Just to be clear, this is a step by step process for how to launder money, right?
In any case as your lawyer might tell you: if the origin is illicit it is money laundering. If the origin is not illicit then its not money laundering.
The irony being that it is the onus of the accuser to determine the origin, and if you do it right that is not possible to know in any scenario. Typically money laundering then is a tacked on charge, after other clear evidence is already known, to help ensure a conviction.
But really at this point, its probably better if your public resources weren't spent on flagging transactions in the first place, and if the private sector was not burdened with doing this work for the state.
It is if done for purposes of e.g. avoiding taxes or purchasing illicit goods.
That said, obfuscation per se is not illegal in most jurisdictions.
yes, people need to be aware of the universe of illicit origins. When I was working for the US government most of the people indicted under these laws (structuring, avoiding reporting thresholds, and then obfuscation so money laundering) were not terrorists or drug dealers. They were people like landlords freaking out because a tenant was suing them and they wanted to move their money without triggering a real or imagined $10,000 threshold. Whoops structuring is illegal straight to jail and we’ll take the money too! Tenant lawsuit still pending lol.
All while HSBC completely undermined the ‘purity’ of the licit financial system in the tune of billions over many years on behalf of the LITERAL CARTEL. Guys, 9/11 wasn’t that expensive to pull off, and today’s compliance measures wouldnt have flagged those wire transfers, so who is this for?
Stigmatizing the whole concept of having money and moving money has been an expensive and unnecessary and fruitless exercise. While increasing the costs of offering a financial service.
Non-political checks on the power of the state, like cash and its electronic corollary, private digital currencies, are needed in case of the failure of the political system to prevent the state from becoming oppressive.
An institution like physical cash can be powerful/deeply-embedded enough to survive totalitarian governments.
No. The obfuscation of licitly-acquired funds used for illicit purposes is still money laundering.
And it can't be, as long as fiat money exists. There's no tracing involved in passing notes around. The only times fiat transactions become suspicious is if you try and cross a border with a lot of cash or valuables on hand, which is where crypto comes in because it knows no borders. This makes law enforcement nervous.
I'm sure that besides crypto there's many ways to move large amounts of money or valuables across borders though. The rich do it, they just set up shell companies and pay licenses for intellectual property, paying a token amount of corporate taxes.
I'd like to have some anonymous money just in case the future gets really dark, but I'm not sure if it's wise to flag myself as a BTC purchaser that changes to XMR.
stop using surveillance coins to begin with and just use Monero natively instead of as a conduit
In the mean time pollute the pool by doing more lawful transactions in monero, monero is half as old as bitcoin and has only been used on darknet markets for half of that due to its older user experience challenges
Just swap to the more fungible asset. Its a flight to liquidity the market always chooses that.
The state just figured out how to use transparent blockchains as a tool a decade late and the market has already moved on
The ROI won’t be great but you’ll have virgin coins to do what you want with.
even in hot climates where power isn't cheap enough, buying digital asset mining computers to breakeven or even take a 5-8% loss is the best way to convert any amount of money from that local economy into the global digital economy.
Of course, if the future is dark enough for a list of everyone who has ever bought XMR to be compiled, then your name would be on it, along with mine.
If you're worried about that, I suppose you could distribute the XMR to a bunch of different addresses over some length of time. (All addresses you control, unbeknownst to the authorities.) Then if they do hunt you down you have a plausible story that you spent it all.
For real money, hire someone who knows what they're doing.
Not really, you need to be able to justify to the tax authority how you got in possession of any amount of assets you have and prove you pay taxes on it.
So if a large amount of money eventually show up in your bank account (or you buy a house or any other "visible" asset) and it is not compatible with your previous tax returns it is likely the tax authority will notice it and at that point you are fried
Reread that paragraph and dont skip it this time.
You run a very successful fly-by-night VPS service paid for only in crypto. There is a decent sized market for that by the way. Too bad most of your customers are fake, anyway be diligent and actually mimic your customer behavior over TOR.
Run a subscription service.
Figure it out. Some to all of your customers will be fake because it will just be you making more accounts and paying yourself.
Report taxes on your wildly successful SaaS cloud business.
Assuming you even want govbucks, you deposit the clean crypto into your business and personal bank accounts.
No different than cash based services except its online/digital native and not constrained by local market liquidity and brick and mortar overhead.
Usually they do that when they stumble upon them during tax/laundering investigations, but they'll prosecute anything.
And isn't it easier to simply cash out XMR you've allegedly mined back in 2014? Long-term held. cost basis zero, capital gains rate 20% max in the US. That's even better than the 21% corporate income tax.
Privacy and tax evasion are not identical..
the licit private transactions are indistinguishable from illicit
Edited to add: I’ve heard of drug dealers doing it. Whether it’s true or not I can’t say.
That’s the point of criminalizing all options
Or just avoiding an easy conviction under tax evasion laws?
But they also were trying to bust him for evasion because he declared zero income and lived a visibly lavish lifestyle. The government was gathering evidence on his spending to estimate his income and how much he evaded.
You can't sustainably solve that problem by simply paying lots of tax on magic illegal money, especially not in today's interconnected world. Laundering is core to the solution.
not paying taxes on illicit activities = tax evasion and likely discovery of illicit activity in criminal investigation = FAIL
money laundering = illegal if the government has determined the source is illicit = FAIL
those are the options and deterrents.
if you money launder with proper obfuscation, you wind up with money that you do pay taxes on and will never trigger an investigation.
BTW when you declare your crypto gains, the IRS not only does not care about the source, there's not even a place on the forms to list the source.
That might change in the future though.
You want to unlink the transactions