How well does the money laundering control system work?
journals.uchicago.edu
journals.uchicago.edu
Gambling: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/online-gambling-sites-money...
Casinos themselves: https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trumps-businesses-...
Commerce: https://www.wired.com/story/wired-awake-180518
Crypto: https://financialcrimeacademy.org/cryptocurrency-money-laund...
Shell companies: https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...
Real estate: https://www.firstaml.com/resources/5-ways-criminals-launder-...
I remember reading about a case where criminals bought an entire issue of a local lottery, thus collecting all the prizes, and apparently saw that a reasonable cost to launder their cash.
Reminds me of True Lies.
Most folks will remember the 2019 temination of lootbox key trading for CS:GO on Steam.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50262447
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/research-identifies-suspicious...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...
I'm not sure what good ways there are to manage this generally, other than limiting the size or types of financial transactions that can occur within a system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debanking
"The Financial Conduct Authority reported that banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.[4]"
Money transfer is a basic utility and should not be rationed out and gatekept by government regulators.
There was a period where it seemed like they were doing some data crunching of IRS data and taking down domestic drug trafficking orgs (DTOs) this way, and a bunch of businesses were raided and shut down across the region I was in at the time.
Personally, I wouldn't do any of those and would launder through art and collectibles where the values are somewhat arbitrary. And "consulting".
I think Baskin Robbins was just increasingly bad.
Growing up in Wichita it was definitely around and I remember going to it a lot when young. But then we started going to Braun's more, and I think it was a combo of location, liking the ice cream better, and getting burgers if we wanted.
I think they just didn't adapt over the decades and sort of coast as a zombie now.
I can't think of why I'd go to one vs so many other options now. Even supermarket stuff is gonna be better.
Can't help but feel like they got the private-equity squeeze deal to turn them into a zombie.
Some MBA comes in and cuts all the corners, all the costs that made them a first class market leader. Turning them from the best out there into just another ice cream shop with nothing distinctive that Washington and Lincolns everyone for all their money. (We're long past nickles and dimes these days)
Funniest case I visited was a Chinese restaurant where the waitress always wore a winter jacket, because they couldn’t be bothered heating the place.
That place had super good food though!
Actually, any business that can just add an arbitrarily huge markup for what are otherwise cheap, run of the mill products and services is probably also laundering money. Usually exclusive/luxury places, the ones where in one go they can convert the lowest possible cost into the highest possible clean profit.
Quick calculations on minimum wages, rent, other costs and the required amount of sales show that they can not be profitable.
That’s something that a friend mentioned to me a few years ago, haven’t forgotten it since, and now everything does make sense when viewed from the right context.
In my local neighbourhood there are a couple of commercial spaces that keep seeming to become new businesses, go through the expected few months of rebranding and outfitting, stay for a couple more months, then shut down. Only to become new businesses doing the same thing. Repeat ad nauseum.
Which would be fine, except it’s always the same owners. I’m not sure what the grift is, but I’m sure there’s one. Perhaps its simply taking advantage of business loans. Perhaps something more involved with contractors and business expenses charged differently on paper. I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m curious.
In the same way that buying a company and taking out business loans for expenses isn’t itself fraudulent, but can be done for that purpose, I can’t help but feel like there’s something going on.
Often the actual answer to things not making sense is that most things in the world are done poorly and many things are some mish mash of various interests rather than a singular actor.
Incompetence is far more common than malice, and many observers are themselves incompetent.
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/04/do-charity-bookshop...
which legally evade taxes and
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shop...
which illegally evade taxes not to mention
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/26/more-than-90...
and
https://www.esquire.com/uk/style/grooming/a65829331/high-str...
and these are frequently accused of being involved in all sort of crime not least money laundering.
If it's legal I think it's "avoidance".
And, yes, this does get abused. Government is people, some of whom are evil, or out for revenge, or whatever. I had an acquaintance whose accounts were periodically frozen by the IRS, because he had pissed off the local office. He would get them unblocked, but only after weeks of missing mortgage payments and other bills.
The short answer is that said money is either the proceeds of a crime, or (in the other direction) being sent to or from a sanctioned person, organization, or country.
This is why it's so hard to push back against, like the TSA. "Do you want terrorists using the banking system?" is a killer argument for midwits.
(historical background: https://www.chards.co.uk/guides/exchange-control-act/785 )
The “crime” is alleged to the objects in question, and since they aren’t people they don’t have rights.
Civil Asset Forfeiture. It’s clearly unconstitutional, but it’s too profitable to stop.
It's a real shame that kind is allowed to vote. IMO, they're more destructive than the 90 IQ and below crowd.
Why?
I’m not allowed to vote medicine FDA approvals because I’m not a doctor.
Why are some topics “restricted” to the experts? But voting for president is not?
Seriously? That's probably because the FDA does not have the power to declare war, annex territories, or sign treaties on your behalf.
> Why are some topics “restricted” to the experts?
You're still allowed to go across borders and get medication that the FDA has not approved for your own personal use. This "restriction" isn't nearly as complete as you pretend it is.
It actually only binds what professionals can do not what citizens can do.
> But voting for president is not?
It's actually /any/ representative. Does that make it clearer for you?
After you pay your W2 income taxes for the year, your income for the year is no longer taxable.
edit: I guess I can't argue with the holy writ of wikipedia, but it's how they got Al Capone.
Money laundering is disguising the source or use of funds (making illegally sourced cash look legally sourced).
Plenty of people would (do) happily pay some tax on cash as part of avoiding difficult questions about the source.
Tax evasion conversely makes legally earned money somewhat illegal to the evader (though generally fine for anyone else to handle accidentally).
In practice we have a system where money laundering has not ended and we have much more financial surveillance for average citizens. That was probably the purpose all along and it never had anything to do with finding tax evaders or stopping terrorism.
"Time magazine reported that throughout 1981 and 1982, the Israelis reportedly set up Swiss bank accounts to handle the financial end of the annual multi-million dollars arms deals between Iran and Israel during the Iran–Iraq War."
The vast majority of arms dealing is state-controlled, all terrorist groups combined aren't big enough to make a dent.
And in any case, the original claim was "money laundering for terrorism" not the other way round.
Regarding your question: the whole concept of "terrorist states" is made up if you ask me, and UN agrees. States wage wars and commit war crimes (or "collateral damage" if you win the war), other states retaliate. This has little to do with the asymmetric confrontation with terrorist groups which inflict violence but then evade retaliation due to their secretive and decentralized nature. States can't do that: they are centralized and not secretive, you can find them on the map.
But the few certain Americans, and especially non-Americans, who did apparently bothered the US administration enough.
People in power want more power. They want more control, even over average, law-abiding people. They want to moralize and tell you what you should be buying and consuming. Power over others is the goal; it's not incidental. The random Swiss bank account holder is the pretext, not the reason.
The “only one army” concept is how governments remain governments.
If you could raise and pay a competing army, the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence becomes threatened.
This is why most states also heavily restrict private access to arms. Interestingly enough, it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
So maybe 1/4 or more of the adult USA is explicitly barred from the right to bear arms. When you consider those same people would have been much of the ~3% that had high enough risk tolerance to fight the American revolution, basically the USA has barred a very large proportion of those with the risk taking temperament that would enable them to become part of the ~3%.
They've effectively made it illegal for revolution type of risk taker to have arms unless those risk takers used the police/military as that outlet. Note this is a relatively new development -- the M1 carbine was invented by a prisoner inside a prison!
Also you can own guns on a non-immigrant visa as a resident if you have a local hunting license that are pretty easy to get and maintain. Even non residents can with hunting trips.
Just in case people thinks this is far fetched...
Several countries in latin america are actually narcostates disguised as democracies. The drug cartels make so much money they can afford to have their own military forces, not rarely trained by actual soldiers who deserted for better pay.
I live in one such country: Brazil. We have a couple massive organized crime gangs which dominate huge amounts of territory. They have their own governments, their own laws, their own tribunals, they even collect taxes from their subjects. They essentially pulled off a stealthy, undeclared secession.
I gotta admit I have a certain respect for these drug gangs... They are an example of the power afforded by real freedom. Instead of waiting for the government to solve their problems, they had the balls to arm themselves to the teeth and seize what they wanted, like it or not. They exercised the freedom to build a new system that benefits themselves to the detriment of the society that shunned them. That's the freedom governments cannot tolerate. The freedom to replace them.
English Wikipedia has surprisingly detailed and well referenced articles on these organizations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comando_Vermelho
> Individuals that fail to comply with the group's "discipline" are judged by the "crime courts", with sentences that can range from beatings to summary executions.
> Rather than expanding by territorial conquest alone, the PCC is able to develop its illicit activities more efficiently by focusing on the regulation and control of markets combined with a monopoly on violence and discipline.
Pretty much a parallel state.
Just yesterday I was reading about how the drug gangs killed some electricians tasked with shutting off the electricty of a gang member for lack of payment. Another gang launched their own ISP which they forced their subjects to pay for and use, our FCC equivalent ANATEL was trying to disconnect them.
"Undeclared secession" is just my interpretation of the situation. They dominate territories to the point brazilian police cannot freely operate without significant risk of death. Without police, nobody can guarantee brazilian rights and enforce brazilian laws. Without rule of law, is it really brazilian territory? I think not.
How is the right to violent revolution prepared for and protected in the US?
You make moves to constrict the available information and permitted behavior of residents and citizens in excess of what is defined by law through pressure on culture and public marketplaces, etc. and not legal action by government. (e.g. the stuff going on with erotic content on Steam recently, but not limited to stuff like that). You start with more questionable and controversial things like e.g. sexually explicit content, then progress to all content or ideas that are inconvenient to your regime.
You boil the frog of authority over the public at a rate where only a minority starts noticing problems and looking for solutions in educating themselves using politically inconvenient media (and flagging themselves as enemies in the surveillance tools) or taking action that is inconvenient to you
You start making court cases against these inconvenient people and start deporting them or incarcerating them. First with e.g. illegal immigrants or foreign national students that are saying things that are unpopular, but slowly escalate to all the people that disagree with you.
If you don't think all these things are well established, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Completely agree. Terrorists destroyed the USA by destroying all of its freedoms and values. They happily gave up freedom for security in spite of the warnings of their founders. All it took was two aircraft.
Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.
I think that the same case with Hamas which I believe was a mossad creation.
Most of these problems are self inflicted.
The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
Another reason are policy options. For one, there are certain decidedly "non-terrorist" goods and services that the government might not want you to purchase. Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
Either way the income tax is one of the most dystopian ways to collect tax as it pretty much relies on mass surveillance of domestic activities to be implemented fairly or effectively.
Land value taxation is different because there is no meaningful growth or loss of the capital stock.
It is difficult to determine the value of a particular piece of land, particularly if it hasn't been sold for a long time and won't anytime soon.
International trade can much easier be priced, and there is no (additional) privacy concern because it all has to be declared anyway.
Tariffs (or, more generically, consumption taxes) are effectively both. If something is sold, the money is going to some combination of labor and capital, and then the tax is paid either way. Tariffs in particular also create a preference for domestic production, which increases domestic labor demand at the cost of lower economic efficiency and higher prices, which is the primary thing that makes them dumb if you're not a fan of taking that trade off.
In theory the primary disadvantage to consumption taxes is that unless you want to track all of everyone's consumption, it's hard to apply a progressive rate structure. But in practice there is a way to do that -- provide a universal tax credit in a fixed amount. Then everyone pays a uniform marginal rate, lower income people receive e.g. a $10,000 credit and pay $5000 in taxes (which also obviates the need for $5000 in social assistance programs), and middle and upper income people get the same $10,000 credit but pay more in tax.
I am such a big georgist. Seriously, I might genuinely cry seeing how georgism isn't being implemented. it is one of the most superior policy systems but the parasites own so much that we don't even discuss about it
I was talking to my friend about georgism when he asked me if I was a capitalist/communist.. Basically in the end he just said, that he doesn't know about economics... so he doesn't know and they wanted to change the topic I feel like this might be a major hurdle where people think that economics is some huge mumbo jumbo when I feel like georgism and (index funds?) are two things that almost everyone should know given how simple they are.
It's straight up marxism hidden as a capitalist market measure. Vacant land portion of property taxes are essentially georgism-light where the land capital is mostly under a capitalist model but with a % owned by the community (or more likely, a government that commonly works against community interests) and rented out in the form of property tax (in georgism the % is 100).
Marxism explicitly rejects classical liberal principles such as the rule of law, limited government, free markets, and individual rights, Georgism not only functions within those principles, but requires them.
Marxism is incompatible with individual rights due to its hostile position on private property and its insistence that all means of production be collective property. The most fundamental means of production of them all is an individual's labor. Without which, no amount of land would produce a farm, a mine, a house, or a city. And then we wonder why Marxist regimes consistently run slave labor camps.
Henry George argues that society only has the right to lay claim to economic goods produced by society, rather than an individual. Marxism recognizes no such distinction.
Georgism is fully defensible using classical economics and has been repeatedly endorsed by both classical and modern economists. Marxism is at best heterodox economics and at worst, pseudoscience.
Georgism could be implemented tomorrow if sufficient political will existed. Marxism requires a violent overthrow of the state.
Henry George himself rejected Marxism, famously predicting that if it was ever tried, the inevitable result would be a dictatorship. Unlike Marx's predictions, that prediction of George's has a 100% validation rate. And he made that prediction while Marx was still alive.
Economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz have observed that a public levy on land value (Georgism/LVT) does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes.
Suffices to say, you are not sharing a grounded opinion on Georgism.
>Economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz have observed that a public levy on land value (Georgism/LVT) does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes.
This is not an accurate portrayal, there is an extensive list of problems with Georgism that destroys much of the important methods of allocating and using land, even if you could tax it accurately.[]
[] https://cdn.mises.org/Single%20Tax%20Economic%20and%20Moral%...
Smith, Adam (1776). "Chapter 2, Article 1: Taxes upon the Rent of Houses". The Wealth of Nations, Book V.
Tideman, Nicolaus; Gaffney, Mason (1994). Land and Taxation. Shepheard-Walwyn in association with Centre for Incentive Taxation. ISBN 978-0-85683-162-1.
Thanks for the opportunity to present Georgism as a superior policy over the clamor in your prior comments.
This was such a beautiful ,might I say article on georgism. I would genuinely prefer if you could write it as a standalone article that I might share with my friends or can refer to.
Its such a nice read. Thanks for giving me the pleasure to read it.
Edit: I went further into the post and it seemed that mothball isn't having this discussion in good faith and wants to have a last word and yes they feel so right, almost being stupid might I say. But your way of recognizing it and saying it up front really both surprised me and made me respect ya since you actually went through their sources when they sent some and are doing this discussion in good faith.
I am maybe georgist because I feel like it genuinely made the most sense to me and uh maybe it makes also sense because land price seems to have gone so high that I can't hold land so maybe that's a bias but still georgism is such a good take yet landlords have such a lobby that I wonder if we can break it.
We really need to get more georgist thoughts.
Might I say,though this isn't strictly georgism but taxing/patching billionaire loopholes since software businesses are built on open source and is almost like land in the sense that community owns it, plus I feel like that concentration of power into such people is wrongful but I also know that its a really really tough issue as to taxing billionaires, do we tax their stocks? do we do what exactly??
Yet georgism is a right step in that direction except it is more quantifiable and (almost universally?) agreed to be a good taxation strategy.
[] Henry George, Progress and Poverty
Land speculators play an important role by introducing unimproved land into the market at a delayed point in time, adjusting the stock of available land to market demands, preventing economically inefficient prior improvements from happening which then make it even more expensive to use the land productively in the future.
The incredibly vital task of land speculation that adjusts available stock to market conditions, is virtually impossible under a LVT.
But I think you need to make a pretty clear distinction between "land" communism and, well, communism. Communism is based on public ownership of the means of production: if you own a steel factory, you don't really "own" a steel factory, the people own the factory and the state appoints a bureaucrat or manager to run it. You can receive no profit from it, you can't sell it, really you have no rights to it other than the state's promise to let you manage it (and whatever they pay you for that).
Georgism explicitly still admits private property: if you own a steel factory, you actually do own a steel factory, you can make decisions about the management of that factory, you can sell it, etc. In many ways it's more capitalist than today's capitalism, because single-tax Georgism also states that there should be no income or capital gains tax, and so you receive 100% of the profits from building that factory. You just have to pay a tax to the state for the land that the factory sits on, set in proportion to what others would be willing to rent the land for.
The distinction is pretty key, because it gets at the heart of human agency and incentives. Georgism does not admit private ownership of the land because the land was here before any humans were; no human suddenly built the land, and no human can destroy it, they can only manage its use. Likewise for other common goods (like pollution, the electromagnetic spectrum, natural resources, etc.) which Georgism seeks to manage. Georgism does admit private property, because when you construct a machine or a factory or invent a new process, that came out of your own efforts. It could be summed up as "private persons own what they build or buy, the public owns what was here before".
Is it though? The entire bottom 50% of the population paid something like 3% of total federal income tax, by intentional design of the tax system. Babysitters don't owe any significant amount of taxes whether they report it or not and under some circumstances (e.g. EITC) their effective rate can even be negative. Forcing them to report the income can't seriously be the justification for all of this mass surveillance.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
That doesn't have anything to do with physical cash. You could do the same thing by borrowing at a negative rate and investing the money in any security/asset/commodity. Which is why negative interest rates are crazy and never really happened.
This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it. It's questionable whether the society as a whole benefits from taxing babysitters.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
I'm not sure you'll gain much support for bespoke policies like that. Just reading this passage made me feel an urge to hide some cash under the mattress.
And the money the retail clerk gets paid was already taxed when the customers spent it at the store. No, wait, it was already taxed when they got paid it! No, wait, it was already taxed when the customers of their employers spent it! No, wait——
...This whole idea of "money getting taxed multiple times" being a bad thing is absurd. Of course any given dollar going through the economy is going to get taxed many times. It's not about the dollars; it's about the transactions. And, ultimately, it's about funding the government so it can actually provide services, from sanitation all the way up to the military.
(Note that this is not an attempt to say that "the more taxation, the better"; that's obviously absurd, too. There are different levels of taxation that make sense for different people, different countries, different transactions, and different economic circumstances. There is no one simple magic rule you can follow that will always make things better when it comes to taxation, any more than there is with anything else economic or political.)
Meanwhile, the government you fund takes that money and uses it to surveil you, and commits crimes across the world in your name. And this giant machine that's supposed to stop the bad guys tells you there's nothing to see here when some big scandal comes up right in front of your face.
Yes, I think money being taxed multiple times is too much.
Government is essential, massive government is not. Yet the system we have now is probably the smallest it will ever be (before it collapses anyway).
Your imaginary analogy chain breaks here. The store is taxed on what's left after the expenses, individuals are taxed on the total income.
If I, as an individual, could deduct my babysitter expenses from my income taxes, I would have no questions as to why babysitter has to pay them. This doesn't happen however. In some countries you can deduct 50% at best.
Therefore I don't see the point of taxing first the parent and then the babysitter again. You can as well tax the parent 2x, it would be the same from the economical standpoint.
> There are different levels of taxation that make sense for different people, different countries, different transactions, and different economic circumstances
You didn't make any effort to explain why taxing babysitters is the "level that makes sense" as you put it. You just write some generic words how taxes are good in general and help government to provide services. It's irrelevant to our conversation.
Replace babysitter with any government regulated and licensed profession and the motives become clearer. The government gets power by forcing things above the table because once above the table you can be forced to transact with who they want and how they want and those parties then become dependent upon government to a degree.
There's no such thing as cash under the table land surveying, for example.
I think that capitalism has strayed away from its original goal. We have basically parasites in the current ecosystem leeching off of either land rent or being billionaires imo.
But no it feels like we don't discuss it, we will all be ever so radicalized about something that happened on twitter etc. that we are forgetting the issue of classes.
As with the TSA, any system designed to filter "bad guys" ends up being a huge imposition on average citizens, because there's a lot more of them.
But with money laundering and KYC I'm having trouble remembering ever having to deal with them. What are situations where the average citizen finds them an imposition?
I vaguely remember being asked what the sources were for the money in my IRAs, but don't remember who asked or what I was doing with them. Maybe it was during an application for a home equity line of credit? Anyway, whatever it was I just told them (rollover from a 401k, money from my salary, and earnings from investments held in the IRAs) and they didn't ask for any proof or anything.
[1] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/air-travelers-in-america-an...
That is the issue. Its none of their business where your money came from. The collected information will eventually be abused as evidenced most recently by Canada's trucker bank freezes.
For a fucking Toyota Yaris. Bought by a retiree. Who’s going to be paying it through the banking system where they already have KYC, AML, and all of her financial history.
If that’s not overreach, I don’t know what is. And… who elected the people who came up with this? (That’s a rhetorical question)
Absent a complete dismantling of AML oversight (and I do have empathy for those free market purists who want to wholesale toss out KYC and AML, but for now in practice we have to deal with what are on the books), these are difficult use cases to address. These kinds of edicts don’t usually say, “any retirees buying even economy cars must fill this out”, it is usually broadly applied like, “all car dealerships must do this for all transactions no exceptions”. And these laws are often a lagging reaction to various sham transactions uncovered as a result of crime busts.
Once you start weaving “reasonable” exceptions to address the overreach, the scammers start to come up with sham transactions that fit the exceptions filter. It’s a pretty fascinating problem.
There are many who would still object to a system where your mother doesn’t fill out a form. Instead her banking app pings her to confirm that she is purchasing a Yaris from the dealership (looking at the other comments here, it seems anonymous large transactions scattered through many people with otherwise clean records are a common laundering pattern, so metadata on the nature of the transactions might be one way to counter that kind of structuring, but alas that’s overreach for many), and uses her financial history in the background as the AML controls rails.
I’d love to see AML professionals participate in this thread to help us learn what they’re really facing. Assuming we have to put up with it for the time being, might as well design and make its implementation as low friction for lawful people as possible.
I’m very critical of the system in general. It’s an extra-legal way to “fight” crime, that weaponizes private enterprises against their will, inverts the burden of proof, and at the end of the day just doesn’t work. Because, obviously the cash for buying the Lexus came from a completely legal casino payout.
Simple as that. Allow people to shift value in larger units without AML and the crooks will use that route.
The AML form will not be the most unpleasant part of buying a Yaris.
We don't need to constantly change and often times collectively punish society for one bad terrorist attack.
Ignoring them would actually be better than what we do.
For the uninformed: if you cannot complete KYC or proof of wealth checks, you do not lose your money.
The institution you're trying to transact will just will not work with you. They might not for any number of other reasons: adverse media, dodgy transaction history, etc. etc. etc.
A friend of mine wired his money across the border following his relocation, transaction got blocked on KYC for several weeks, rollback became impossible because the source bank got sanctioned in the meanwhile. Money was forfeited with very little chance of recovery.
My personal account was frozen once due to KYC which made it impossible to pay the rent. Luckily I've had some reserves to live but paying for an appartement in cash isn't legal in my country of residence.
Saying "it's just the institution won't work for you" is extremely deceptive, on purpose or not. There are complementary laws that make sure you HAVE to deal with these institutions so when they close the door you're screwed.
Your money indefinitely frozen without a clear process that requires lawyers, courts, money?, and time is essentially you losing your money.
That is the problem with this approach if you are a small guy. A big guy/corporation can pull other resources to fight this. You can't as it is probably your only bank account.
A great article on this dynamics that is worth a read (https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo...)
Meanwhile in the case of classical criminal enterprises, the laws against money laundering don't actually work because in practice there are ten thousand ways to exchange value other than with official currency. And then the systems to prevent "money laundering" cause more problems for honest people who get trapped up in them out of ignorance, or become victims of corrupt government officials who use financial surveillance systems for oppression, whereas professional criminal organizations just restructure their activities to bypass the rules.
Once it’s converted to money it’s everyone’s problem. I can’t avoid my mortgage interest helping supporting the dealer who is supplying the addicts who are stealing my stuff. The harder I work, the worse it gets.
The controls may not be effective but I think they are necessary. I wouldn’t want to live in most countries where money laundering dominates financial activity.
Which is exactly the point. The proceeds from both market monopolization and contract killings are the proceeds of a crime, but the proper way to address this is to impose penalties for the antitrust violation or murder rather than tracking the finances of millions of innocent people only to fail to prevent the criminals from successfully laundering the money of the un-prosecuted original crime regardless.
If you're prosecuting the original crime, you don't need laws against money laundering. If you're not prosecuting the original crime you're already screwed and need to fix that.
> If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.
It's quite the opposite. The drug dealer doesn't want their house painted by a heroin addict, they want money. But by definition money is fungible. Anybody can buy or sell whatever.
