3 ms·

If you want a fun summer project that will get you your very own casefile with various law enforcement and financial regulators: Come up with a program that le

by olefoo 11y ago

If you want a fun summer project that will get you your very own casefile with various law enforcement and financial regulators: Come up with a program that lets users manage multi-currency transactions with a basket of currencies ( game currencies, paypal 2 paypal balances, (bit|alt)coin, reddit gold, odesk credit, store credit balances (gift cards), und so weiter). Extra credit if you can add constraint solving to defeat traffic analysis and reporting limits. Technically legal to develop and give away if you are a US citizen; but probably a really bad idea to run as a web service unless you really like being a test case in federal court or want to become a spy for the FBI.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
Sorry I am missing something. Multi currency transactions between wow currency and Starcraft currency? So I want to buy a spaceship using my guild gold? But that implies some sort of exchange ? You could make a peer to peer thing for the actual transaction but the bid/ask must be public surely? Throw in Walmart gift cards - aha do I see it now - all these things are convertible from dollars and so can be used to launder money ... If so then I guess I don't care about an open exchange - I am going to own both sides of the exchange as a drug lord anyway. But I presume this is less exciting as a money laundering setup as it is all traceable? Is that it?
- olefoo 11y ago
  Well, anyone picking this up for anything other than intellectual curiosity is probably not a good actor. I imagine that if you were serious about something like this you'd probably recruit a number of intermediaries to receive payments and acquire goods for you since shipments of high-thread count sheets are less likely to draw adverse scrutiny than significant flows of negotiable currency. If you want the real drug lord version of this read up about the Peso Exchange [0] which is a form of repatriating money from illegal proceeds that will never go away. And rather than thinking of it as a strictly money laundering tool, think of it as enabling the "unsurveilled marketplace", not just drugs but the trade in items that are restricted in some jurisdictions, or for which specific efforts are being made to delegitimize preparatory to banning ( think tractor repair diagnostics without the snitch chip, or radar/lidar detectors, or any of a number of tools that could be banned as circumvention devices ). The thing is that we all know that Anti-Money-Laundering efforts are inherently corrupt [1] and that only the little people ever go to jail for it. 0. http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/advisory/html/advis12.html http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/advisory/html/advis12.htm... 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves-1-9b-drug-money-laundering-accord http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge...

by olefoo 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

Sorry I am missing something. Multi currency transactions between wow currency and Starcraft currency? So I want to buy a spaceship using my guild gold? But that implies some sort of exchange ? You could make a peer to peer thing for the actual transaction but the bid/ask must be public surely? Throw in Walmart gift cards - aha do I see it now - all these things are convertible from dollars and so can be used to launder money ... If so then I guess I don't care about an open exchange - I am going to own both sides of the exchange as a drug lord anyway. But I presume this is less exciting as a money laundering setup as it is all traceable? Is that it?

olefoo 11y ago
Well, anyone picking this up for anything other than intellectual curiosity is probably not a good actor. I imagine that if you were serious about something like this you'd probably recruit a number of intermediaries to receive payments and acquire goods for you since shipments of high-thread count sheets are less likely to draw adverse scrutiny than significant flows of negotiable currency. If you want the real drug lord version of this read up about the Peso Exchange [0] which is a form of repatriating money from illegal proceeds that will never go away. And rather than thinking of it as a strictly money laundering tool, think of it as enabling the "unsurveilled marketplace", not just drugs but the trade in items that are restricted in some jurisdictions, or for which specific efforts are being made to delegitimize preparatory to banning ( think tractor repair diagnostics without the snitch chip, or radar/lidar detectors, or any of a number of tools that could be banned as circumvention devices ). The thing is that we all know that Anti-Money-Laundering efforts are inherently corrupt [1] and that only the little people ever go to jail for it. 0. http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/advisory/html/advis12.html http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/advisory/html/advis12.htm... 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves-1-9b-drug-money-laundering-accord http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge...