Ellen sells a house to Denise. Who should go to jail?