Now let's suppose the heroin addict has a choice between taking a job to buy heroin and stealing the copper pipes out of your house to buy heroin, and these things are equally annoying. It's hard to hold a job as an addict but it's also hard to steal things because it's dangerous and illegal, so to begin with it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the drug dealer wants money, not copper pipes, so the first one has an edge.
Then you pass a law against money laundering. Well, now the drug dealer wants copper pipes, or wire, or anything else that can be pawned, because he can take them to the scrap yard or pawn shop himself, claim he found them in an old shed or had them left over after a renovation etc., or even set up a fake construction company in order to do that at scale, and then get a receipt from the scrap yard legitimizing the cash he gets from selling your pipes that the addict stole to get drugs. Is this new arrangement helping you or hurting you?
That isn't one of the alternatives. Notice that the laws against "money laundering" are the status quo and the cartels continue to get enough money to buy entire countries.
> I am also sure that it would benefit a large number of people who live in countries where cartel money dominates the economy.
I feel like I must not be explaining this well enough.
The cartels are going to end up with money, not assorted junk. When they launder money through a car wash, they're not doing it because they want to have their cars washed. They're doing it so they can claim their drug profits are car wash profits and then deposit them into a bank.
The problem with trying to prohibit "money laundering" is that nobody except for the criminals knows that it's happening. If you deposit money into a bank, the bank has no way to know what you were actually paid for, they only know what you tell them, and then criminals just lie to them.
Anyone can convert an arbitrarily large amount of money to stuff and then back to money again. You simply buy something fungible and then sell it again. That prevents anyone observing financial transactions from tracing the money because they have no way to know that the stuff Alice bought and the stuff Bob sold was the same stuff. The cartels know this which is why the laws against money laundering are completely ineffective.
And when you have a law that causes a ton of collateral damage to innocent people while being highly ineffective at producing value to the public, you should get rid of it.
A private transaction is incomparable to that. The government imposing itself on every private economic interaction, by making itself a gatekeeper from whom you need permission, is incredibly invasive and dangerous. The threat vector here is the government, or the people in it, harming the general populace through malice, and more commonly, incompetence in how they wield these powers of warrantless surveillance and financial exclusion.
Banks unilaterally closing people's accounts, or refusing to open an account for them, because those people fall into high-risk categories, is now very common.
On the bank side alone, the costs of this system are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year. All those costs are ultimately passed down to the consumers in a way of higher banking fees. On the consumer side, not knowing if you can move your money or access it is a significant source of anxiety that also makes it harder to plan one's life.
That's the "ton of collateral damage".
If you multiply a small inconvenience by the entire general population, you are causing a lot of damage.
And the damage to specific people or industries is significantly worse. There are legitimate things people may need to buy that would be dangerous to have associated with their identity, e.g. because it reveals something about their religion or health or sexual preferences. If you want to anonymously pay for any of those things to be sent to you in an unlabeled box at a numbered mailbox so that you don't have to risk someone seeing you buying it in person with cash, you should be able to do that. If some schmucks you've never even met have added some erroneous data to a database or you share the same name with someone rowdy, you shouldn't be endlessly aggrieved like an outlaw by financial institutions that aren't even allowed to tell you why.
> They also don’t really “work.” But they are needed
If something doesn't work then it isn't needed.
There are definitely legal ways too that screws you over in this financial world.
You say that you wouldn't want to live in a world where money laundering dominates financial activity? Well how about a world where cryptocoins/multi level marketing/ai stickers/private equity parasites/land owners (almost parasites?) /billionaires dominates the financial activity??
I guess you or many others live in such a system. I am not even talking about United states, I feel like to a lot of countries, the same thing is true.
I'm in an EU country where banks go through all the necessary checks.
As someone who worked for a bank, I got hit by the AML check on a larger transaction, delaying it for over 3 months in the end, causing me to have to spend from my companies war chest instead.
Once, I mistakenly sent a large amount of money from my own account to my own account, which I had to spend multiple emails and phonecalls explaining the mistake to the tax authority.
But, we had cases where people illegaly transferred hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to accounts without anyone reacting.
We have a large amount of real estate that is "bought in cash". It is especially popular among politicians who declare getting a large "loan in cash from their mother" or "their parents collected money for years". When you compare the salaries to the amount of cash earned, it is obviously impossible unless they were genius investors too.
We have corruption cases in which money was transferred from government companies into personal accounts without anyone's knowledge or anyone triggering a check.
These transactions are somehow legitimate and not investigated.
The AML system as it is is not just inefficient, it is suspect to corruption, human error and vindictiveness.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/09/india-fatf-ra...
Because Karen is salty her teenage son's weed dealer isn't paying taxes, basically.
And then there's all the people who see these broad invasive things as a way to get at people who can't otherwise easily be caught, Al Capone and the like.
And don't forget all the idiots who see it as a means for "their guy" in government to exert control over people they don't like such as brown people without papers, uppity truckers with horns, etc.
There are more criminals than abusive IRS agents. And usually when people tell me stories like that, there is more to it..
FINTRAC is unable to establish a pattern in those reports and prosecute. Instead, when someone is charged with an indictable offence, their name and related entities are searched for STRs. Any financial crimes are then used to create additional charges.
The net result of this, because of lack of digitization and various privacy guarantees, is that it is almost impossible to be charged with financial crimes as a primary offence in Canada.
Source: former RCMP financial crimes consultant.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report
It doesn't, lol. Structuring is when you make several smaller transactions to avoid a CTR. If a CTR was created, you aren't structuring. And if you are structuring, a CTR isn't created.
You're acting like the government will charge you for a $100 in your wallet.
You would be able to point to the timestamp when you took possession of the wallet which would prove providence unambiguously.
I'm always amused by the paranoia in the xxxcoin communities. If the government had and exercised the power you believe it does, why on earth do you think putting your money in bitcoin or whatever would provide any protection at all?
Edit: case in point:
> KYC and AML invert the burden of proof and are essentially an exception to the 4th amendment
Oooph.
I tried to open a bank account when I was moving states before I had a local state ID or any utility bill or proof of address, no one would do it because they stated the standard the feds hold them to for KYC would essentially presume I am guilty of lying and require me to provide documentation to prove I'm not.
Their point is that the government does not prosecute you, they threaten the banks with "regulatory incidents" if they don't comply. The result is that some people find it difficult to ever open a bank account with no means to "clear their name" as it were.
