Most criminal cryptocurrency is funneled through just 5 exchanges | Hacker News Reader

Most criminal cryptocurrency is funneled through just 5 exchanges

wired.com

32 pointsTomte19 comments

To save you a click: they’re not named in the article.

I imagine it's the only ones that allow reasonably large deposit and withdrawal without kyc/aml

> I imagine it's the only ones that allow reasonably large deposit and withdrawal without kyc/aml

When you have no KYC but a 5BTC/day withdrawal limit like KuCoin it doesn't matter. You can just create 10 accounts and get your limit up to 50BTC/day.

5BTC/day is about $3 million per month. I bet most criminals don't even need the muliple accounts

When a criminal actually gets a big win, they usually want to cash out as swiftly as they can. Not over the course of 30d.

Those who make less will probably just use an exchange like sideshift.ai or changenow.io.

Also probably true: "most non-criminal cryptocurrency is funneled through just 5 exchanges".

Also true: Most (known) criminal currency in the USA is funneled through Wells Fargo.

There are some exchanges who actually operate under some kind of financial regulations and are thus avoided by the most shady operators.

Exchanges are the interface to actual currencies, and some interfaces are watched more than others.

The real question is if it's the same five exchanges? Or is there some effect from KYC rules and the like?

Is there such a thing as legitimate bitcoin? How much of the value of bitcoins is tied up in some form of money laundering, be it from criminal proceeds or just to transfer value out of a jurisdictions against prevailing regulations? The rest, "innocent" investors or enthusiasts, when not trying to scalp each other, just seem to provide liquidity and a fig leaf for the dark bitcoins.

A lot of bitcoins associated with known crimes or sanctioned owners are flagged, and actually blocked by exchanges, for example there is an OFAC sanction list of bitcoin addresses. One problem with such approaches however is "dusting attacks". The owner of a blocked address could send tiny amounts to vast number of innocent addresses, thus tainting them as well. Seized bitcoins from crime have also many times been auctioned directly from authorities. So coins sold in that manner in some sense become 'legitimate' again. [1]

In any money system, maintaining fungibility is really important. You wouldn't want the distant history of a bitcoin or dollar bills to be of concern to someone transacting with it. You could probably say something similar about dollars, for example there is the famous finding that 25% of US Bills have traces of cocaine on them [2]. This doesn't make me personally feel like by using dollars I am providing liquidity to drug cartels.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/19/what-the-us-government-does-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency

Almost all use of bitcoin is speculative investment.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181

> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.

(Note that this quote is talking specifically about bitcoin, not crypto as a whole.)

That would actually be worse because then bitcoin is really mostly about "investors" trying to scalp each other, and very close even to a Ponzi-scheme. "Large concentrated players" don't need blockchains as "legitimate tender" or for the anonymity or whatever, they mostly use it for investment purposes. If everybody is just investing, and nobody is actually generating value above investing in actual currencies, then that should scare the living shit out of anyone involved in that.

And I don't really believe that it is possible to estimate the amount of "dark" trading. Those investors may very well be providing the necessary market liquidity which the actual criminals appreciate very much.

Despite its reluctance to name the top five money-laundering exchanges in its most recent report, in another report in February of last year Chainalysis did point to a collection of Russia-based exchanges it says have cashed out large sums of criminal proceeds.

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...

Let me guess: those exchanges do not happen to pay Chainalysis 30,000$/month for their AML software.

Everybody knows if you don't pay the Chainalysis "tax", then US Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) will swoop in to shut you down.

Despite you're innocently stealing the pensions only from grandmas who deserved it.

There will always be a shady exchange or five, the pressure from criminals looking to launder crypto is just too great.

> There will always be a shady exchange or five, the pressure from criminals looking to launder crypto is just too great.

I wonder why because laundering crypto will always be easy with crypto, even with exchanges like Coinbase.

To launder cryptocurrency into your bank account, the best practice is to create a business with non-physical stuff which scales up (in terms of money) quickly. Sell e-books, email hosting, consultancy or whatever.

Then, accept crypto with your business with Coinbase merchant, opennode or whatever, and you know, transfer the sweet USD to your bank account.

The origin of your illicit BTC you receive should obviously be obscured, so maybe trade BTC to $privacycoin and back again, before sending it to your business.

You can add as much complexity as you want. You know, offshorecorptalk.com is actually a great resource for this.

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