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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

> Can't be tracked

If that were true, then criminal elements wouldn't need to severely launder their money. It's a spectrum. Cash can be tracked, each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it, but the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

For more information I suggest getting some books on Terrorist Financing for the new meta. There is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service lady out there that wrote a whole book on it recently.

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I have to apologize, but you don't understand what the concept of "laundering money" means. It has nothing to do with tracking cash bills through serial numbers and it has never had anything to do with that.

"Laundering money" means that criminals make transactions in order to use cash they have from their illicit gains within the general economy, ie get it into a bank account and being able to declare where they got the money from.

> the reality is that if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

Not at all.

> motorcycle

It should be tracked to some degree. If the motorcycle is designed for street use (compared to track or dirt only) then there are several interested parties that need to know about some sort of transaction (insurance companies, DMV, state sales tax). There's some difference between "my insurance company knows I bought a GSXR" and "Visa knows I bought a GSXR", but less than you'd think. Even if the insurance company doesn't sell the data, you're likely to buy a new helmet with the Visa, increase browsing of motorcycle related webpages, or have some new speeding tickets.

You launder money to obscure the source of the cash. If you sell, for example, $200k worth of cocaine and you try to deposit it all through one of your fronts you will be caught.

This isn't difficult data science.

> each legitimate bill has a unique serial number, and yes, at least at present I haven't heard of private actors outside of those that service law enforcement tracking it

This isn't quite what you meant, but 20-ish years ago there was some crowd-tracking of Euro-bills.

The Euro was pretty new and people were excited about their banknotes showing up in other countries. Some people created a website where you could enter the serial number of your bills. Each serial number would have a tracking page in which places it showed up. It felt kinda cool to find a bill in your wallet that had visited a few other countries.

This reminded me https://www.wheresgeorge.com/ in the USA has been doing it a while as well. Had no idea it was still going strong all these years later.

Said website: https://EuroBillTracker.com/ Still operational!

> if you withdraw $8k to pay for a motorcycle and hand it to a guy that sells you the motorcycle and then deposits it straight into his own bank account then yes, this is quite obviously tracked.

Not really? As far as they know I could have spent that $8000 on a used car from another guy who then used that same money to buy a motorcycle. It's untracked for all the time it's not in the bank's hands.

Your statement is true as long as it stays out of the bank.

A motorcycle is a bad example, too, because there are licensing and registration requirements.

Like I said, this is a spectrum.

It obviously could have gone through an intermediary, but it usually doesn't for honest transactions. If one of the two people is already a person of interest to law enforcement, a warrant can be called up to figure out exactly what happened. Added to other sources of information, like the new registry of the car or motorcycle, a pretty reliable history can be constructed.

Don't think in binary. Think in continuums of likelihood. Also, this isn't a new concept. It was covered by HBO's The Wire many years ago.

are you suggesting that the serial number of every note you withdraw is registered against your account?

Modern ATM bill acceptors have sensors that can read serial numbers off of bills. I don't know whether it's been publicly stated that this occurs (and don't have any relevant personal knowledge, either), but the capability exists in the field.

I'm not sure if I'd be surprised either way. Either they don't track bills because it costs too much money, or they do track bills because they've found a way to monetize the data.

I scarcely use ATMs at this point because they won't hand out "large" bills. Inflation will be the real driver of cashless adoption, as the absurd number of $20 bills (and eventually, $100 bills) you need to pay for anything these days makes using cash too difficult for the average person.

Technology exists. Policy will vary.

https://www.amazon.com/NUCOUN-VC-7-Denomination-Counterfeit-...

> Money Counter Machine with CIS Technology: Equipped with one pair 200DPI Contact Image Sensors, scan and detect each counted bill like human eyes.. counts the quantity, reads the denomination and currency type, calculate the total amount at one time pass. Turn on serial number reading function to record serial number and all the counting details can be printed directly or exported to PC , very helpful for money tracking and management.

It looks to me like there's two different notions of cash tracking being discussed. One is tracking individual bills and the other is tracking transactions that involve exchanging goods or services for cash.

If the bank teller counts out the cash from a drawer and hands it to you, no. If he runs it through a counting machine, or you get the cash from an ATM, maybe?

I admit this is a bit of tin hattery. But that said at my bank the cash is distributed from machines that the teller uses. You go up, make a withdrawal, they type the amount into the machine and bills are counted out.

I am sure this offers several advantages to the bank. That said, however, maybe I can see it being straightforward for these machines, along with ATMs, to log bill serial numbers as they’re distributed.

I have no idea if this is being done, simply, at least at my bank there’s an avenue for it to happen. I would also freely admit that it would be an imperfect system. But still food for thought.

That lady's book is super expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Illicit-Money-Financing-Terrorism-Twe...

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