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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

Of course they did. Crypto and NFTs are some of the easiest ways to money launder now of days. This represents some of their biggest clientele.

Terrorists love crypto.

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> Terrorists love crypto.

Please keep such low-effort hyperbole off HN. It's just so unnecessary and contributes so little.

[some group you dislike uses thing everyone has access to] is just not a useful statement.

What do we do now, ban all crypto currencies to force 'Terrorists' back into using cash?

Has terrorism gone up since cryptocurrencies came around? Did Bin Laden have access to crypto?

I'm not even a big fan of cryptocurrencies and think that the environmental impact of BTC is a heck of a lot worse than 'terrorists' possibly, potentially using it.

But I just don't understand what you were trying to achieve by throwing such an incendiary statement into the discussion with so little evidence to back it up.

I would imagine that OPs could be thinking of the recent story (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59990477) about North Korean stealing $400m of crypto.

It seems reasonable to suggest that groups who want to avoid scrutiny by various authorities would make use of a system which isn't covered well by standard regulators who are under the control of those authorities.

Additionally there are a number of crypto currencies who provide anonymous transactions (e.g. Monero) which is obviously going to attract people who want to move money covertly.

Terrorists would be one example of such groups of people.

A more accurate view would be that crypto cannot conform to laws that prevent terrorists from making transactions, so it's a good method for terrorists to transfer funds

Or paying cash in germany for a house.

Mafias love this

There are laws about large sums of money.

tiert mit der Frage, warum der Immobilienkauf in bar nicht endlich verboten wird, antwortete Scholz: Bargeld sei eben beliebt. Und zwar zu Recht. Es reiche, dass Immobilienmakler verdächtige Bargeldtransaktionen bei der zuständigen Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) melden müssten. Dabei weiß auch der Minister: Dort stapeln sich 46 000 unbearbeitete Geldwäscheanzeigen. Die Prüfung einer Verdachtsmeldung kann Monate dauern. Bis dahin ist das verdächtige Geld längst verschwunden.

That's a different matter. I don't think the money actually disappears, does it? In a real estate transaction, it simply changes hands. It might be harder to trace, but if there's no trace, it can be assumed illegal.

Houses leave a trail, and they can be easily seized at a later date if evidence turns up. Not saying it doesn't happen (obviously it does) but there's more to catch than with crypto currency.

This is flat wrong, Crypto is one of the hardest places to launder money. This comment betrays a lack of understanding of how it works at even the most basic level..

So in this weeks crypto.com hack the attackers appear to have moved $30m through tumblers to launder the money (https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-com-breach-may-be-wort...), doesn't feel like they found it that hard to do.

To put that in context laundering $30m in a country with even semi-decent Financial regs, like the (mainland) UK would take some doing. It's possible but it'd require more work than that.

Sending crypto through a mixer isn't money laundering. You still need to effectively launder it afterwards to say - buy a house from it. Mixing is just the first step to cover the tracks after committing a financial crime.

Why do you need to move it out of crypto to launder it? Laundering is concealing the source of funds to avoid it being associated with a criminal activity. You can run it through a tumbler then use the proceeds to buy an NFT, the coins used will appear to be clean.

If you're feeling fancy you could then re-sell the NFT, no need to touch fiat.

You need to provide origin of funds for purchases exceeding a few thousand bucks (depending on jurisdiction). At some point you would wanna sell the NFT to buy something from it.

I mean sure, there is the dark web, or face to face trading... If you're into that.

I'm guessing that very much depends on the jurisdiction. Those people that took $30m this week and all the previous thefts this year alone, they all had a plan for how to move that money and I've not seen many of them get caught...

According to https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-scam-revenu... - scammers took in $7.7b in 2021 alone, if they couldn't do anything with those funds, doubtful they'd go the effort of stealing them :)

Say you have controll of wallet A that's clean and never used, and wallet B that has 30M of dirty crypto.

You 1. mint a NFT with wallet A. Then 2. Sell the NFT to wallet B. You then deposit the proceeds into coinbase as its legitimate earnings on your NFT artwork.

If you want to get creative you can do multiple buy and sells between a collection of wallets to reduce suspicions.

Laundering is

* Placement

* Layering

* Integration

A mixer is layering and integration as a service

This isn't particularly true, there are a lot of details to how KYC/AML for crypt works under the hood for that escape the discussion usually and leave gaping laundering holes. Crypto has its own equivalent of trad-fi shell companies to enable laundering, and it's a bit of a miracle for the space that these details haven't surfaced yet. I'm hoping they don't until the space is much more meshed into regulated finance, such that not much can be done about it.

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