9 ms·

Squillions: How money laundering won

• Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
  In Italy there is a very aggressive law against money laundering: if you withdraw more than 1k cash, it triggers a call to the police. I know it's the same if you do it over multiple days. I think it has been relaxed a little bit later on, but in Italy everybody does the "I'll charge you X less without VAT" (which is 23% in Italy, I should point out), so this is also fighting that.
  • BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
    Does that mean it's illegal, or that they'll just come knocking to investigate? I wonder if the "it's my money, I can withdraw it if I want" argument is good enough to send them on their way? (in addition to $1,000 being such a small amount as to be less-than-trivial when it comes to the overall problem of money laundering).
    • ExpertAdvisor01 5mo ago
      I think the limit is 10k and withdrawals over 1k get bundled. If you hit the limit you get reported to the Unità di Informazione Finanziaria (Financial intelligence unit) and what they do is under their discretion.
      • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
        Oh so it was raised back to a higher amount
  • iririririr 5mo ago
    withdrew 2-4k rent for a few months in 23 and never saw any cops.
  • wmf 5mo ago
    In other words, the Italian police are flooded with more reports than they could possibly investigate.
    • rectang 5mo ago
      A great opportunity for selective enforcement!
      • wmf 5mo ago
        Also parallel construction. "We caught him due to reports from his bank." (That's not how they caught him but those reports did exist.)
    • wood_spirit 5mo ago
      Presumably the police computer system is told about the transfers automatically and it has no capacity problems. I know my own country has long had such a system and these days is almost entirely cashless.
  • HDBaseT 5mo ago
    You mean they implemented laws under the guise of "money laundering". They just want to track what you spend your money on, that's step one. Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on, although this is a partial side effect of part 1.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
      Actually the privacy legislation in Italy is pretty strong. With the gdpr, banks have more challenges to do what they do with data in the US. Government might be tracking everybody, the goal of the law for sure is that. It's hard to say what happens with all of that.
    • margalabargala 5mo ago
      > Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on Where do people get these ideas? How do they sincerely hold them? No non-religious government wants to restrict what you can spend your money on. They want to get a cut of your money, but otherwise it's strictly better for them if you spend as much of it as possible. If they don't want you to have things, they just attack those things directly, like hard drugs or weapons. No need to restrict your ability to purchase.
      • Cider9986 5mo ago
        >In July 2025, Visa and Mastercard pressured major digital storefronts Steam and Itch.io to delist thousands of adult and NSFW games.
        • margalabargala 5mo ago
          Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Let's ignore the fact that that was done by private companies and not directly by a government. The mechanism is to make it so undesirable objects are not available for sale. The above comment is implying these things would remain legitimately for sale as normal, but you would be unable to spend money on them.
      • mike_hearn 5mo ago
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    That wouldn't help in the situations described in the article. For example where individuals buy drugs with small amounts of cash, then that cash is used to buy things like luxury watches and iphones, then those items are taken overseas and sold. Seemingly the only effective way to solve this would be to ban purchasing highly resellable items with cash and requiring that cash to be deposited in to the system first.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
      You cannot have a transaction in cash of that size. Loundring is about converting the dirty cash back to normal money, but the idea is to force you to go through a bank
    • tony69 5mo ago
      In Italy, it’s illegal to pay in cash anything over 5000 euros
      • Gigachad 5mo ago
        Sure but presumably you could buy as many $4000 handbags and watches as you want. If it’s not being tracked it would be hard to pick up.
      • y-curious 5mo ago
        Ok, but 5 smurfs buying 5 €4999.99 watches is still €25k
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Tangurena2 5mo ago
    Italy has had some very widespread tax avoidance. Retailers have to use thing called "fiscal printers" to print receipts. These printers store data for the tax authorities to download. There are also fiscal police who would fine you (the customer) if they catch you coming out of a retail place with purchases and you can't show them a receipt.
