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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Seems... particularly inefficient. I would've thought there were easier ways.

It has the added benefit of both laundering money and acting as advertisement for criminal gangs. Most of the largest rappers were associated with gangs and the artists even got invited to interviews and got played on radio. Plausibly all this made possible by getting the initial publicity through Spotify.

Unless these gangs have found a way to make money on Spotify, which isn't available to the average artist then I can't imagine it being particularly effective.

The scheme makes no sense to me, but in society like the Swedish where banks are heavily regulated and monitored and where cash is used less and less it might be one of the last ways of laundering money. Still, they are taking SEK, buying crypto, using the crypto to buy fake stream of "music" they put to Spotify to get a meagerly pay out for played streams. The "loses" on each laundered kronor must be immense.

It seems 30% platform commission is pretty standard across digital platforms (apps, books, music). I'm not well versed in the world of money laundry, so I don't know if that's efficient or not. But if you're willing to pay the commission it seems pretty easy to launder money via fake apps/books/music or other digital goods than can be generated with near zero marginal cost.

There is...you're asked about your bank account, then few days later you receive $100,000 along with info to send it to another 5 accounts $20,000 each. Guess what happens next?

That's just a straight-up scam rather than laundering, generally (the money resulting from _that_ would then need laundering).

Money muling (the activity I described above) is a type of money laundering.

Oh, I assumed you were referring to the style of scam where a reversible/essentially phantom payment is made to someone's account (traditionally cheque, but it happens with credit transfers), and they make _real_ payments elsewhere (either via cash, crypto, or more difficult to reverse credit transfer). Initial transfer bounces, victim (or _maybe_ bank, depending) is out 100k.

It's just not that useful in Sweden, I'd assume. You want to get the money into the banking system and stay there. What you describe is easily traceable and reversed. Unless you transfer it abroad to... less civilized countries, it's not really helping you.

I find it really hard to believe that this Spotify scam is more effective than some classic Forex scam.

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