As I understand it, the international "gold standard" for money laundering is still real estate. The reporting requirements the US pushed onto international banking specifically except real property transactions. Thus, property is the place embezzled money is parked.<p>Vancouver, BC seems to be the favored place to park Chinese money. Of course New York remains popular. American "midwest" farmland is another big sink.<p>I would welcome any updates to this situation; my information might be old.
This isn’t an anti anti-money laundering. It’s providing the same information as an anti-money laundering service, the only difference is that its access isn’t limited to large exchanges and banks. I, for one, am happy to see this kind of technology available for the masses. If I were legally accepting bitcoin as payment for my small business or whatever I’d like to be able to check that the bitcoins weren’t involved in criminal activity before accepting them rather than dealing with trouble when trying to deposit them to an exchange.
Even if your funds are 100% clean, AML flagging can lead to weeks of funds being frozen. People also regularly get refused bank accounts not because they were convicted of any crime, but because these AML risk assessment systems mark them as suspicious. To convince the bank you're not suspicious, you have to give their employees extremely intimate information about your personal business, and even that doesn't guarantee approval.<p>The asymmetries this creates in possession of private financial information, between the general population, and those who work in the banking sector, undoubtedly leads to the latter attaining a major unfair market advantage in finding investment opportunities, which will contribute to the growth of incomes of those in the financial sector outpacing the growth of income in the economy at large.<p>And we do see those working in the financial sector receiving a significant pay premium:<p><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...</a><p>And seeing rapid growth in compensation between 1979 and 2005:<p><a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/" rel="nofollow">https://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/</a><p>>>Those in the financial sector were associated with nearly a fourth (23 percent) of the expansion of the income shares of both the top 1.0 and top 0.1 percent.<p>Beyond the inequality AML gatekeeping fosters, the global AML compliance industry costs trillions, and by at least one account, does almost nothing to stop crime:<p><a href="https://www.effectiveaml.org/aml-compliance-oxymoron/" rel="nofollow">https://www.effectiveaml.org/aml-compliance-oxymoron/</a><p>Which is obvious from common sense, considering cartels are not only successfully laundering billions of dollars in illicit drug sales every, but actually distributing billions of dollars worth of highly restricted Schedule I drugs to every city in North America, which is a much more difficult feat than laundering the proceeds of those sales.<p>The special interests that have emerged to provide these enormously illiberal and costly, and dubiously useful AML compliance services, like Elliptic mentioned in the article, will continue pushing for more mass-surveillance of financial transactions and criminalization of privacy.
If you did a crime and made money in Bitcoin, deposited at an exchange, traded it for Monero, cashed out, sent it to a different exchange, traded back for BTC, cashed out, and went to a different exchange to turn it to dollars, how would anyone trace that? Someone would need to link internal data from the second and third exchanges in order to even know you ever owned Monero.
Money laundering laws are a fiction perpetrated by authoritarian leaning leaders. It equates to "monetary transactions I don't like for idealogical reasons". In the US for example, there is no monetary transaction that occurs at all that cannot be selectively prosecuted as money laundering. Breaking a $20 dollar bill into smaller bills to use as a tip in a restaurant is a plain violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1956 .