Topic: Can we see coin mixing services as money laundering services ? - page 3. (Read 2675 times)

Why do you ask, are you a Fed looking to bust people? People mix coins for a number of reasons, it doesn't take a genius to think of reasons why people do it.

I would say that in mixing service, the coins are mixed but still some trace remains between the input and output. So they are not 100% clean.
 
In a coin laundry, there would be no link between the dirty and cleaned coins. Possibly the clean coins come from freshly generated coins, without any history.

They can be used by both good and evil persons. People who deal a lot in the dark net I think they need to use this service of coin mixing for their privacy and security.

This can be also used by criminals to erase their activity logs. This cannot be stopped but mixing services are not responsible for that although they may indirectly help facilitate such thing.

That's right and especially the people is already changing their fiat money into bitcoin is already get an enough of anonymous and by using the mixers is can eliminating the trace and i think the possibilities for using it about the money laundering is so high.

I think yes, but doesn't mean we can blaming the bitcoin mixing services because the intention of bitcoin mixing services are for keep your privacy and there is another reasons why we must mix our coins, can be checked on here https://cryptomixer.io/why.html

One of the points is that Bank of America tried something about six months back and quickly dropped it.  It was over a very limited customer base, but no one was even asked ahead of time.  Their purchases were tracked from the beginning of the day to the end.  Where and when a purchase was made was tracked and if your account was found to be making too many "sin" purchases, the next "sin" purchase was put on hold. 

I think aim of bitcoin mixing services are for stay anonymous and it is good aim in my opinion, but it is can be used for money laundering too the reasons is still anonymous and i think depend on people who use bitcoin mixing services.

It was also the things that come up to my mind because during my observation on some of the coin mixer running right now in the market is that most of its users asking of what kind of coin are much likely anonymous.

It is true that mixers make laundering easier, but this is not a fair argument. Normal Bitcoin users deserve the right to be avoiding traced by the government.
I would go as far to say that most mixer users are probably not involved in illegal activities.
Bitcoin mixers fill the gap between Bitcoin and anonymous currencies which do all that for you.

well, first things first.  i would prefer to start on a machine that i have never accessed any account on...not my email, not facebook, not even netflix....

the problem with mixing is that a finite amount goes in and comes out.  if you are going to hide $50 through a mixer, i would expect to find a $49 TX somewhere down the line and that should be your other end of mixing. 

one thing that keeps them guessing is rented mining to a paper wallet of a new coin.  provided the new coin is not going to die immediately, you can go to an anonymous PC, maybe the library and create a paper wallet for say Doge.  then go home and go to miningrigrentals and use your dirty BTC to rent mining power to a doge pool and payout to that address, but keep the paper wallet untouched, don't even log in to check the balance.  you will lose value doing this, that is why people rent out their rig instead of mining for themselves, but you should get around $45 out of the $50

Now, back to a new anonymous computer(best buy?) and shapeshift the doge into NXT, more lost funds, but not too bad....

create a private asset with your NXT and then send the asset to a new NXT address, from there to software wallet at home and then back to BTC....not clean, not perfect, but $40 out of $50 of pretty clean Crypto.

You can also rent a VPS anonymously and run a tumbling script for yourself.   
or..........get an account on the onion, set up a quick website and service for $50 using a new coinbase or other third party BTC payment processor and buy from yourself then transfer to software wallet

there are countless ways, hell, just sending the $50 through as five tumbled amounts instead of one helps.  making your tumbled transactions common amounts, like 50, 100, 10...
you can automate some of these things, smart contract others......you can even prep a smart contract to fire 1000BTC to fifty addresses once the address balance hits 1000

if you have a specific need, PM me, otherwise, play around and have some fun with it, options galore

Honestly, it is probably used for that purpose most of the time.  But, I see the purpose of coin mixing as a way to take Crypto back to its original way of business.  One of the very points of Crypto is to be anonymous. 

I have always claimed something to that tune myself, that using mixers can be counterproductive and actually decrease your anonymity level. In your post you mention that people who are in need of laundering funds should be doing it themselves. Could you expand in greater detail and depth on the tips and tricks of doing just that? I think many people would be interested in learning about making their coins more anonymous the right way, metaphorically speaking.

sure, it can and is used for laundering, but that is not the only purpose.  also, the more people that join into bitcoin, the more that use these services for more ethical reasons. 

