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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

The laundering part is easy. A guy has $1M need to clean up. Release a $1000 app under account A. Buy the app 1000 times with account B, C, D, ... Account A earns legit money.

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What about the 30% comission the app stores take?

What's the going rate for money laundering? :P

Well, the money was illegal to begin with.

That does seem steep. The main article indicates methods that I suspect don't involve a 30% cut.

Nothing wrong with losing a little bit of money to make a lot of money. Even Pablo Escobar had to write off 10% of all his money due to rats eating it. I feel like these people are ok with giving Google/Apple a 30% cut if it means a platform is provided for them to make the other 70%

> Even Pablo Escobar had to write off 10% of all his money due to rats eating it.

I didn't think this was true, but your statement checks out. Wow!

> "Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10% of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost," Escobar wrote.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/pablo-escobar-and-rubber-band...

You're making it sound like the credit card companies are idiots. If a huge portion of their stolen cards are buying an obscure app with a $1000 price tag, they're going to notify the authorities.

Laundering money means someone is using their own dirty money in a clean transaction, not further stealing others' money. This is all happening after the initial theft has taken place.

Credit card companies don’t have product level insight. They would just see payments to “Apple Inc.,” hardly a rare occurrence for any customer.

Why would the credit card companies even want to stop this? For every transaction they are earning processing fees, the only thing they need is a small amount of plausible deniability to shed any legal liability. They are basically being paid to look the other way.

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