But given the sourcing, my money is on "Some rube got roped into taking 'payment' as part of a laundering scheme and was left holding the bag". Real fraud is rampant and pervasive. Libertarian fantasies are usually just that.
He has no valid serious convictions that I'm aware of, the only one he has was reversed because it was prosecuted in the wrong jurisdiction (and aside, had some other serious appellate arguments to consider if they hadn't chosen jurisdiction as the reason to vacate).
That is fair. I've noticed that these things often go unsaid. I was just offering clarification. (And I'm glad I was close enough since I don't like misrepresenting others.)
The issue of provenance is an issue regardless of the type of funds.
In most jurisdictions the burden of proof is civil, so more likely than not.
The original claim is easy to prove: it'll be in a wallet which was held for that amount of time. The bank isn't obligated, unless you turn up covered in blood, to prove that you didn't just beat a guy with a hammer till he gives you the password - because you'll go down for that crime by other means.
But very few people engaging in ongoing criminal transactions are going to have a supply of aged BTC accounts to use in trade for goods and resources, and certainly you'll trigger red flags if you keep turning up with a brand new "held it for years" account of $50,000 each week. I mean we know this: because it makes headlines when untouched BTC accounts start moving.
Simply swap into monero and then send it to anybody else.. Maybe lets say you have 100$ in btc, you convert it to 100$ in monero and just spend 10$ 10 times in a span of a week and I am sure that nobody can keep track of it.
If you and your friends are just innocently idling in a your car wearing a ski mask in the middle of summer with a shotgun and a large duffel bag, in front of a bank that was robbed in this manner four times last month, you're highly unlikely to, at minimum, beat the ride.
Or is this just a theoretical concern for anyone who isn't laundering Bitcoin stolen through ransomware or from exchanges?
And some of those interactions are taxable events - e.g. if you are exchanging out of cryptocurrency denominations, then by US tax law as a US citizen that was a taxable event.
Did the jury have reasonable grounds for voting to convict?
But needless to say such a government doesn't need to pass boring AML laws to do that. It can just throw you in jail because it wants to. The actual rule of law under which we live doesn't have that property.
Sometimes your employer goes out of business. Employees do not always preserve their payslips.
Then there are countries like Georgia, it's culturally acceptable to buy real estate with cash. If no valuation of the property was made, it becomes very difficult to prove where the money came from.
In most places this is "proceeds of crime", requiring associated convictions.
In places that have unexplained wealth statutes, the bar is also pretty high - "balance of probabilities" is not hard to argue IF YOU HAVE LEGITIMATE SOURCES OF MONEY.
https://www.nemannlawoffices.com/blog/law-enforcement-seized...
The point of AML/KYC regulations isn't to stop all crime, just like the point of US sanctions on Russia isn't to stop all Russian exports. In both cases it's to raise the cost of doing business for the entity being targeted. In the case of Russia, they can still sell their oil to India or whatever, but at a steep discount. In the case of drug cartels, they can still get their funds into the regular banking system, but also at a steep discount. Smuggling pallets of dollar bills across the border and setting up a network of front companies is expensive. Doing all that also which implicate them in even more crimes, so even if there's no evidence of them smuggling fentanyl, they can be prosecuted purely on the basis of having a car full of cash.
>I have money from my grandad, received 40 years ago. No one really has records going back that far but you try buying a house and they want proof of the origin of the funds.
The better question is why are you were sitting on cash for 40 years. In that time inflation already ate 66% of the value, and if you factor in the opportunity cost of not investing the money in stocks/bonds, the loss is even greater.
I've handled a couple of these for family members and the amount of paperwork around even a minor inheritance can be pretty impressive.
If I showed up with 50K in cash at the tellers window or a local notary to pay in part for a house tomorrow morning though I would expect the conversation would be an entirely different one.
I've been in business for 42 years now. In all that time I have never seen more than 1000 Euros cash in any kind of business transaction, and I have never been offered to be paid in cash. It's always bank transfers on invoice. I've never bought a vehicle cash, I can't even begin to understand why or how someone would want to buy real estate cash. Besides the obvious risks of being robbed the whole idea of keeping that much money or more around in physical form feels strange to me.
Even in the 1980s when I would buy a vehicle it would be through a bank transfer. The only people that sometimes insist they want to do some transaction in cash are usually marketplace sellers that I suspect are professional sellers that are keeping their income out of sight of the taxman and restaurants where the POS machine 'just broke' that are doing the same. And when I say I do not have any cash and it's ok they can send me an invoice or give me their bank account number suddenly their machine starts working again. Ditto with cab drivers.
Just because there isn't more than 1000 Euros cash in people's hands is simply an indictment of the Euro as a currency and the culture around it.
OP could literally just put it in the bank, sit on it for a year, and there’d be zero questions. They are mostly only interested in knowing that you didn’t get this money from a different loan that they aren’t aware of (like a personal loan, or one you got two days ago that hasn’t yet been reported).
You can make the same argument about literally any crime deterrence measure though? For instance having drug search dogs at airports probably makes it harder for the indie drug trafficker to get drugs through, but probably isn't going to do much against organized crime networks with insiders working at the airports and/or bribed officials.
I can't just walk up to your doorstep, make your sister take my drug dog, and force her to walk it around your bedroom and then punish her if she doesn't do it.
But since you don't know when the government is going to ask for it, you need to collect it from everyone all the time, otherwise you won't have it to satisfy the request. "What do you mean you don't know who your customers are?" is not a question you want to have to answer in the face of a warrant.
In fact it's worse than that in some ways as I had an investment advisor who bought and sold stuff and I don't know if I have records of what exactly.
And saying "gift from dead parents" wasn't enough to placate them? They wanted receipts? I get asked about source of funds all the time, but I don't think I've ever been asked to provide proof.
The proof I did use - a more recent inheritance, I could probably use multiple times as there doesn't seem any check on you doing that. The system is not very organized.
That's not a better question; that's just ignoring reality. Who cares why they were sitting on cash for 40 years? People should be able to do whatever they want with their money, even if it's not the most financially advantageous thing.
Okay...
The point of a down payment is to make it so the borrower has an incentive to not default on the loan, because the borrower would lose the down payment.
If the down payment is actually borrowed money as well (like suppose you get a credit card advance for the money), then the borrower won’t lose anything if they stop paying the loan, and there is increased risk that the loan defaults.
Fannie Mae's assessment criteria for origin of funds has a time limitation. If that money has been in an account you control, for forty years, "origin of funds" is not a question. I want to say the cut off is something like 36 months, but it may be even less.
Helpfully, all this information is public: https://selling-guide.fanniemae.com/sel/b3-4.3/verification-...
This makes zero sense.
I have bought a house, and they want bank records going back like a few months or maybe a year at most. If that money has been sitting in an account for that long, nobody gives a shit where it originally came from. Like, if you had $100,000 for a down payment, they’re not checking the last twenty years of your paystubs to make sure the math checks out.
The only thing they really are interested in is knowing this money didn’t just appear out of nowhere because you got a personal loan from someone or because you got a conventional loan from a lender that hasn’t reported it to a credit reporting agency yet, and which would affect the decision to underwrite your loan.
If you’ve just been holding on to large sums of literal cash dollar bills for the last 40 years, that is such a comically ridiculous financial decision I don’t even know what to tell you.
I had to juggle with this a little bit because I had sold some crypto for the down payment, but it's crypto that I had been keeping in a hardware wallet for years. As a result, I could certainly generate records showing how long I'd had it, but they'd be my own records based on the blockchain--not from any bank.
They ended up accepting transaction records from Coinbase, though even those mostly just showed some Bitcoin being received into the account and then being sold before transferred to the bank. But I guess that was enough for them.
In any case: I did ask about it and they told me it wasn't actually for KYC laws or money laundering. The reason they want a paper trail is to make sure you didn't actually just borrow the money from someone else. And that makes sense, since they're super picky about you not opening any new lines of credit while trying to close the mortgage.
My main issue is that all the AML/KYC/KYB barriers we have to deal with never seem to be subject to efficiency tests, all the studies I read and the few audits of these system seem content with it's likely better than doing nothing... but never measure the lost opportunities in trade/business they cause.
In a way it's the same hopless fight against so-called piracy for movies/games. The motivated actors who want to break the law find ways to do it at a large scale, mostly without consequences... and the honest people are just hindered when they want to use their content (even lose access to it when DRMs rely on the existence of the developer/publisher and their goodwill to maintain it way past the time when that media was able to generate revenues).
Finding intrastate regulation of cannabis as outside of interstate commerce would basically implode most the government at this point, which I'm doubtful they would allow. The Civil Rights Act, ADA, FDA, EPA, OSHA and a myriad of other stuff all squarely rely on the same precedent that makes federal intrastate marijuana regulation legal.
Thing is these tactics aren't just available to the authorities but also to anyone like intelligence agencies, the mafia, etc. so the confidentiality problems are much much worse with crypto.
Try telling it to Chinese, Russian, Indian exchanges.
It's worth reading the OSPEAD report from the Monero Community: https://www.getmonero.org/2025/04/05/ospead-optimal-ring-sig...
> Monero users with extreme threat models should be aware that anti-privacy adversaries can leverage timing information to increase the probability of guessing the real spend in a ring signature to approximately 1-in-4.2 instead of 1-in-16.
So slightly worse odds than Russian Roulette. Cool. Cool.
Hopefully FMCP will get implement soon to mitigate these issues.
Crypto advocates love this “drop in the bucket” excuse. By the same logic, it’s not a problem if I manufacture extra strong alpha-PVP and hand it to school children, because my drug distribution is just a drop in the bucket compared to the global cocaine trade.
Or so you think.
USDT is the money launderer’s dream. If they can get it into crypto (and there are a number of firms who are barely disguised criminal finance portals), the world is very much their oyster.
One thing that consumers can do right now is to petition their favorite online vendors to start accepting cryptocurrency, at least a stablecoin that you can swap to.
It's strange to see otherwise smart people correctly identify the "think of the children" fallacy in E2E encryption or net neutrality issues, but fail to identify the same exact fallacy when network traffic is measured in dollars and not bits.
Ideally, access to the financial system and secrecy of financial transactions should be protected by constitutions in the same way as secrecy of correspondence and right to privacy. Unfortunately, most constitutions were written in the age when it was a given, since most people relied on physical cash and were was no need to explicitly protect this right.
I don't know what to tell you - but my experience was that it is the most careless and obvious criminals that get caught. Some even being very rich, rich enough to afford solid defense teams, and rich enough to stay in court for a long time. These were also the very same type of people that would cry to the media about unfair treatment, witch hunts, etc.
But, as for why these agencies go after the money: It is much easier to prove money laundering, rather than the actual crime itself. Many of cases I worked on focused on companies that illegally harvested regulated natural resources, used unreported employees, and did not report their sales / trades. Off the market, under the table.
We co-operated with other regulatory agencies around the world, and I can tell you - in the more corrupt parts of the world, the effects can be devastating on the community: No honest companies can compete against the ones that operate illegally, dire working conditions, less tax funding to the local community. What happens is that these actors eventually become local monopolies, and start operate semi-legally, but that's what the community is stuck with. If you report those companies, you end up losing your own job - should the company go down. And since these players don't care about regulations anyway, whatever natural resources they harvest, can risk being wiped out.
And to re-iterate: It is easier to follow the money. Usually in these cases, where there's smoke, there's fire.
Meanwhile, the same corrupt government gives a free pass to its buddies devastating the planet with digging for oil and gas, destroying sea life with major leaks, and stops renewables from succeeding. See the current administration. The government permanently destroys farmland by using PFAS mulch as fertilizer, making the soil poison.
The difference between this country and others is only that corruption is legalized here.
Thr problem with people at such regulatory agencies is they drink their own koolaid a bit much.
This system is the result of compromise among the biggest financial and governance systems. It's basically a melange of the possible and desirable (for many reasons), in service of multiple goals.
It's not its own thing. It's not owned, no one controls it, it's not subject to market forces, it's pretty much required for those who agree and avoided by others, and its benefits are almost exclusively hidden outside the justice and security services.
Even the simplest measures of accuracy seem inapt. False positives are clearly wrong (but so numerous now they are ignored and thus harmless?), but it's not clear that false negatives aren't intentional as a matter of investigational and prosecutorial discretion.
To me it's like asking the EPA to prove health benefits: since it's largely impossible, you end up with a reason to disable the regulatory system as ineffective.
Targeting these controls while the Genius act loads up trillions in stablecoin for a run on treasuries is fomenting a financial crisis.
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
How does that even work? You think that without an AML system, el chapo is going to be opening a wells fargo account with his real name?
HSBC's cash deposit tellers in Mexico were even reported to be wider to accommodate the larger cash deposits from the cartels [1]
The same people we put in charge of watching their own activites are the ones breaking the law, repeatedly... and the governments enable it by arguing that fines are "preferable" to real prosecutions and firm/long prison time for complicit bankers.
They are just taking their share on the illegal traffic revenues, like mob bosses do. No intent to stop them. And in the mean time all these AML hurdles hinder legal activites.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/11/hsbc-fine-p...
Also, people who can't easily move large amounts of money are weaker in organizing against a corrupt government.
It partners well with disarming the populace.
Also on what basis do you make the second assertion. I struggle to think of historical examples that validate that idea
We just need lower standards of proof. Something like:
1) you had some level of responsibility within the organization (no specific knowledge of wrongdoing required) 2) some kind of violation occurred within the organization 3) your wealth increased over some time period in which such violations were later found to have occurred
If those things happened, you are liable. People who profit should be on the hook for everything a company does, not in proportion to their specific knowledge of or involvement in any particular illegal activities, but in proportion to their nominal or "global" level of responsibility and the magnitude of their profit.
Get some sort of job in the company, do something illegal, threaten your manager with going to the feds, since at this point they are criminally liable for your act.
More generally, i get where you are coming from - its frustrating when the ceos are like, i just work here, totally wasn't me, excuse me while i cash my bonus cheque. But i still think morally its important that we punish people for things they actually did (or failed to do), not just by mere association.
Although perhaps something like an enhanced version of how supervisory responsibility in war crimes works would make sense - basically the way that works is if you are aware or ought to have been aware that someone under you is commiting a crime, and you don't investigate/take measures to punish/take measures to stop them, you are on the hook for the crime.
Not if the manager goes to the feds himself.
> But i still think morally its important that we punish people for things they actually did (or failed to do), not just by mere association.
Well imagine you're a CEO and you not only didn't setup protections against wrongdoing but rather created a system of incentives that makes it beneficial to close your eyes to things.
In the Dieselgate the engineer went to jail, in Skyguide the air traffic controller got stabbed, the executives walk free.
I guess I left out a key word in my conclusion there: "You are presumptively liable." The point is to shift the burden of proof. If it can be proven that someone else willfully did the violation (especially in order to screw you), that might be a defense. But the point is that the default assumption should be that greater responsibility/authority equals greater liability, and the burden should be on those with that responsibility/authority to prove that they are not liable.
> But i still think morally its important that we punish people for things they actually did (or failed to do), not just by mere association.
But that's it exactly. What they failed to do was ensure that bad things didn't happen while they were in charge.
> Although perhaps something like an enhanced version of how supervisory responsibility in war crimes works would make sense - basically the way that works is if you are aware or ought to have been aware that someone under you is commiting a crime, and you don't investigate/take measures to punish/take measures to stop them, you are on the hook for the crime.
Yes, something like that. The key phrase being "or ought to have been".
Let’s say one particular org at a company engaged in the activity in question, generating increased profits for the whole company. Taking this approach to the extreme, literally every shareholder could be liable because they benefited from those profits.
But I'm kind of okay with shareholders being liable to a certain extent, as long as their liability is proportional to their benefit. Someone who had a few shares in their 401k and made a couple thousand dollars, okay, no big deal. But the prospect of having gains clawed back could make shareholders more vigilant in ensuring the company is fully aboveboard. It doesn't make sense for me to someone to rake in, say, $50 million in unrealized gains and then say "oh, I had no idea, oh well, I'll just enjoy my $50 million". It's sort of like how if a drug kingpin gets arrested, it may well be that assets of their family members are seized as ill-gotten gains.
Seems like changing this would fix a lot of the problems.
I worked on a front line product for US banks and built a process to verify beneficial ownership for business account openings. I found the current expectations to be laughable:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/09/30/2022-21...
> An individual may be a beneficial owner of a reporting company by indirectly holding 25 percent or more of the ownership interests of the reporting company through multiple exempt entities.
Getting around this is not very difficult if you are clever and wealthy.
The overall takeaway I had was that these kinds of rules don't really work in the cases where they need to the most. I don't know how much of a deterrent this could ever hope to be. We even developed an override process for this based on a request from one of our clients.
> ALERT [Updated March 26, 2025]: All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN.
Offshore vehicles? Most are British islands.
Onshore vehicles? Delaware and similar
Unless the west puts you on a list, it's professionals will happily help anyone in the world.
I support it on that basis alone
Other than that it is largely ineffectual, it’s just not that hard to work around, for a percentage of course.
Its main function is to protect existing power structures from usurpment by potential up and comers. Oligarchs have no significant issues if they hire the right people, but small organizations can face cash crisis and limited maneuvering room.
Crypto is also the currency of corruption. Easiest way to pay/accept bribes by creating $myshitcoin.
Most cryptocurrencies are open ledgers, quite easy to trace and track the movement of funds.
Pretty much every exchange for on/off ramping funds must comply with KYC and anti money laundering regulations. They use tools such as Chainanalysis (which analyses such addresses) and also reports back to governments.
Go ahead and downvote. I've got karma to burn.
I've yet to see a single comment here that referrences any of the facts or ideas presented in the article. It is entirely composed of people responding to the headline.
I found the section on MERS particularly interesting. Minimal training on how to asses inconsistent assements between countries, complete failure to mention massive laundering scandals at banks in the asses countries... And this is the primary method of international oversight to see if these systems work and are implemented consistently.
If we stopped money laundering totally and completely, and managed to track down and confiscate all that money, the stock market would crash, hard. So would real estate.
And we're in the last minute to do that, if it's not too late already.
World seems to be headed to a short dystopian fascist phase before the collapse. A metacrisis caused by these tax-free metahumans with the tax fee multinational abstraction of individual power called corporations.
Left vs. right doesn't work to solve it, but the true dichotomy of people vs. billionaires with their sycophants.
Also known as... left vs. right. Left: people. Right: billionaires with their sycophants. (Democrats are not left)
It continuously boggles my mind how the American political education is so bad. You're not the first to say something like this.
Lucrum ante valores.