• jaggederest 5mo ago
  POSWID* says that money laundering laws are intended mostly to keep the proles and other people within the system honest, while providing a clean and easy system for people with enough money or cachet to bypass it. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
• yieldcrv 5mo ago
  The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors through deputized financial intermediaries is new, and temporary. Outside of this social graph, where private cash transactions still exist, the state lacks power and relies on stigmatizing cash ownership, consumption, movement. This stigma is largely successful and ubiquitous but inconsequential to anybody that matters or has a lawyer of their own. Electronic settlement of funds since the 1970s has allowed for the state to leverage financial institutions for records and enforcement. Electronic settlement without institutions since the 2010s removes that power from the government and is merely a reversion to the mean. Any delay in the prevalence of this is both user-error, social stigma, and a government's unfamiliarity with the reality that their own constitutions and documents that organize the state are things that have to be updated to actually remove an expectation of privacy from finance. > We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. One major and necessary fallacy inside the social graph is that electronic settlement between institutions assumes that the deputized institutions have blessed the funds and user as not money laundered. Only the user and who they transact with can trigger an investigation by the government at this point, by reporting the money for taxes or in a large withdrawal to cash out of the social graph, without further laundering it. This user error is mostly mitigated as soon as cross border payments are done, because the next financial institution doubly assumes funds from another country's banks are clean. The banks and sovereignty become the washing machine inside the electronic settlement system. This is doubly important to realize, because it's the tip of the iceberg in brand sovereignty. One country's illegality is not another country's illegality. You can't simultaneously be for a stigma against withdrawing large amounts of cash, while considering the Communist Party's capital controls to be oppressive. Removing one capital control, blesses the other. This is a blind spot for most people, since they don't consider them to be the same things, but fortunately this cognitive dissonance highlights the reality. It is impossible to completely stigmatize and the capital routes around the stigma and all capital controls, unless the entire world is under a single totalitarian regime. All while only the edges, moving between physical cash and electronic system, and moving cash between borders and the electronic system, are policed, in what could really only be the ultimate hubris of expecting the state to be involved at all. And it's not just cash. Its assets too. The state is hoping for titled and electronic settlement of assets. In the last 30 years a systematic global dismantling of explicit "bearer assets" has been done, when the bearer assets were offered by the state. But this is also unsuccessful, as since the 2010s, the bearer assets created and settled without a financial intermediary have existed and been wildly popular. All capital controls have been obsoleted while they were never fully implemented to begin with. No matter whether that's the idea of your neighbor holding a lot of physical cash, or a subject of the Communist Party in another country circumventing capital controls you consider oppressive. This article covers the same points with a wildly contrived conclusion: To attempt to change anything in favor of the state being more effective at enforcing its invented crime of money laundering instead of curbing the actual illicit behaviors. For reasons that are assumed and unexplained, so it's impossible for me to change my view on. My view is simple - capital controls are dead and a waste of time. The article and both books it references actually agree on that. My other view is that the state should just do classic investigative work on illegal behaviors which means finding the people involved and subpoena-ing them, something it seems to have forgotten how to do in favor of relying on deputized intermediaries who are temporary, ineffective, and inconvenience just the law abiding.
• dustfinger 5mo ago
  Here are the last two sentences: > Governments don’t do anything about the status quo, for a number of reasons: it inconveniences them to look too deeply into the darker corners of their own financial systems, and they make money from printing their own currencies and don’t much care how that cash is used. But most of all, they don’t do anything about it because they haven’t got a clue. The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  Alternative to archive.ph Disable Javascript and CSS For example curl https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions \ |sed '1s/^/<meta http-equiv=content-security-policy content=\"default-src none\">/' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm There are also Firefox add-ons that can do this as well Or use a text-only browser links https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions links -dump https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions
  • Cider9986 5mo ago
    BPWC is good as well, but I would keep it in a separate browser profile.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
    To be clear, there are Firefox add-ons distributed at addons.mozilla.org that allow the user to add/modify/delete HTTP response headers and bodies One can use these to insert a Content-Security-Policy, either via HTTP header or <meta> tag, that disables Javascript and CSS Personally, I use a local forward proxy to insert HTTP response headers, not a browser add-on, for experimentation and learning As a matter of practice, I read HTML with a customised text-only browser that does not auto-load resources, nor does it interpret Javascript or CSS. There is no DNS prefetching or other nonsense. As such, a "Content Security Policy" is not necessary
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
    If the user chooses browser "add-ons" or "extensions" as their solution, then they can choose open source projects and compile the software themselves after reviewing the source code and modifying it, if necessary, to their satisfaction "Browser profiles" and other "browser features" created by developers working for Google or Mozilla, a Google partner, that are not reviewed and compiled by the user, are potentially compromised by conflicts of interest if used to protect users from online advertising If the user does not compile the browser themselves, and permits "automatic updates" (remote code execution), then Google or Mozilla can prevent users from using "extensions" or "add-ons" by changing the browser software As such, annd for various other reasons not mentioned, using "extensions", "add-ons" and "browser features" as protection from data collection, surveillance and advertising is not ideal In some cases it may be totally ineffective. In others it may actually subject the user to _more_ data collection, surveillance and advertising
• deleted 5mo ago
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• laszlojamf 5mo ago
  " Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who smuggles product across the border to the US. The drug in question would once have been marijuana, then cocaine, and is now likely to be fentanyl, which is cheap to manufacture and easy to conceal. The drugs are sold in the US for cash, which is used to buy, say, agricultural equipment. " Wouldn't the person buying the tractor in the US for $$$ have to show where that money came from? Can you show up to John Deere with over a million dollars _in cash_?
