Topic: Is "money laundering" really that big of a deal? (Read 5174 times)

By the same measure, so also are words, ideas, and the characterisation of all experiences are artifice.
At the risk of skipping to your punchline, why make this distinction as to whether it is or isn't artificial if all are?

I think that crimes recognized as such by every human culture and justice system (US Law, European Law, Roman law, Hammurabi's Code of Law, the 10 Commandments of Moses, Islamic Sharia, Aztec Justice and other more ancient justice systems) can be regarded as basic crimes.

Surely some of them did. People still kill each other as do many other animals.

Of course at some point some tribe members realized killing each other doesn't benefit the tribe and instated rules against it. But even if a rule/law is beneficial for the society, it's still artificial and made-up.

Human trafficking/slavery

Name one way a criminal could obtain money which is so evil that he MUST be punished, because the way I see it selling weapons illegally isn't bad because people want to defend themselves (especially from their evil, irresponsible governments), selling drugs is even more harmless, who are you to decide what a person ought to put in his body? Pharmaceutical companies sell drugs like Ritalin to children, image a drug pusher giving some LSD or MDMA to a 8 year old child, surely he would be put into prison for all eternity yet when there is money for the government to be made off it, it suddenly becomes praiseworthy.

I doubt that even archaic hominins, before modern humans evolved, would kill each other with impunity. There has to be some progress in a million years!

Regarding "money laundering". That is effectively victimless. The crime that needs to be punished is the one that obtained the money being laundered. If there was no crime then the allegation of laundering is just governments trying to micro-manage citizens lives.

I mean all crimes. Even the violent crimes weren't crimes until someone(s) decided they are.

If it were legal, then we're no longer talking about money laundering.

If we're talking about should anyone be able to move their proceeds of crime without any observation, I explained why I disagreed with that. Do I agree with all the laws which they pursue it for? No.

If people are worried about the government cracking down on them, IMHO it's not through anti-money laundering (AML) legislation. They don't get enough information. The $10k reporting limit only applies to cash: wires are not reported. The other information they receive is if a set of transactions go through the bank's entire compliance department and the bank has considerable evidence to believe the transactions to actually be proceeds of a crime (drug dealing, bribery, tax evasion, whatever). Then they are sent to the regulator. This is a tiny fraction of transactions that go through: in the ballpark of 0.001%. The government sees these transactions and no others, unless they're conducting an investigation into a crime. This transaction monitoring process alone costs some banks up to $500 million a year, and they do not want to send through any more than they have to, because each one adds to that number.

FATCA is the government turning every foreign bank into a proxy for the IRS. IMHO that's the concerning legislation.

Not all crimes are made up crimes.
Some of them are basic crimes, like murdering and stealing or damaging in any way to others.
With 'money laundering'   you don't make basically anything wrong you have just moved money from one account to another or you just helped for others to transfer their money.
This crime was invented as a convenient and easy method by inventive lawyers to stop other invented crimes(like drug consumes or children porno).
Drug consumption sounds very bad but it is also an invented crime to not damage others if you cannot control yourself. It is more difficult to supervise all junkies when they had their shut.
Children porno sounds and is very very evil but it is also an invented crime to stop some basic crimes(like violating and damaging childrens).
They are statistics that those who consumes drugs commit more crimes and who looks children porno will violate more probable childrens.
So far the must people already accepted.
However if this construction is to high, invented crimes based on invented crimes, or invented crimes based on invented crimes which are also based on invented crimes then it is very difficult to understand it(probably 99% of the population doesn't know when it is money laundering), can be manipulated how they want (eGold, Liberty Reserve - HSBC) and it becomes more a tool of suppression and fear than a tool of justice and prevention.
It is also a very good revenue.
It is easier and more profitable to confiscate money then catch violent gang members. If somebody will be hurt then can be a scandal and 100 million people will watch on the TV.
But nobody will protest if somebody gets arrested because probably he have done money laundering.
The society have accepted as something what is evil but they don't exactly know why.

Doesn't sound like there would be any problem or disruption if moving the money in the first place was legal.

Hopefully he does.

Surely you mean non-violent ones?

Because art dealers are required to register with regulators and this transaction would (should) be reported to the authorities.

I wonder why the criminals never thought about that.

All crimes are.

Doublethink - is the key word to understand it. (eGold, Liberty Reserve - HSBC)
This is the ultimate concept of the government to fool people and hold the financial power.

'The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.'
George Orwell

sorry about the repeat link posts, but I recently wrote this paper and it offers a solution to the p2p Exchange Problem.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwUFHE6KYsM0ZkxLVmFwbXQ3ck0/edit?usp=sharing

just want to make sure everyone knows this option exists.

-bm

According to the prosecutors, the criminal volume was 6 Billion.

According to http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/05/30/digital-currency-liberty-reserve-shut-down-by-us-governement/, 13.83% of criminals now use Bitcoin. Such an inflow of money should be observable in the market. It isn't. Therefore the 6 Billion is a number they just pulled from their bottom. Might be that they consider all TX of LR as illegitimate.

I consult to financial institutions in anti-money laundering, so I feel I can speak to this with some knowledge:

Money laundering is a huge deal, but not for terrorism. Terrorist financing is actually different - it's moving legitimate funds for an illegitimate purpose, rather than the other way around - and there is still not an effective scenario to monitor for it. 9/11 they think cost around $20k to execute. The numbers are too small.

The "lazy policing" argument I disagree with: I don't know the numbers, but I'd suspect a large proportion of murder convictions are from people not actually witnessing the murder, but someone found to be disposing of the body, hiding the murder weapon, basically everything that is a result of killing someone. ie the results of the crime, rather than the crime itself.

How money laundering does cause a problem though is it disrupts the economy. For example:

I want to move $20 million to my partner in crime overseas. I can't wire him $1 million without someone seeing that: what I can do, is send him 2000 laptops and charge him a dollar per laptop. He now has an invoice showing he's paid for these laptops, and he can sell the laptops at a reduced price to move them quickly and now has his $1 million. He has also now undercut every other laptop seller in his marketplace. This may put legitimate businesses out of business.
Same goes for any other business propped up by illegitimate funds. They compete with legitimate businesses without valid business models. Depending on the amount of laundering or the size of the community, it can do huge damage.

Legislation in the US however (USA PATRIOT act) was pushed through with an emphasis on terrorism as it was the hot topic (2001). It's generally believed in the industry that this was to cut down on tax evasion (which itself is a crime and you can debate how bad that is for years), but saying that money laundering doesn't cause problems in itself is incorrect.

It wouldn't be if the IRS was so up in everyones business.