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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always thought this would be a money laundering opportunity. Sell an app for an outrageously high price, buy App Store gift cards with dirty cash, and then buy your app from yourself. You could almost certainly get an army of cheap labor to buy your app on their phones if you gave them a gift card worth say 110% of the app’s cost. You’d lose a pretty big chunk to App Store fees and taxes but it’d be clean.

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There are a few common scams that directly demand Google Play or iTunes gift cards from the victim. The most depressing one I've heard about is a phone scam where the caller claims to be from the IRS and demands that the victim pay some overdue taxes in the form of gift cards. This is common enough that I've seen notices specifically warning about it on the gift-card displays at drug stores. The fact that this scheme apparently works says a lot about America's civics education.

I disagree about the civic education. Everyone knows the IRS doesn't take gift cards, it's more about taking advantage of people when they have a panic response. You get a call from the government saying you're going to jail if you don't pay them right now, you may panic. If you panic, what are the odds that you're going to get yourself under control before you do something stupid?

I've seen this happen to a very bright coworker of mine, it's all about taking advantage of human fear.

> Everyone knows the IRS doesn't take gift cards

If that were the case then nobody would fall for the scam.

That's true. (And this is tangential anyway.) I do think that a greater familiarity with how the government works could help in that moment of panic, reducing the self-doubt of "I don't think this sounds right, but what if I'm wrong?"

To follow up on the other response to your comment, remember that for these scammers, this is their job, and they do it over and over again, day in and day out. They know what strategies work and what doesn't, and manipulating people to doing something stupid is their whole goal.

They are experts in scamming people, and the people they are calling are not experts in detecting scams.

It is important to encourage people to trust their Spidey sense, most people know something seems off when these calls come in. But we need not trash people for falling for scams.

I've seen people doing this with Turo.

Sorry, but if you're renting out your Chrysler 300C at $550/day and it's booked (not just unavailable) for weeks at a time...

... that's not legitimate. Someone is laundering money, there. The best bit is if you're coordinating it, you don't even lose access to the vehicle, because there's no verification that an exchange of property took place.

That's a pretty clever idea and an easy way to clean $200k a year.

Yeah but what about the other half of the transaction? That person needs to have identity verified and a license in the system. That doesn’t sound like a good starting point to a laundering scheme.

If you're a dealer?

"Sign up for this site. I'll give you $5,000 to put in your bank account. You're going to 'rent' my car, except I won't actually give you my car. In exchange, I'll give you a discount on your drugs for the next six months."

Drug addicts in the throes of withdrawal, or 'savvier'? Absolutely would go for such "deals" like this. And really, it's probably fairly low risk - the worst that is likely to happen is that Turo disables your account.

Does Turo accept gift cards? Not clear how the cash gets turned legit. Thx

I think it would work if the scammer put their car up as the rental and used a fake/stolen identity to overpay for it. As long as the fake buyer doesn't get linked to the scammer's real identity, the proceeds will look legit.

It's 30% for App Store I attended a money laundering course and that was about the going rate for large value sums.

> I attended a money laundering course

Hmmm? Hopefully from an anti-laundering perspective, right?

After the 30% Apple takes, you still have to pay tax.

you mean that launderers are typically taking 30% cut from dirty amount to launder the money?

Their "profit" would probably be much less than that - they have their own overheads for doing the actual laundering.

I wouldn’t surprised if money laundering takes a 50% off your pre-laundered money. It’s a funny world when some people are paying to avoid taxes and some paying to pay taxes!

I think deniability of criminal activity is the main goal, rather than tax evasion.

Laundering money makes you pay taxes, not evade them.

It has been suggested that Amazon has been used for this, too.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...

What are the counterfeiters doing if not exploiting the certainty that Amazon will provide the absolute least amount of oversight their lawyers can defend some years from now...

https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...

Except it'd be fully traceable to you if it was discovered. Not to mention it probably sticks out like a sore thumb analytics wise.

> to you

you mean, to your fake identity??

It's probably still easier (and with less loss) to sell $500 gift cards for $450 on eBay

I've sold Amazon and Best Buy gift cards for more than face value on eBay.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/6uypt5/what_to_spend...

Probably more obvious though if you're moving a ton of gift cards on eBay.

Seems like that'd be a tricky proposition. There are a lot of people who would be happy to buy your $500 gift cards at $450.

But does this scale ? People seeking to launder money reckon in large sums.

I'd agree. should I ever have thought about ways to launder money, it's the ability to scale, not so much the % that's important.

Why even bother with changing the price

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