4 ms·
Money laundering, no other explanation.
by Keyframe 5y ago
Money laundering, no other explanation.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoThere certainly seems to be something nefarious happening here but how are they laundering money this way?
- dehrmann 5y agoYeah, I'm not sold it being money laundering. Getting a story by the BBC is the absolute last thing you would want. You also want to avoid expensive items with paper trails. High-volume cash businesses is where it's at.
- jfoutz 5y agoI don't think this is what's happening, but I think this is the model. I have a super Mario cartridge. I also have a lot of drugs (or whatever) that I'd like to sell, but I don't have a distribution network, so I have to sell at a wholesale price. I put up the proxy object for auction. You bid far more than we think anyone would pay for the proxy object, and you win. We've made separate arrangements for the drugs (or whatever) so you already have them, or will get them soon. Now I have a pocket full of legitimate cash. I think there's some biases stuck in American minds about Al Capone. He was a bad guy that did lots of illegal things. But his downfall was tax evasion. This approach gives me a reasonable explanation for all that money, and I can pay taxes on it, so I _appear_ to be an upstanding member of society.
- casefields 5y agoThe one problem with this theory is why not launder $1.5 million through a boring painting by a C-list painter, rather than a headline grabbing newsworthy object? It seems like unnecessary risk that'll attract IRS attention.
- ipaddr 5y agoIt feels more like a marketing move.
- herbst 5y agoThis assumes moving money is hard, when it really is not. If you go for such an effort and risk visibility why not just go with some shell companies, crypto or investments that arent bound to end up in every second newspaper?
- i_call_solo 5y agoIf I need to transfer $1M to you because a some type of "favor", you can buy a collectible like this for a reasonable price, then get it appraised for a ridiculous amount like this, and then I can buy it off you for that crazy amount.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoCriminals can be very creative, but I struggle to understand this too. Fine, you sell a ridiculously overpriced thing, that amounts to disguising a money transfer as a sale, but how can you launder dirty money unless you pay in cash? Can auctions take a bag of cash as payment without repercussions? OTOH, there might be something I'm not seeing here. In my country, private doctors at high-end hospitals accept cash as payment (even for major surgeries), which for common mortals would be a fiscal hell to convert into bank money, but they seem to be fine with it. I've noticed that most high-end hospitals also have a non-profit charity attached, and that many doctors have several big and ugly paintings in their offices.
- efficax 5y agoYes, and in fact these transactions are often in cash. It's true there's always going to have to be an initial transaction that's dirty. But if you have some (other) way to wash that, you can do all your following transactions as "art" sales, keeping the art in a freeport so it's never taxed as an asset and is just moved from one vault to another when these sales are made.
- herbst 5y agoExplain how this is laundering then