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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

If I'm an "artist", and I draw a horizontal line, and a "buyer" pays 7 figures for my "art", and I sort of know into exactly which account to deposit the payment: is that money laundering?

Or just a modern art?

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If you deposit the payment into an account that's not yours, that is where AML (and tax laws!) kick in. Are you simply giving a gift to that person? Are you buying something from them? Are you making a honest mistake?

The problem is not that a casino "makes a lot of money" suddenly. Sure, great for them. But then if that money starts to percolate into the other jurisdictions. For example the casino orders dry cleaning from a foreign company. The casino wire transfers the money, the cleaners send the receipts, but no actual cleaning happens (obviously).

And this is where banks come in, because they provide the wire transfer. And they are mandated to flag extremely successful dry cleaners and other providers, report it to various government agencies.

And ... it turns out that somehow they can't even do plausible deniability properly.

If the money used to pay for the "art" comes from declared income and and the only thing you provide in return is "the artwork" it's modern art, unless of cause your connected enough that it could be seen as an attempt to carry favor with your connections.

The transaction that happens when the buyer then sells it for twice the amount to an offshore holding trust without any operational business associated with it is money laundering.

That is just modern art. But... if in the previous week you paid someone those same 7 figures, or you paid N people 7 figures/N for their creative dance with walnuts, then the tax people might be justified in their curiosity.

I have no idea if that is money laundering or not.

But in the Real World™, most money-laundering investigations are done by law firms after a theft of funds is discovered.

The frauds are typically insider-assisted procurement fraud where some known list of initial illegal transactions are identified and then attempts are make to recover it from intermediate and/or ultimate beneficiaries.

The bank accounts of a long list of intermediaries are subpeonaed and the transactions traced.

The entire point of money-laundering is to make the trail go cold.

The 'contra' bank account entries keeps the trail very, very alive.

Imagine, paying 52 million bucks for a vertical blue line on a canvas. When the auctioneer, who suspiciously never really care to do background checks beyond the simple stuff, finds that the buyer is an offshore trust fund - they are more than happy to sell the painting and extract ridiculous fees because the trustee won't care. The trust is a laundering device for whole countries created by the English to aid capital flight. 52 million is but a drop in the ocean.

So no. Its not modern art. It's money laundering.

That was enlightening; now I also understand the need for NFTs.

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