  • glitchc 5mo ago
    The short answer is yes. You can buy cars, trucks and tractors for cash. The more expensive the car, the easier it often is. Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.
    • dataflow 5mo ago
      > Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash. Cash? As in hundred dollar bills?
      • caspper69 5mo ago
        Yes, duffel bags full. But it doesn't take too many cash purchases that are not inline with your tax returns before somebody is going to start snooping around. edit: although sometimes, a lot longer than one might expect.
        • mikeodds 5mo ago
          Disappointly small bag to buy most cars with 100 dollar bills
        • dataflow 5mo ago
          > Yes, duffel bags full. Citation needed? Where did you hear that this is a routine occurrence? That seems risky for everybody involved, and it requires a report to the government from the seller.
• arttaboi 5mo ago
  Here's an anecdotal thought: AML laws surprisingly work well to discourage offline transactions by tax-paying citizens, helping maximize tax reporting and improve tax collection. As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid. With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.
    • Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
      I've mainly seen it in small businesses - e.g. food vendors - but instead they charge extra for using electronic payment methods. Also to offset the costs they're making on offering it I suspect, but it does encourage people to pay with cash.
      • Gigachad 5mo ago
        A card tx fee of around 1% is common. At 10% it’s tax evasion.
        • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
          If you sell items for $5 and the card charges e.g. 2.9% + $0.30, that's >11%. On top of that, merchants carry the risk of chargeback fraud or stolen cards, and in some industries that can be another double digit percentage by itself.
      • graemep 5mo ago
        > but instead they charge extra for using electronic payment methods. That is illegal in the UK. That is why many trades people here will accept bank transfers but not cards.
• dwd 5mo ago
  I always thought the TV show Ozark was fairly accurate in it's depiction of money laundering. The family would buy a small business that they could inject cash and cook the books with fake sales.
  • wutwutwat 5mo ago
    any tips based job; serving/waiting, stripping, bartending, etc. gig/service work. freelancer websites that offer escrow, etc. Shopify. Hell, github sponsorships. You don't even need a physical store these days, or a business for that matter. Cashapp even. The list is endless and it's easier than ever. Now I just need some dirty money to go through the hassle of cleaning
• photios 5mo ago
  In this day and age "money laundering" just means "not bending over and letting the state tax you to oblivion". TFA is just scare mongering. People need to learn about Bitcoin.
  • cyberax 5mo ago
    > People need to learn about Bitcoin. Indeed. Bitcoin is now a major player in the money laundering business. NFTs are so much better than fake pocelain!
    • photios 5mo ago
      > I can invalidate Bitcoin, by comparing it to NFTs. I'm sorry, that's not how it works.
      • MDCore 5mo ago
        It's not so much invalidating Bitcoin - Bitcoin is valid and effective. Unfortunately what it is extremely effective for is money laundering and tax evasion (which was what your original comment seemed to advocate for.)
      • cyberax 5mo ago
        Yes, it does. You just make a round-trip through one of the exchanges.
    • nout 5mo ago
      That's not true. Most money laundering is in USD and then stablecoins (USDT, etc). NFTs are a thing of the past and the big majority was not on bitcoin anyway. So no, bitcoin is not a major player. If you would completely eradicate bitcoin (which is not possible), you would solve (I'm guesstimating) 0.3% of money laundering.
