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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

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jacurtis

Wow, never realized that that could be a great money laundering strategy.

1. Take cash, load it onto prepaid cards.

2. Buy GPU instances.

3. Mine crypto.

4. Pay for compute with #1

5. Sell crypto

6. "Clean" cash

I just don't have the mind of a criminal I guess, it sounds like this was figured out a long time ago.

There are (were) enough random kids in thier basements making millions on crypto that it probably wouldn't turn too many eyebrows either by the IRS if you actually tried to report your crypto earnings cleanly, they would likely spend their efforts chasing down the people who weren't reporting.

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Fortunatelly your evil ML plan going to fail on #1. It's basically impossible to get some cash loaded to prepaid cards anywhere. Also AWS and other hosting providers wouldn't accept prepaid cards either. Instead you just buy crypto with cash P2P and report that as mined or whatever.

On other hand credit card fraud is real problem especially due to fact that Amazon don't want to add any KYC burden on their customers or try to track down any anomaly spending. After all good chunk of AWS profits come out of fact how bad people of tracking their cloud costs.

If Amazon to implement built-in option to track suspicious jumps of AWS costs then it's not only gonna cut on fraud, but on overall AWS profits.

Couldn't you also buy GPUs in person with cash and mine with them?

That's when you end up with the electricity bill of a weed farm and you get cops busting down your doors.

That would be true regardless of the means of obtaining the GPUs -- I was just replying to the issue of the cash->GPU funnel, not asserting that any other part of the operation is easy.

> If Amazon to implement built-in option to track suspicious jumps of AWS costs then it's not only gonna cut on fraud, but on overall AWS profits.

OK. https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-anomaly-...

you can buy prepaid cards with cash at any drug store. you have to pay with cash for most prepaid cards (or use a debit transaction).

the downside is the insanely high service fee -- 7 or 8 bucks per 500

That's a good way of monetizing stolen credit card but it would be a very bad way to do money laundering, because crypto is effectively "cash" so it still isn't clean. It doesn't have a good origin story.

Basically for money laundering you want to have a good story for your money that you can get tax authorities and banks to believe. "I found some crypto" would only work at small scale, and crypto is considered "high risk" anyway so you'll get higher scrutiny.

If I was in the business of laundering money and I wanted to do it via crypto, I think I would create an NFT instead then buy it from myself. Then I have funds I can transfer to cash, and I can claim I got them through my great artistic abilities.

The NFT sounds better but assuming the police FBI, DEA etc. are smart, which they probably are, they can see that you are not famous in the NFT world so why did someone pay so much. So you would need to almost be able to make a million anyway (just pure NFT grift) to launder a million (some other source)

IOW, money laundering works best as an adjunct to a profitable real business, same with crypto as with laundromats and vending machines.

GPUs are not used to mine cryptos anymore, it's last year's news. There are much easier ways to launder money.

I don't know about AWS but with GCP the instance gets suspended if you try mining

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