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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 y
by 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 agoDoes 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 agoI 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 agoOh so it was raised back to a higher amount
- iririririr 5mo agowithdrew 2-4k rent for a few months in 23 and never saw any cops.
- wmf 5mo agoIn other words, the Italian police are flooded with more reports than they could possibly investigate.
- rectang 5mo agoA great opportunity for selective enforcement!
- wmf 5mo agoAlso 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 agoPresumably 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 agoYou 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 agoActually 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 agoYes, 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 agoThat 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 agoYou 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 agoIn Italy, it’s illegal to pay in cash anything over 5000 euros
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Tangurena2 5mo agoItaly 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.