  • Cider9986 5mo ago
    You might want to check out Monero. It's like Bitcoin but actually usable for purchases. And it's private.
• zuzululu 5mo ago
  It's very simple, there is more incentive for money laundering than there is fighting it. It's the same reason there are more lawyers working for large companies vs small guys. The invisible hand that determines the structure of our society.
  • HlessClaudesman 5mo ago
    In war the side that knows what they are fighting for generally wins.
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    Seems like the reason Australia dragged its heels on AML changes for property purchases. Propping the property market up was more important than stopping crime.
• seanhunter 5mo ago
  Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.
  • stdbrouw 5mo ago
    Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.
  • jcattle 5mo ago
    Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get. Just sentences like this: > This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...] So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an article, actually good writing just hits different.
    • pjc50 5mo ago
      This is the London Review Of Books. They will be one of the last bastions of non-AI writing, because they actually care.
      • Gigachad 5mo ago
        It’s depressing how hard it is to find anything worth reading on HN lately. Everything is either an advert or slop essay. The article here is outstanding.
    • conductr 5mo ago
      Not a fan of AI writing but I find sentences like that to be fluff and would prefer a more concise article overall. That would also have been my critique prior to AI and is the reason I only made it about half way through.
• cwillu 5mo ago
  Unrelated, but I love finding lower-case numbers in the wild! (Note the two and the zeros in “$20 billion to $80 billion.”)
  • layer8 5mo ago
    These are called text figures, as opposed to lining figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures
• bradley13 5mo ago
  First off, money laundering does not require cash. So the premise is a bit strange. Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people. Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity. This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.
  • drmathias 5mo ago
    AML laws enforce monitoring so that legitimate businesses have to block or report activity, assisting law enforcement in tracing said criminal activity. It's the most effective way. As the famous saying goes: follow the money. You're correct on the privacy implications. It's shocking how much data AML monitoring companies have collected about you, there's more data points than any single person could think up. These aren't entities owned by the government - they're private companies. Also yes money laundering does not require cash but I think the author is highlighting the scale of it. Most countries tax consumption a.k.a VAT and 'hidden transactions' such as cash transactions bypass that. You can be anti-anti-money-laundering but then you also either have to be a complete anarchist or completely anti-taxation and anti-data-collection by corporations and yet still have a reasonable argument for how this will result in the ability for society to have a government. I'm not saying the system is perfect - far from any means. However the utopia you describe seems infeasible to me.
    • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      > It's the most effective way. Its effectiveness is shockingly poor and rounds to zero: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1725366 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
• mike_hearn 5mo ago
  I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff. A few minor comments. My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were accepted without question or comment. To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance. You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist, because the state assumes that anything it can't see must automatically be suspicious. And there's so much street crime, and the police care so little about burglary, it would be very dangerous to hold such notes. But in Switzerland it's safe and the government doesn't try to wipe cash out, so paying with high value notes is common. (Although bank notes are in no way as private as people assume and can be tracked quite well, because they don't tend to circulate far.) This situation makes a mockery of the recommendation to fight crime by removing high value bank notes. The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care. I looked into the case of George Cottrell once. The case against Cottrell collapsed because it was founded on entrapment (the eight months was a plea deal in the usual American fashion, and doesn't mean much). It boiled down to undercover FBI agents asking Cottrell, "how could we launder money" and he explained how to do it, in the way anyone familiar with the topic could. He didn't make any offers to actually do it, didn't do it, and that's why "could be jailed for up to 20 years" turned into an eight month plea bargain to let prosecutors save face. Then after he was released he trolled US LE by writing a book called "How to launder money". Usually not given is the subtitle: "A guide for law enforcement and politicians". It's not written for criminals but people love to omit that detail. Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it and fear that by talking about it, they'll just teach more people how to do it. It's an infinite money glitch but in the real world. It's interesting that the UK thinks they solved it. I suspect they didn't, rather, enforcement collapsed elsewhere and it became easier to just go back to other ways of scamming the government.
  • jcattle 5mo ago
    I'm not suprised that in the swiss economy no one bats an eye at 1000 CHF bank notes. After all the swiss are historically known for being the classy alternative to launder and store your ill gotten gains from, for example, your stint as the dictator of an African country. But there has been some changes in recent years so I don't know how it is today.
