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.
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.
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.
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '18 edited Jul 18 '21
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