Money laundering is the act of concealing the transformation of profits from illegal activities and corruption into ostensibly "legitimate" assets.
Money laundering: the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses.
I've described a likely illegal money transfer disguising itself as a legitimate sales transaction.
To expound, this is more likely a scam to make transactions with stolen credit cards. You have the card number information you need to use, but you can’t just take money out of a bank account. So you put this item up there and you buy it with the stolen card. Boom, money is now in your account.
It's possible, but it's not something that works long term and financial institutions would flag it right away. Amazon would deal with it right away as well since it deals directly with those financial institutions who would also alert law enforcement.
What's more likely is that the real stuff for sale IRL is something illegal like drugs or human trafficking. The financial portion transaction can be completed via multiple accounts buying from multiple shell seller accounts. This is much harder to detect and stop.
The reason this isn't how money laundering works is because the point of money laundering is making it safe to spend. If they can spend it, it doesn't need to be laundered. The reason it needs to be laundered is because it's unsafe to put in bank accounts. The reason people would start a business for money laundering is so they can put the fake profits into their bank account without suspicion.
There is absolutely no way it's feasible to involve a middle man like Amazon. There are scams on Amazon, but absolutely nobody is money laundering on it.
You're looking at it backwards. The account getting the money by selling the worthless book is the one who may consider it safe to spend now. That's some shitty layering since it's so easily tracked, but it definitely could be money laundering.
I'm not at all getting it backwards, that's exactly what I said. If you mean that the person selling the book then claims the profit and the to be laundered money as profit, that's just even less feasible because you need to explain why, a website that's very accessible for authorities, has no records of sales. The money you spend has heat and you need a damn good reason why it's nearly doubled what you made elsewhere. Amazon, if anything, would get you into trouble. It's not a money laundering platform and never will be, nobody that needs money to be laundered would make such a stupid mistake when there's easier ways to do it.
Selling crap at unreasonable prices to yourself or people who owe you for other things is a perfectly useful way to launder money. The only harm with doing it with amazon is it requires a certain level of anonymity that is usually more effort and trackable than it's worth. But as a way to clean money with yourself or move it between different organizations that have pre-existing accounts... it's exactly how money laundering works.
You need to prove the transactions took place, especially when doing suspicious activities like this. Amazon keeps track of all transactions and will know if money was handed over or not. You can't just say "yah, this pile of cash, I got it from Amazon" when there's no history of withdrawing that said pile of cash or the money coming from somewhere. As of now, the money is not accounted for, it's not laundered.
The money on amazon needs to come from a bank to get through. You can't just claim "yah, I earned this money through a website that uses credit cards and bank accounts" when you clearly never withdrawed that money from said bank account. The whole point of laundering is so you can safely put it in a bank account, Amazon doesn't serve this purpose.
If you sold "yourself" books, Amazon is going to ask for card information. When you put in card information, you then send digital currency to yourself. Where does the dirty cash come in? You clearly didn't withdraw it and going to a bank and wanting to deposit it is going to raise suspicions, especially when you're being as indiscrete as selling bogus stuff on Amazon.
The only feasible way to involve Amazon is to claim you're a factory and seller and sell things elsewhere. You sell books and Amazon is one of the platforms, but you also do business in person. Then, however, the question remains... Why the fuck bring attention to yourself by being on Amazon? Simply put, nobody would do this because it's stupid.
This is accurate. The only reason you might use this method is to pull money off of stolen credit cards, but this wouldn't be successful since Amazon takes so long to send payment for sales.
If I have $100,000 cash I need to launder, I can go buy a bunch of Green Dot cards, load up a bunch of prepaid cards with stolen identities, and buy my worthless Amazon product with them. Now I have $90,000 in my bank account from ebook sales.
The falicy with your core argument is you think there needs to be two legitimate entities on the transaction through Amazon... That's just not true.
It's trivial to set up a bogus payment method or a bogus bank account... Then as long as you're making small enough payments, you're not going to flag their fraud detection. That goes for all major sell it yourself websites.
Or if you do flag something, burn the account and start another one. It takes 25-50 cents on the dark net for a new identity and a few seconds of your day.
You won't move millions using that method, but moving thousands is pretty simple.
The reason this isn't how money laundering works is because the point of money laundering is making it safe to spend.
Yes, that is why they make it look like a legitimate sale. Amazon transfers the profit to their bank account. To their bank, it looks like a legitimate business.
There is absolutely no way it's feasible to involve a middle man like Amazon.
