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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I'm not GP, but your condescending attitude is not only rude but wrong.

Money laundering through things like app sales is a classic technique. It's the modern version of buying "art" that isn't valuable at insane prices. Laundering through an app store incurs a 30% haircut, but the funds are very clean afterward and every money laundering technique is going to cost that much or more. It is not unusual for the laundered funds to be 40% of what they started with.

Pointing out that money laundering is a possibility is fair. I very much dislike Apple, but if it is a potential money laundering situation then their hands have been tied by the US government.

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You're really out of your element here.

>It's the modern version of buying "art" that isn't valuable at insane prices.

That was possible because the art world (at some point in time) enabled this. Apple and its App Store actively prevent this from happening, it's the complete opposite.

Step 1: Create an app and put it in the app store.

Step 2: Generate a bunch of fake accounts in many different countries, and fund them with the dirty money.

Step 3: Have all these accounts buy the app. Make sure you don't have them all buy it at once, or otherwise have a suspicious purchase pattern.

Step 4: Collect the (now clean) funds from the app store,

Okay, how does Apple "actively prevent" this? They don't have to enable anything.

Here's the difference,

In the art world there is (or at least, was) some level of secrecy in the transactions and parties involved.

Apple would give up all information it has about you to law enforcement at the slightest suspicion of some shenanigans happening. They also comply with all KYC requirements from the law. That's how (among other things) they "actively prevent" people using their platform for criminal activities. Heck, at their scale, they must have an entire team devoted to doing just that.

You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines very badly lately, such as here and (even more) here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38396197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395956

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395894

If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you. We've already had to warn you about this more than once in the past.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. That means no more swipes or name-calling, and definitely no more personal attacks.

My apologies, you're right.

I'll tone it down.

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