3 ms·

Exactly. The OP may want to look into what happened to E-Gold.

• mahmud 17y ago
  What happened to E-Gold is that they tried to be hereos to their clientele and went out of their way to refuse to cooperate with Uncle Sam. Opening a foreign bank account and calling yourself a foreign entity does not save you; Saddam and Noreaga each owned an entire country :-) What he can do is what most freelancing websites do: show tangible products or services changing hands; make sure the amounts stay low, make sure you're not paying out U.S. citizens without reporting their income, etc. A tangible good or service would be something whose price is market dictated and doesn't seem too outrageous, the delivery of which you control. It's OK to facilitate the sale of a domain name for up to $1000, and require that the seller wait a certain number of days, then transfer to a U.S. or EU bank. However, it's not OK to setup an auction room for impossiblystupiddomainthatnoonewouldbuy.com and have one buyer start bidding at $10k. That's a rigged auction. It might be far easier to setup an escrow service (if you can even survive the bad name the escrow industry has) and just deal with people in the U.S., taking SSNs from all the payees. We tried something like this a while back but it wasn't worth the trouble.
  • secret 17y ago
    You make a good point about controlling the delivery of a tangible good. That may get around some of the regulation that applies to money transmitters, but either way I think this type of business is going to require some rather expensive lawyers to review.