Research; The use of Crypto currencies for cyber laundering

[pooya87]

I'm not sure if OP is serious since they created the topic and went away for good but for the sake of argument I' suggest you forget about bitcoin and look into tokens namely NFTs.

Bitcoin is a currency and its market and the price is clear, not to mention the very transparent ledger storing all transactions. It is extremely difficult to launder money using bitcoin.

On the other hand it is not only super easy but it is happening every day using tokens. Here is a simple example with only 2 steps:
1- The money launderer creates a fake and useless token (mostly NFTs)
2- The same person buys that NFT for an unreasonably high amount of dirty money (like $60 million out of nowhere!)
Claims it was a legitimate sale and the received money is clean!

There are numerous examples of NFTs appearing out of nowhere selling something that by no standard should be worth millions of dollars and to make matters more suspicious, there is only one bid on that token buying it for millions!

[buwaytress]

1- The money launderer creates a fake and useless token (mostly NFTs)
2- The same person buys that NFT for an unreasonably high amount of dirty money (like $60 million out of nowhere!)
Claims it was a legitimate sale and the received money is clean!

Wonderful suggestion for research. I believe there actually has been evidence of this going on in this brilliant NFT scheme -- which, by the way, is simply a lesson lifted straight out of the elite rich's world of "how to launder money using art". In this instance, an artist is commissioned a painting by said rich guy. But instead of paying the artist, said rich guy instead agrees that he will bid for and pay a ridiculous amount of money for it, using the services of auction house to promote and legitimise the deal.

Artist keeps promised share, auction house keeps promised portions and, if lucky enough, rich guy actually gets outbid by some other dumb rich guy -- bidder keeps profits. Clean.

In NFT, replace rich guy with NFT minter, replace auction house with NFT marketplace, and remove need for actual artist (you've got AI tools now minting NFTs on script).

P.S. Ought to look also into stablecoins and "defi" for more cyber laundering loveliness.

[GreatArkansas]

Lot of criminals are using cryptocurrency for these kinds of activities for sure.
I am also curious here,
is using a bitcoin mixer/different chain mixer or converting your funds to different altcoins just to mix it also considered money laundering?
It seems one of the best ways to hide your identity is using mixers.

[Odusko]

What exactly are you looking for? I think the important thing to remember here is all money types are used in laundering cases. Sure bitcoin / cryptocurrencies have made a new way to launder money and some make it easy to do so, but I hope this doesn’t get in the way of the fact that this is such a revolutionary piece of technology.  Not sure what else to provide.

Paper money is the most vulnerable and frequently used for money laundering without a trace, in my country when men on the darknet want to make transactions that can not be traced they choose to use the US dollar as the local currency in most cases money laundering in my country are done using the United States dollar as my traditional currency have low value and can not be easily carried around in paper form and if the deal is carried out using either the bank or blockchain it can be traced so Bitcoin is never a haven for money laundering.

[jaberwock]

I believe there actually has been evidence of this going on in this brilliant NFT scheme -- which, by the way, is simply a lesson lifted straight out of the elite rich's world of "how to launder money using art". In this instance, an artist is commissioned a painting by said rich guy. But instead of paying the artist, said rich guy instead agrees that he will bid for and pay a ridiculous amount of money for it, using the services of auction house to promote and legitimise the deal.

Artist keeps promised share, auction house keeps promised portions and, if lucky enough, rich guy actually gets outbid by some other dumb rich guy -- bidder keeps profits. Clean.

In NFT, replace rich guy with NFT minter, replace auction house with NFT marketplace, and remove need for actual artist (you've got AI tools now minting NFTs on script).

P.S. Ought to look also into stablecoins and "defi" for more cyber laundering loveliness.

This has been established long time ago. We do not know "all" people who does this, but we have caught a lot of people who did, the accounts were tracked back and eventually shown that they were connected to each other. Which meant that the same person who created the NFT, was the same person who bought it for silly amounts as well.

This means that people overprice their own shitty stuff and then take advantage of the situation by selling it to others for cheaper if they have to. Do not consider just those 60 million type of stuff, people do this with even 200 bucks worth of stuff, this is why it is quite important to check the projects and see if they are legit or not.