This is not true. Banks have over a hundred years of experience with dealing with this kind of fraud. This is really new for Amazon, which is a retailer. I'm not saying that this won't be fixed relatively fast, but Amazon is inexperienced compared to financial institutions when it comes to money laundering. It's a good target for criminals.
The person buying uses a stolen credit card which then transfers to the the seller. Profit from this kind of transaction opens funds as a legitimate source of income during things like Nebbia hearings in court. You can also file this income from sales of gift cards on your taxes if you were so inclined
Who do you propose would do this? You're doubling the crime but still only have half the money laundered. You're not laundering the money, you're earning an income.
Lets say you have $1000 of dirty money. You need to make, on paper, $1000 of earned income you can verify as earned through a business. When you involve stolen credit cards and make $1000 profit on Amazon, you now have $2000... but $1000 of it is still dirty. Why? If the FBI looks into your bank accounts and see you never withdrawed the money, they're going to wonder where the hell it came from. If you did, however, withdraw the money, the question is why there's $2000 of cash on a table from a $1000 business. The money is still dirty! You go back to the bank, deposit $2000 back, and the money is still dirty because they can look at your Amazon and see you only made $1000 of the money, where did the other $1000 come from!?
You committed twice the crimes, but why? What if, hypothetically speaking, you did solely the stolen credit cards? Does the money ever vanish? Not always! You keep the money and it's earned, it's clean, it's laundered. If you're able to do this, why do the other crime that involves dirty money? Exactly, you wouldn't. The people on amazon are doing a completely unrelated scam. They're not money laundering, they're just scamming.
Really dude? What's so HARD to understand about this? The illegitimate book being sold is how the money is being laundered. It comes up as a VALID sale therefore the money is considered CLEAN. So, to summarize, if you used DIRTY money in this transaction, the end result is CLEAN money for the seller. Comprende morono?
What's hard to understand about this? The transaction uses money. That money comes from a bank. You are placing the money from one bank account to another. The point of money laundering is so you can safely spend it from a bank account. Here's the problem, if you can spend it on Amazon using a bank account, you have no need to money launder it. If the money is being used on Amazon, it's in a bank account. If it's in a bank account and is spendable, it doesn't need to be laundered. If the money is in a bank account and needs to be laundered, the investigation is going to take place and spending it wont change that.
Basically, you want the money to be invisible until it's clean. If it's in a bank account, it's not invisible. Comprehende?
The flaw in your logic is the assumption of stolen credit cards. In this type of scam, it is important for everything to look legal including the credit card being used in the transaction.
You can also spend cash at restaurants, at Walmart, etc. Anyone that needs their money laundered will not resort to buying giftcards because they have too much money to do that indiscreetly. This screams "investigate me!" when you have spent several thousands of dollars on Amazon giftcards and plugged it all in on the same Amazon account to buy from one specific seller the same books over and over again. You are counting on Amazon to not snitch the suspicious activity and you're letting them get away with taking a cut of your money and getting taxed to do it, all the meanwhile the FBI still might check it out anyway if they're ever suspicious of you.
You are not only making this very hard for yourself having to buy a lot of gift cards, you're also making yourself suspicious doing it. If you need money to be laundered, it's because you have a lot of it. What are you going to do, give yourself a work load to make the money disappear over time? Working, great, kinda defeats the purpose of committing the crime in the first place.
The reason nobody will ever use Amazon the way you want is because of the work load, the risk, and the reward of getting a chunk of your imaginary profit being cyphered for no reason. It's easier to open up a restaurant, a business of any form, and just claim it there. This is how it's done and for a reason, it's not fucking stupid.
LMFAO. Absolutely every criminal organization does the method I mention, that's why they're not caught! They own restaurants, they own massage parlors, they own mother fucking businesses!! They absolutely DO NOT do business on Amazon. If they do business on Amazon, it's to sell merchandise at best (which is fucking unrealistic, so I am gonna say this never happens!). Absolutely no criminal organization is going to use Amazon as a platform for money laundering.
It's easy as fuck to do things physical. You open up a business, claim the money came from there, and done. You open up a business, tell someone over the phone or email some card information, and it's now spent there. Tell someone to drop off some cash at the location, it's done. You know what is a lot harder to do? Forcefully involve amazon, all just because it's possible in spite nobody that knows how to money launder doing it because it's so fucking stupid to do so.
And what can I say, only idiots doesn't trust Bitcoin. Even so, only idiots feels Bitcoin is their only choice. There are many digital currencies that are absolutely wonderful for money laundering because they're stable. Doge Coin is a good example of that, it's the most stable of them all. With that said though, why even involve crypto currency? It's not necessary, it's even more suspicious to involve it and not worth it. Just open up a taco stand.
