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Comment by nocobot | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm missing something this doesn't really seem to launder the money. Sure you have converted bitcoin to cash but the cash still doesn't look like legitimate income if you don't sell the books under your own name (which they clearly don't). So wouldn't it be easier to just sell bitcoin on exchanges like localbitcoin?

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> the cash still doesn't look like legitimate income

It would if you used your real identity for the "book" sales instead of fraudulent id. Then the proceeds are legitimate. Govt would have to prove you faked the sales, which is easy to hide.

It also doesn't seem that far fetched to actually write a 60 page book. One topic per book (civil war, computers, carbons, whatever) copy and paste wikipedia articles on various points related to the topic, some crappy pics, and bam, one day of work and you've got something you could claim to be a real book if anyone started investigating.

Or just publish one of these:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guitar

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Guitar.p...

I don't think it would be that easy to hide. It would be easy to dragnet and find suspects by getting Amazon to report % of purchases by gift card by author, and then following up manually with a few customers should be enough to filter out any false positives and snare the scammers.

But what are you going to charge them with? Where is the evidence? The wrongdoing is hidden in the gift card purchases which you can't actually tie to the faker seller.

If you live in a western country it isn't a very smart way to launder the money as you will eventually get caught. If you live in other places it is a way to move the money without it getting flagged. I'm guessing that local bitcoin probably isn't popular in N. Korea or China.

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