Comment by pixel_popping | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixel_popping | Hacker News Reader

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Revolut is just like any bank? It's normal to want money/assets (if you are wealthy) scattered across multiple jurisdictions. I don't personally know any person that has good wealth without having bank accounts in HK, SG or the likes...

And Revolut itself is particularly strict, receive 5 random unexplained payments and it's almost sure that you'll get banned and you'll receive the very known email stating that you must give them some bank info to forward your money somewhere else.

Many people also care about their privacy, exposing all your wealth, assets and history to a specific government doesn't sound really reasonable to me.

Also, Money laundering is easy to do regardless of the jurisdiction, in the US you can just setup an LLC for a "SaaS", add Stripe, get ton of virtual cards with crypto (no KYC possible), make XXX transactions = "clean money", taxed (aka laundered, legal money), arriving on your bank of choice. I'm pretty sure people that knows how to launder money (even a child could do it) knows how to do it without any sort of offshore bank, I don't really see how Revolut is aggravating this matter.

Most banks don’t allow deposits in BTC for obvious reasons.

I don't see what's wrong with accepting BTC, ton of banks do all over the world and it's already available for a decade via exchanges and services, why wouldn't the banks directly offer this service?

Let's not mistake banks for tax authority, that's unrelated. Tax evasion and money laundering are two very different things, the latter almost always imply that taxes WILL BE PAID in the tax residence of the ultimate beneficial owner, just having money on a remote bank is not money laundering, people laundering money wants to buy properties, assets... you can generally only do so if you paid taxes. You can't buy properties easily if you just hide money somewhere.

To the contrary, someone laundering money absolutely does not want to show crypto as the source of funds as this is the most suspicious and might call for any sort of check. Generally speaking, it's easier to launder money without any crypto involved, you can just chain a few companies with nominees in different jurisdictions and just invoice each other and so-on, all done online without having to go anywhere.

To be clear again, people laundering money DO pay taxes, often a lot to appear as genuine as possible.

The ones that are successful at both money laundering AND tax evasion generally use very complex schemes that involve buying second citizenship, setting-up blurry structures... it's not done at a level of wealth that is Revolut compatible :)

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