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Comment by thr0waw4yz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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