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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever heard the phrase "money laundering"?

Yes, and it's almost always used as a vague catch-all

There are some resources out there if you search for the stages of money laundering. Companies that have to fight money laundering have to know what it looks like and what they can do to catch it.

The stages are Placement, Layering, and Integration.

Here’s one source that may help explain:

https://www.stpaulschambers.com/stages-of-money-laundering-e...

But how does any of that apply to the supposed "Steam purchases with stolen credit cards by way of Bitcoin" scheme?

1. Stolen money is used to buy bitcoin

2. Bitcoin is obfuscated by purchasing things online with it

3. Those online assets can be sold for cash

The obfuscation in step 2 seems very superficial. Like, is the IRS not going to ask where you got your stacks of Steam codes from?

Your bank will probably be the first one to ask, lying is a felony. (As is money laundering, of course)

Also Valve will be looking for this too, as required by their bank.

This is an incredibly unrealistic money laundering scheme, entirely fabricated by mr_cyborg.

The truth is that the “fraudulent transactions” here are double-spends, because Steam was accepting 0-conf payments in an unsafe way.

> This is an incredibly unrealistic money laundering scheme, entirely fabricated by mr_cyborg.

Using stolen money to buy gift cards, using those gift cards to buy real things and then selling those real objects or licenses or accounts after the fact is a well known process. Substituting "bitcoin" or any cryptocurrency for "gift card" is neither unreasonable nor unrealistic.

This only makes sense where “stolen money” is money that you don’t actually control, such as stolen credit cards where the transactions will inevitably be charged back. In that case it does make sense to buy and sell gift cards in order to “cash out” the money.

This does not make any sense in the context of bitcoin.

1. Make a bunch of illegitimate money

2. Release some shitty game on steam that no one will play

3. Buy millions of copies of said shitty game with your illegitimate money using Bitcoin

4. Your illegitimate money is now revenue from your shitty game and can be taxed (Profit)

How can you launder money on steam? Buying swords or funny hats? Buying hundreds of games and then never play any?

Buy TF2 keys and trade them to another account? Or CSGO skins? It's incredibly liquid and there are third party marketplaces for cashing out

They are not more liquid than BTC itself. Why not just sell the BTC directly?

I guess games and cosmetics sell easier than crypto scams.

Bitcoin is so liquid you can cash out millions within seconds. Source: I've done it

You got it backwards. It is much easier to sell crypto "scams" than games and cosmetics. At any given time, there are a lot of people ready to buy your BTC. For games and cosmetics, not so many.

Speculative theory -

- You steal a credit card.

- Buy BTC with said credit card.

- Use BTC to buy Steam cosmetics that you already own and Steam converts that BTC to USD.

You now have effectively used a stolen credit card to convert its value to cold hard cash that is not traceable, or at least requires several hoops to jump through to figure out who stole the card.

Why would they go over Steam?

If they already have their assets in BTC they could simply put them in a mixer.

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