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Comment by kumarski | Hacker News Reader

Most people never want to acknowledge the sheer scope and scale of Paypal and Square's Cash app's usage as large scale money laundering, drug trafficking, and prostitution tooling. (and much more)

They didn't really even try to stop it in the early days. You could setup an injectable immunomodulator merchant account in under 10 minutes with Square. People started entire pill mills using Square and Paypal. It was wild!

Similar to Turo who allowed the vehicles of their users to be used by weak KYC'd users. You never knew who was actually driving the vehicle.

I had loads of interesting conversations with Ex San Quentin prisoners, was riveting to listen to some of them talk about the crimes committed with all the fintech startups. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

Paypal/Square Mafia's used cheap pension money of VC's to take their vig.

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> Most people never want to acknowledge the sheer scope and scale of Paypal and Square's Cash app's usage as large scale money laundering, drug trafficking, and prostitution tooling. (and much more)

How do you arrive at that conclusion? How does it compare to other means of payment?

I don’t doubt that it is used for criminal activities. But I doubt that the scope is extra ordinary.

> conversations with Ex San Quentin prisoners

I heard Maddoff was involved with NASDAQ. Does it imply NASDAQ is a fraud?

You could say the same about cash. The acceptable amount of crime in a healthy society is more than zero.

The criminal laughed when I said the same thing to him. His response was "You're just an analyst behind a computer, I moved weight. Paypal was a godsend. Cash was painful."

Go hit the street, talk to ex-cons and white collar criminals, your view is simplistic and lacks depth of on the ground reality.

Perhaps his first sentence lacks depth, but his second one certainly doesn't.

But then you're talking to people who got caught. Of course PayPal makes it easier to handle money, but it also leaves a big paper trail.

How is this a refutation of the notion that the ideal amount of crime is nonzero?

What is an "an injectable immunomodulator merchant account"?

Something that should take longer than a few minutes to setup a merchant account for.

immunomodulators are a class of drugs, eg steroids. Many users of them need very regular doses, so frequent repeat sales is very explainable.

I'm assuming this is used as a cover since it explains away "drug paraphenalia" like needles.

under any compliant diligent process, it would not take minutes to set this up.

CashApp was a haven for criminal leverage of the homestead act-types.

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