4 ms·

NFTs are hypothetically a good way to launder money but practically not so. Governments and chain analytics companies their tentacles wrapped around blockchains

• vmception 5y ago
  Right! The real question is why does the recipient want to launder or obfuscate the origin of proceeds. Criminal money laundering charge requires an illicit origin, while there are plenty of non-illicit origins that would prompt someone to want to obfuscate it. Those people can do that successfully. But for the criminals its not clear if they are successful. Regardless, I think better information is useful too. You can always use your clean savings and salaried earnings and buy some random small cap crypto, and then use your dirty money to pump that crypto, and sell your clean savings at a profit and just book the capital gains. This is likely happening a whole lot by now. The dirty money just is held in Tornado.cash and then exits Tornado.cash to a virgin address which acts as any random trader in the new crypto being pumped. People do this in the stock market too, they just have to go the extra step of making brokerage accounts with someone else's ID. I've also read about people that never cash out and just keep operating as the stolen identity, while the banks and governments believe there is no illicit money in the capital markets (yeah because it all passed KYC!). It's not like you would know if someone had made another bank or brokerage account in your name. But at least with crypto coin pump laundering nobody has the risk of getting framed.