Hacker News Reader

Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

Give me a single scenario where money laundering should be considered legal.

I think the actual money laundering should be illegal. What bothers me is that, in chasing money laundering cases, it makes what is supposed simple things, very painful. I'm US lawful permanent resident, but European citizen too. Now, because of US regulations, pretty much ALL European banks do not want anything to do with me. If I ask to open a bank account, they'd rather not to. If I want to open an investment account in EU, they pretty much say "we do not want your business". If I transfer money from MY account in EU into MY account in US, I most likely have to JUSTIFY it. If I ask for a wire transfer, some foreign financial institution respond "oh, you are a US person, we don't want to deal with the reporting requirements". It's like the fight of terrorists: I think we all agree we should prevent the next 9/11. But when you have to pass through TSA, you cannot bring your laptop, you need to handover all your passwords, etc - even though terrorism is "illegal", you wonder if we are fighting it right.

Money laundering is not the term we should be using. Money laundering only applies where the source of money is dirty.

I can give you many examples where "having at least $10,000" should be considered legal. Money laundering is evidence of a crime, it should not be a crime itself.

Is it illegal to have $10,000? If you're referring to financial reporting requirements, the law is just that the bank has to report when you make large deposits (and I think withdrawals as well) it's not a crime, though it is a crime to intentionally deposit multiple amounts less than $10,000 to try and evade the reporting requirements. If you're referring to civil asset forfeiture or something, then I agree work needs to be done to reign in the practice.

It can be illegal doing things even with less than $10K at a time, due to structuring laws. Your business insurance only covers up to $10K cash, so you make deposits of $9500 each week? Cool, enjoy your legal problems.

And you should not have to report the money you carry if you, for instance, travel.

In literally every single scenario? It should never be illegal to conceal your actions. Yeah, this makes prosecutors' jobs harder. That's the cost of a free society.

So, injecting illegally-gotten dollars into a business to inflate revenue and so you can spend it shouldn't be illegal? Lying on federal documents and committing fraud?

If my business wants to sell me a token for $5M, that should be my right. The real crime is how I got that $5M, not that I decided to put it into another business.

Where's the fraud? If I want to run a pizza shop and record a million orders to myself that I never actually deliver, so what?

If you record a million orders to yourself, that's not money laundering. Though, unless you already paid tax on that money you're using to purchase the "pizzas," you are committing tax evasion. Because you're essentially giving pre-tax dollars to your private company.

Until the million orders are paid with by the money I made illegally?

I mean yeah. Money laundering is just tax evasion and fraud with illegally gotten money. We treat it differently than regular tax evasion because it's a more serious crime, much like how pre-meditated homicide is treated differently than regular homicide. Does that make sense?

No. You've got the tax evasion (if any - certainly you could set it up so you're paying the full taxes) plus the illegal activity, so two crimes already there.

In fact, it's less serious for society if you launder it, because then you're paying taxes on money you wouldn't otherwise pay taxes on.

"Money laundering" is illegal by definition, so this is a meaningless question. Try rephrasing it.

I meant a scenario of an activity currently considered money laundering the OP thinks should not be illegal. "should" is the operative word here. Does that make things more clear?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com