I mean, yes to those things. I agree. I was sort of meaning what are they to do to stop money laundering. 'Cause like, criminals are always going to exist and the best place to catch them seems to be when they try to clean up the money.
In reality though, you wouldn’t ‘launder’ money that wasn’t ‘dirty’.
As an activity it’s basically always indicative of a crime. (Wether you agree with the law or not)
And by its very purpose, it makes the ‘base’ crime harder to prosecute and trace.
I think you’ve flipped the causality.
So I don’t think it’s so much that prosecutors just think it’s easier way forward, and if they put their mind to it they could prosecute the base crime, but don’t want to. As much as the laundering activity itself has made it too hard to prosecute.
Probably because you can do the laundering step through a web of anonymous servers sitting on the darknet rather than through fraudulent incorporations which have a lot more surface area for detection and also leave immutable paper trails.
I'm not entirely convinced that money laundering is unethical in its own right. Certainly, profiting from unethical activity is only once removed from unethical. That would make obfuscating the taint on unethical-once-removed funds an act that is unethical-twice-removed.
Clearly, there has to be some point at which we can no longer care, because I'm not certain that (metaphorically) there is a coin circulating that hasn't been dipped in blood at least once. Otherwise, the farmer who sells a hog to the butcher that sells sliced ham to the mafia capo's wife also shares the taint.
And even that presumes that the money to be laundered is profit from an unethical act, rather than one merely prohibited by government edict. I personally do not find marijuana-based commerce to be unethical. Therefore, I don't particularly feel as though a seller of sinsemilla on Silk Road should feel bad about wanting to be able to spend his profits without getting pinched, even if it means a murderer-for-hire could theoretically also prevent someone from following his money.
It isn't the money that's dirty or clean. It's the person holding it. Thus, I believe the criminalization of money laundering practices is simply an effort by the governments to solidify their control over the financial sectors, and to make their efforts at fighting crime less labor-intensive.
Even if all money were perfectly untraceable, police could still solve crimes by examining the evidence of the crime, rather than the evidence that someone got paid for it.
Of course, states seem to think that is rather a useful tool to have, so I expect that this business will be raided and shut down sooner or later. My advice is to cash out (in actual cash, no less) on the unexpected success as soon as possible, and then exit the business entirely before someone decides to make an example of it.
This is right - the whole point with money laundering is to have a legitimate business where extra money can come in, apparently from real but untraceable customers, that is really dirty money you control.
It's my impression that obtaining BTC isn't the interesting problem for most would-be launderers. After all, you just have to sell some CC #s or provide custom DDOS services or do whatever nefarious shit you do that makes laundering a good idea, and presto you have BTC. The real problem is trading those fat stacks of BTC for fast cars, palatial mansions, the intimate attentions of beautiful people, etc. without the fuzz connecting those riches back to the nefarious shit that earned them. That is, as for regular money laundering, the trick is make dirty funds clean. It's actually straightforward to obtain dirty funds in the first place, for a criminal.
Part of the goal of reducing corruption is having alternative behaviors that are more attractive
But in any case there are lots of useful laundering techniques that can pass scrutiny
Just wait for the next darknet pastebin to have that debate
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