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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

This does provide an amusing mental image of some theoretical commercial real estate person who specializes in distressed properties, not specifically this auction, but showing up to some "auction on the courthouse steps" type thing with an actual Pelican case crammed full of USD 100 notes. I wonder what's the largest recent real estate transaction that's been done actually in cash. I imagine it would raise a few KYC red flags and reporting requirements, of course.

In practical terms of course we all know that "cash" payment really means "ability to execute a SWIFT transfer for the funds within one business day".

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> I imagine it would raise a few KYC red flags and reporting requirements, of course.

real estate industry is exempt from AML/KYC requirements, they lobbied Congress and won

secondly, you can use a lawyers IOLTA account for these large transactions, its pooled money from all of their clients - usually retainers and settlements - but nothing dictates that limitation. Banks consider them institutional investors that already did KYC. but. I mean. The client could be from anywhere and the lawyers account cant get probable cause on it for just that.

It’s a known gap in the US AML/KYC framework. DOJ and thinktanks and the EU have been aware for at least a decade.

That's wild that we have to deal with AML/KYC buying a few dollars of crypto but a multimillion dollar real estate translation just goes through without the government sniffing its nose into things. Just goes to show you how unfair the system is towards the little guy.

Just shows how bad crypto sector is at buying politicians

Ross could have been free with a donation to Trump’s campaign, it was pay to play

>real estate industry is exempt from AML/KYC requirements

Source?

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/16/2024-02....

This is about residential but commercial real estate is no different and is more likely to use even more opaque lending sources

Just for scale, $100M weighs a little more than a ton in $100s.

Apparently there used to be $10,000 bills :

https://www.moaf.org/exhibits/checks_balances/abraham-lincol...

With Salmon P. Chase on them. So you would only need 10,000 of these.

While this is true, historical $5000 and $10,000 federal reserve notes have much larger than their face value in the secondary market as collectors items now, if they're in good condition and can be "graded" and put in a slab by a trusted neutral evaluation agency.

Banks and the federal reserve have been collecting and destroying them as they show up.

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