• reconnecting 5mo ago
  The true crime is involving a multinational corporation in a transaction between two private individuals at the local market. I like cash because it's direct, and where possible I avoid paying by card because I don't want the merchant to pay fees to third parties. In Europe, most of the time, using cash doesn't imply avoiding taxes on the transaction, but having cash is essentially sovereignty.
  • marysol5 5mo ago
    FYI, handling cash has fees to "third parties" too. In a lot of cases it's a lot higher than just taking card.
    • humoctopus 5mo ago
      My business needs to insure cash that we keep at the shop in case we get robbed, but that amount is much much less than we pay in credit card fees. In other words, we would much prefer customers to pay with debit or cash.
      • buran77 5mo ago
        What about the extra costs of handling cash, the practical effort to count it, prepare it for transport (including bags, counters, and so on), transporting to the bank, increased security, possibly more cash registers, counterfeit detectors etc.? Overall is it usually more expensive to take credit cards than cash or just in particular cases?
        • anticorporate 5mo ago
          Retailer here: Most of these costs are fairly fixed. We have to have a safe, bags, armored transport, staff training on counterfeit detection, etc. whether the percentage of our sales in cash is 8% or 80%. The few costs that are variable are still far, far less than the processing fees. It's also worth noting there are also huge fixed costs for credit card transactions. We're currently upgrading our pinpads and it's been an absolute nightmare to get the right parts in just for physically connecting the damn things to our counters, we lost almost a whole day of backend POS access for our vendor to push a required update, and I'm looking at more fees to be able to support other types of cards which require POS certification. We strongly prefer our customers use cash.
• harrouet 5mo ago
  How can one write about money laundering without talking about crypto currencies ?
  • dandaka 5mo ago
    Going from crypto to fiat and back is an extremely monitored and regulated route. It might be an easy way to settle between counterparties, but a difficult one to launder.
  • ruthvik947 5mo ago
    but they did?
• DrScientist 5mo ago
  > I reckon the luxury watch trade is 80 per cent money laundering Found this quote interesting given Europes richest person is the head of a luxury brand company. I always wonder who was buying all this high end stuff - the concentration of wealth has created a more billionaires - but they aren't that many of them and there is only so many watches one person needs. It also may explain why China is struggling to establish it's own luxury brands - the money laundering prefers that cross border flow.
• ablation 5mo ago
  All of Bullough's books are worth your time and variously go deeper into this very subject.
  • futune 5mo ago
    I love "Let our Fame be Great", about the history of the peoples of the Caucasus. Strongly recommended.
• tasuki 5mo ago
  I guess I don't really understand it. I understand how a bank robbery leads to dirty money - the bank has the serial numbers. In what way is money from selling drugs "dirty"? Why does it even need laundering?
  • UltraSane 5mo ago
    Dirty means it comes from illegal activities. You need to create a plausible clean source of the money before you can safely spend it.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • tasuki 5mo ago
      Then I don't understand how the money from the sale of the agricultural equipment is "clean". Surely someone can think to ask: "where did you get the money to buy all that agricultural equipment?"
      • SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
        Someone can, and that's indeed a common way for criminals to get caught. But a bank won't let you open an account at all if you don't have an explanation that's at least plausible. How much further effort a criminal invests depends on how competent they are and how much they want to reduce the risk of getting caught by some review or another.
      • UltraSane 5mo ago
        "where did you get the money to buy all that agricultural equipment?" usually loans from banks. Farmers tend to have a lot of debt.
      • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        The value of something depends on its condition. Suppose a piece of equipment has a market value of $200k if it's working, but only half that if it's in need of major repairs. They go to a farmer and offer them $100k plus another $100k piece of equipment for the $200k one, but instead of listing it as a $200k transaction, they specify the condition of the expensive one as non-operational and list only the $100k in money. The farmer is happy because they get to write off a $100k loss on their taxes and get the other $100k piece of equipment off the books. The other party then claims to have repaired the $200k equipment even though it was never broken and sells it for $200k, thereby laundering $100k in dirty money. This is why attempts to prevent money laundering have extremely low effectiveness. All you need is two parties, one of which wants to get something of value off the books, the other other of which wants to get clean money on the books. They engage in an on the books transaction and an off the books transaction at the same time, account for the value of the off the books transaction in the price for the on the books transaction, and agree on a reason for that to have been the price which is plausible but hard to verify.