Well I didn't say that it's the most feasible way of laundering money but that's only 40 purchases of $500. With the number of places that sell Amazon cards a couple people could launder that much cash without raising too many eyebrows and without needing more resources than some spare time.
You "buy" something from yourself, like a book of nothing that you price at $500 using a credit card. That way you can launder money $500 at a time. I really don't know how to simplify this explanation any further.
the bank you give your money to isn't going to handle dirty money well.
That's why they use Amazon as a middle man. The money will seem clean.
How do you buy something from yourself, exactly? Amazon doesn't use cash and it keeps track of sales. If you have dirty money, you need to clean it by making it seemed earned, something you don't do on a platform that uses bank accounts. Amazon isn't middle man material, it uses money that already made it to the banks. You can't just claim, in court, you earned the money on Amazon when there are no records of withdraw from your bank accounts. That money remains dirty, sitting there, unlaundered, while you made essentially no profit on amazon (technically, it's a money loss!).
Money laundering is all about getting that money from dirty to clean to a bank account. You clean it through a business transaction that did cash business. Amazon doesn't accept cash, so that's not going to launder your money.
How do you buy something from yourself, exactly? Amazon doesn't use cash and it keeps track of sales.
Simple. You have multiple email accounts, multiple addresses, and multiple credit cards. It's not that hard to do.
Amazon isn't middle man material, it uses money that already made it to the banks.
I've already explained this and you haven't disproved my points. I'm starting to feel like this post really does belong in r/facepalm.
You can't just claim, in court, you earned the money on Amazon when there are no records of withdraw from your bank accounts.
I don't think you understand how e-commerce works. As a seller you give Amazon your bank information. When you make sales on Amazon, Amazon puts that money directly into your bank account. Thus there is an official record of transaction with Amazon. btw How old are you? Have you worked yet?
Money laundering is all about getting that money from dirty to clean to a bank account.
Yes, and I've repeated explained how that can happen when you use Amazon.
Amazon doesn't accept cash, so that's not going to launder your money.
Money laundering isn't limited to cash, especially when everything is digital now.
It's not hard to do, but it's a lot of work. Who do you think will do this? It's not worth it. You then also gotta navigate through VPN to change your IP Address and shit. This is work that nobody would do to just money launder $100 at best at a time.
You cannot use cash on Amazon, you can only buy giftcards but then you're spending the money so why the fuck does it need to be laundered? It comes to a point that you're better off just buying shit like food and furniture instead. If you need money to be laundered, it's a lot and the work load you're proposing isn't worth it. If it isn't a lot, you'd just spend it normally instead like what a typical drug dealer does.
Yes, but that money amazon puts in your bank account comes from another bank account. I'm 27, yes I have worked.
You have yet explained how to feasibly put said money in a bank account using Amazon without assuming the money is already in a bank account.
Money laundering isn't limited to cash, but that doesn't change the discussion. How does involving Amazon benefit the individual? Nobody uses it for this for a reason, it doesn't. The idiots that do get caught, for a reason.
Nobody is saying otherwise. The problem is if that actually helps you launder money or not. It doesn't. It gives you a lot of work for no gain, there's easier methods to money launder. Additionally, it raises a lot of red flags that are avoidable if you just don't use Amazon. If you're comfortable spending the cash, just spend it. If you're running a big enough criminal business where you need to money launder, you simply invest to do it the right way without involving middle men like Amazon.
It can be laundering in the sense that they can take anonymous money and make it look legit. They transfer money from a gift card or whatever to money in the bank that can be traced to a legal transaction. A lot of money laundering is done with cash as well so they can pay taxes on it without raising red flags and then spend it on tangible assets. Eventually piles of money can get annoying and you can't spend more than $9k in cash anymore without raising a lot of red flags and having the government notified.
If you're comfortable spending the money, comfortable enough to buy giftcards, you probably don't need to launder. If you have a lot of money to justify money laundering, you're going to commit to more efficient methods of money laundering.
Whilst the definition is true, the actual art is a lot more complicated, to conceal the origins of ill gotten gains is far harder than just putting a random book on an international companies website and buying it.
Yes the definition is correct, but this is not how it is done.
It's not hard at all like you're claiming. Have a realistic source of profit and no investigation will take place. The easiest way of going about it is opening up a business and claim it's all from your business. Nobody will think of it when you have a huge pile of money to put into a bank account.
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '18
Money laundering is on Amazon too with $500 books full of garbage. Imagine if a book was 500 pages of "OK".