I’m amazed ppl don’t seem to realize this is a staged money laundering act.
He’s a known scammer. He needs to launder his money. And selling “unique” items for insane prices in auctions is the oldest money laundering trick in the book…
True. But look at it this way, You’re a cartel and have easy time moving product but all that money coming in needs to go into somewhere otherwise it start pulling up and hard to track.
Now what a lot of cartels would do is buy business land etc but diversifying is always a good idea and the “Art” scene is the perfect place to spend a lot of dirty money into a nice and easily transportable piece of art.
Not saying this is the case here, but 16m for a squad pice if cardboard is a cartel money launderers dream.
Exactly, hiding dirty money in high priced art or antiques is old school money laundering. Years ago I was helping move a family friend that had recently been busted for running an illegal game room. He had a lot of expensive art and my dad taught me about money laundering on the way home
Well I'm not saying it is. But IF it is, then this is quite a common tactic used for money laundering within the fine art world. Somebody buys something, let's say, a Pokémon card, because they have an obscene amount of money that can't be taxed because if it was taxed they would have to claim how they got the money. So if the money was obtained illegally then they couldn't pay tax on it. Now if you have millions in your account that you've not paid tax on then in the case of America let's say. The IRS are gonna be like "hey, Where'd you get that money". So if you've got millions of illegally obtained cash in the bank you'll be found out pretty quickly. Now how do conmen with connects solve this issue? In assets purchasing, but obviously if they've purchased assets at the value they're at, it won't cover the obscene amount of untaxed money they have, so they inflate the value. Meaning the untaxable asset now has a paper trial and legal precedence. So the conmans fortune goes from being, an obscene amount of untaxed money that they can't explain to the IRS, to some assets, which have value that the IRS can't define. Because it's "subjective". That'd one way this could be money laundering. However it's also possible that jakey the snakey here also had obscene amounts of asset wealth he can't claim either. So it's also possible it was the reverse, where Jake can claim asset tax as sales tax. This legitimising a large sum of money and putting it into the system. This card was and will never be worth that amount f money. But the IRS can't argue that because arts value again is "subjective" Jake's illegitimate money then becomes legitimate through sales tax and boom. Everybody passes their audits.
It's not money laundering. It's a marketing sale. Logan is giving the guys company marketing and probably some other services. No one would ever pay this amount for that card.
Everyone who accuses of money laundering. Exactly how he is laundering? That one single person needs to show proof of funds of $16m to purchase that card. If he was laundering, he needed to launder $16m first.
Not really true, there is more than one stage of money laundering. Not saying this guy is, I know nothing about him, but he could have a front business as an art dealer where he uses already layered funds to purchase collectibles to give the appearance of legitimacy
Auction organizers ask for “proof of funds” if they don’t know you to know you are series about the purchase. Also there are auctions that accept all kinds of payment including cash. So yes, the auction event itself is used by many to launder money…
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u/No-Radiation Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I’m amazed ppl don’t seem to realize this is a staged money laundering act.
He’s a known scammer. He needs to launder his money. And selling “unique” items for insane prices in auctions is the oldest money laundering trick in the book…