the actual truth is that any one that has a real need to launder funds and knows what they are doing will be doing it themselves and not using services like these.  you are traced and tracked in more ways than just the address and these services likely get more people caught than they protect.  the big case of laundering that got the silk road interrupted was cloaked by some mixing and tumbling, but it was not enough.  the most common secondary tracking method is endpoint amount tracing.  if the FBI knows that i received $10,000 for an illegal activity and that i was likely paid within this calendar week, then they can find the start point, you can even do that.  simply search for TX's of that amount in the date range.  the list will be pretty small and you can narrow it down with a little research

so, they see the original TX and then i throw it into tumbling and mixing.  the FBI software takes 16.38 BTC and prints a pyramid shaped cone, the overall fee for a TX at level 1 for 16.38 is 0.01638.  TX fees are percentage based, so even if that is split between 10 TX's the amount is the same.  the software iterated outward for ten or so TX's, printing the results at each level and you have a simple chart that tells you how much is left from the base number after 1, 2, 3.....numbers of TX's. 

so, you want your funds back in one or two accounts after laundering.  let's say you used a tumbling service, it took in 16.38, went through several accounts and spit out 16 to your other "clean" account.  the fbi software will show that after say "5" TX's the original 16.38 is now 16.2, the software reads like this.

Level 5 TX's      16.2 left after TX fees, 16 after TX fees+common tumbling fee

and there you are,  one of maybe 50 addresses that received 16 BTC one week after the alleged paid crime.  They are watching for that amount and ten other amounts based on the software, plus amounts that are one half and one third those amounts.  it is all on one piece of paper, i have seen it.  you end up as one of maybe 1000 TX's meeting those criteria, but then other software purges a bunch based on other factors, common addresses and such.  that is how Interpol closed that money laundering case and put the silk road in the lime light. 

it is like triangulating position, the first laundered TX and you might be part of ten suspects, once you do it a second time, it is all over.  there are much better ways to attain absolute anonymity and tumbling helps, but it is just one tool in a larger system

My personal opinion is yes.
these mixing service can make things easier for money launder.. because they can easily move their money to any other address anonymously and no one can trace the third address where the btc went out.

but at the other side it have some positive uses also. people use mixing service to be anonymous and safety..

Basically it depends on the person.

Bitcoin itself makes money laundering easier. Say, you have a few million dollars of cash from drug trafficking and you need to conceal the origins of the money obtained in this way as well as transform the proceeds of such an activity into legitimate assets. You start buying bitcoins for cash, for example, using LocalBitcoins userbase. 1M dollars equals roughly around 1,500 bitcoins at the moment, therefore it may take some time and surely is not the most optimal way if you want to make this conversion. Nevertheless, after you convert your dirty dollars into bitcoins, you just sell the latter at some exchange and get clean dollars transfered to your legitimate bank account. You may even want to pay an income tax if you consider yourself a law-abiding citizen of sorts.

Disclaimer: I am neither engaged in nor encourage any such activities

Good question.

If a bank exchanges your cash bills for other cash bills, is that money laundering? Certainly not.

Mixers do not really turn proceeds from a crime into legal-looking profits, like money launderers do. They just exchange fungible units of a currency against other such units. Being a layman, I believe that making money flows untraceable is not automatically money laundering.

But I am pretty sure that authorities would just come up with some twisted argument and file charges against the operators if they could. 

The problem is that a mixing service can be seen as both an money laundering service probably used by criminals but also a service that enables common and honest people to keep their identity protected. I have used it a few times to see hot it works, but will probably never user it again.

First of all. Bitcoin illegal activities and therefore profits from it - compared to standard FIAT are so insignificant that it is not worth any media coverage.
Bitcoin money laundering is highly overhyped by media, hence scale of the problem overestimated by users tainted by that mentality.

In theory there is possible to launder money by mixing but then again, it is possible with any service where you deposit coins, for example: exchange or casino.

Why do we have some many scammers who failed to cover their track?

Mixing failed or they never done it?

Riiight.

I'd bet my life that every single hitman on the dark net is an 11 year old scammer.

Do you accept 5-6 BTC to murder a stranger and potentially spend the rest of your days behind bars. Or do you accept 5-6 BTC, or perhaps half upfront, and, like, not do it?

Golly, that's a poser.

Well some mixing services have 2000 up to 5000 btc which is an amount much higher than any hitman can ask for doing his dirty job.

I am not placing links to such services from the dark net as it's against my moral values, but what I want to say I have seen such services in the deep web asking for 3000 USD prepayment and than 25 up to 5000 USD when they finish the job. It doesn't seem to me that these persons don't need mixing as this value is up to 82 btc the most.

For drug dealers I don't think they use bitcoin in such a massive way yet although I know there are some of them using it.

Bottom line is, mixing services are always useful mainly for privacy but some people like criminals can use them for their dirty intentions.