Hacker News Reader

Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

These transactions would be half money laundering only if the buyers only came from illegal activities and they were avoiding deposit in a typical bank. It's not laundering by the author as he is not involved or aware of the buyers' money's providence. I don't see how it would be money laundering more than say, buying $3000 of gold from a local gold and silver shop. I'm hardly an expert in... Anything, though. If you care to explain that would be lovely.

View on HN

Most of legitimate financial activity forms follow well known patterns. Illegal activities often follow different patterns. It's reasonable for a bank to flag suspicious accounts, even though you'll always have some false positives - because if it looks like money laundering, most of the time it is.

Also I don't know if this works with banks (having no personal experience here), but I remember back from the time when early Kickstarter projects got their PayPal accounts frozen, that the rule of thumb was: if you're going to do something on your PayPal account that looks weird/atypical, it's a good idea to call them in advance and tell them about that.

I agree it may look like money laundering. But one can't really say "the bank was right" in this case since it wasn't money laundering.

It's not technically money laundering, but it might be bit coin laundering if the money the he received was ill-gotten.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com