3 ms·

What is the point of stealing this money then? Presumably the "thief" thinks they will be able to cash in on it in some way. Can these "losses" be used to ave

• baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > What is the point of stealing this money then? Presumably the "thief" thinks they will be able to cash in on it in some way. Yes, exactly, and that is distinctly different from your earlier hypothesis that the whole thing may have been a conspiracy to money launder on behalf of the people who lost money. > Can these "losses" be used to avert taxes on the part of the "investor"? If the pain of the laundering is less than the potential tax avoidance then you might have a profitable laundry outfit. Look, if this was a single person who claimed to have lost a bunch of crypto to a hack, then you might plausibly weave this story, but it's not a single person. It's a bunch of random people. This bunch of random people didn't collude together to fake a hack to create tax losses to offset their realized capital gains from somewhere else. And even if they did do that, that wouldn't be called "money laundering", money laundering is something they would have to do later, to hide the origin off their newly-ill-gotten wealth.