• alberth 5mo ago
  > I haven’t even mentioned gold, which is used all the time in criminal transactions, let alone cryptocurrency, the single biggest recent innovation in money laundering. Curious how that line is received within the HN crowd.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Anonyneko 5mo ago
    Considering my country of origin is using crypto for sanction busting at an enormous scale, I just take this line as absolute truth.
    • Matl 5mo ago
      Sanction busting is an interesting thing because states are sovereign so if one state imposes sanctions on another, it's not illegal for the sanctioned state to do everything to ignore/bypass them, unless we consider the sanctioning state to be somehow above others/source of truth for what's legal.
      • senderista 5mo ago
        Aka the USA
      • chadgpt3 5mo ago
        It's usually illegal in the counterparty's state. If I'm in the EU and I sell weapons to Iran, Iran isn't breaking Iranian law, but I'm breaking EU law. Iran is also breaking EU law but that's irrelevant to them the same way it's irrelevant to me that I break North Korean law all the time.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    It seems pretty obvious that cryptocurrency can be used to transfer funds. The question is whether this is actually an innovation or just method #373453 of doing the thing that was always possible a million other ways. Suppose someone has a million dollars in cash and wants to turn it into "clean" money in a bank account, or transfer it to another country. They pick any goods with a high cost to weight ratio and a third party sale value close to its store price, list them on any marketplace for a competitive price in the country they want the money to end up. When someone orders it from them, they use the dirty money to buy one at any retailer, ship it to buyer, get paid in clean money. When operating at scale they could even get the wholesale price for the goods and be turning a small additional profit from the operation. What does cryptocurrency add to this? Maybe slightly lower overhead or setup time? If it didn't exist, would they actually be prevented from laundering the money?
• greatgib 5mo ago
  Th guy says that they don't know where the cash is so it is "obviously" used for money laundering... But even for money laundering, the cash has to buy real things or it would be useless. So a total sack of bullshit. The kind or lobbyist that are paid to propagate lies and fear in order to justify new regulations that they would like to pass to have more control. Might also really probably be pushed by a big electronic payment corporation or one of the big banks that would like to ensure to have the income of the electronic transactions and not the cost of managing cash.
• applicative 5mo ago
  The writer argues that since $100 bills aren't much used in daily commerce, the 80% of circulating paper money in $100s must be used for crime. But it is obviously predominantly hoards. I know US $ are hoarded all across Latin America, and assume it is so elsewhere. Even in USA keeping them somewhere secure is a sort of hedge against banking collapse, if not against 'collapse of the dollar'. It is like gold or anything else. No apriori principle can tell you what the ratio of 'genuinely circulating' to hoarded money should be. When money was gold or silver, as Bagehot says, the hoards in e.g. France were huge, but those in Scotland, where there was enthusiasm for the banks, were tiny.
• userulluipeste 5mo ago
  It amuses me to see so much fuss about US $100 bill, considering that it's today's buying power is merely that of US $50 in 1970.
• nntlol 5mo ago
  Nowadays banks spy on normal people in the disguise of reporting to government about illegal activity. The people who are in the illegal game always have their own ways to hide money and that is so sophisticated that no one can know they have that much money so the spying only de-anonymize the common peoples. People do think bitcoin as option but nothing is private they also can be tracked by chainalysis.com One thing i know is private is Monero and its heavily censored and its not easy to get as of i know
  • chadgpt3 5mo ago
    Exchanges are banned from trading Monero, that makes it hard to get, but they can't really stop any private transactions, by the design. There are also onion sites that claim to swap one for the other.
• bentobean 5mo ago
  There are four vacuum repair shops on Cape Cod, and I’ve never seen anyone walk into any of them. I bet a big chunk of these funds are funneling through there.
• cantalopes 5mo ago
  The author is truly misguided. They are willing to sacrifice everyone's privacy under the excuse of fighting crime. But what else could you expect from a .co.uk website, they are experts on creating orwellian police state dystopias where everyone's every single move is monitored by a big brother
• cainxinth 5mo ago
  > If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions.