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Laundering Money Online: A review of cybercriminals’ methods
- yoblin 13y agoI think there is some confusion in this paper about laundering vs transferring money.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- toadi 13y agoI think you're correct. The title confused met with the content. It's all about transferring money from one place to another and a way to cash it out and use it. It's actually still "black" money because it's not laundered yet. Laundering is when I can justify to the IRS that my fund are earned legitimated eg. no criminal activity AND I paid my taxes on it.
- akanet 13y agoI especially enjoyed a fraudster's description of his son's profits in World of Warcraft: In 2006 or 2007 my son sold 80,000 gold to IGE and they paid him $70 per 1000g. That's right, $5,600 directly to his PayPal account. He got most of the gold through selling as he types this: "aq20 spellbooks from guild bank around level 60"
- dcc1 13y agoWhats surprising is that PayPal didnt close his account as soon as such a sum arrived
- mikesena 13y agovery interesting
- juskrey 13y agoHonestly speaking, this paper has nothing to do with criminal money laundering. Just a snapshot of third-grade forum with script kiddies out of inner circles. Money laundering is when several fake corporations established and begin transfering shitpiles of botnet and card money from Baltic states to "isles" to such an extent that whole countries are scared of opening accounts for "internet startups" after that.
- jnand 13y agoyeah, I just now learned arxiv isn't peer reviewed. Considering magnitude helps with perspective. However, is it far fetched to think illicit funds might finance the development of a virtual economy, in a mobile game perhaps, that could be used to launder money? Seems theres a need for fraud detection practices to extend into virtual economies as well.
- gizzlon 13y agoHowever, is it far fetched to think illicit funds might finance the development of a virtual economy, in a mobile game perhaps, that could be used to launder money? I don't think so.. The lure is that it can be fast and automated, and that using new technology will help avoiding the feds.
- juskrey 13y agoWhy bother? Any financial attorney in any part of the world knows how to cash or launder money, or, at least, will point to someone who can (for a small mediator fee).
- brazzy 13y agoI wouldn't dismiss it that quickly. The thing is, what criminal money laundering "is" can change drastically when new opportunities present themselves. It does need to scale, but if it can be reasonably automated (or delegated to low- or unpaid grunts, like the work-from-home scams), individual transaction size can be quite small, and that may even be preferable.
- driverdan 13y agoThis is chump change. No one needing to launder decent amounts would bother with these methods. It takes too much work to launder too little money.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI sort of flashed back to the scene in Office Space where they try to get the guy selling magazine subscriptions to tell them how to launder money :-). Everyone knows the first step to laundering money is to open an Italian restaurant :-)
- shitlord 13y agoInteresting read. I did not expect online games to be up there. For a lot of games, there really isn't much of a profit to be made, considering that all the chinese gold farmers are competing with one another and making the real money (the exchange rate in MapleStory is awful and you would make more money panhandling). A lot of these methods seem to require a lot of work to clean a little bit of money, though. I would wager that actual drug lords use something a little more clever in practice; after all, that's what they pay their lawyers for.
- dcc1 13y agoWhen was this written, both Silk Road and Liberty Reserve have been closed rendering this rather useless