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Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

$2.3M in cash and money orders? Isn't that a MASSIVE red flag that you are dealing with unscrupulous people? That's textbook money laundering.

It's alarming on the surface, but he HAD to know he was dealing with criminals with that volume of untraceable payments. I certainly don't think he should be facing criminal charges, but I can't imagine he's actually surprised.

Also, their website: http://www.extensionsoft.com/index.htm

Apparently designed in MS Word, minimal information, no product details (why not?), can't keep their own tagline straight (is it "International Software Systems" or "International Sportsbook Systems"?).

I hope it's not delving into ad hominem territory, but it's a shady website no doubt.

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"Stuart had about 20 clients, all of them outside the U.S. in Costa Rica, Panama, Australia, Jamaica, the UK, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere."

Sending Cashier's Checks by mail is pretty much what you'd want to do in the above cases. Visa and MasterCard 6K-40K transactions aren't really going to work out for you too well coming into your PayPal account, especially from the above Countries.

You've removed all fees, all bullshit, and most of the fraud by accepting legitimate bank checks.

> That's textbook money laundering.

Money laundering is the process of concealing the source of money obtained by illicit means.

I don't think he concealed anything, nor was the money obtained illicitly. He licensed a software product.

I think the original post was saying that he (the sportsbook) was the launder for illicit money obtained by his customers. In other words: they were using him (knowingly or unknowingly) to "clean" their money.

He wasn't a sportsbook, though. He's a software engineer.

"Isn't that a MASSIVE red flag that you are dealing with unscrupulous people?"

I used to think so, but there are legitimate and perfectly legal businesses that only accept cash or teller's checks. I recently dealt with a car shipping service that demanded cash (I was suspicious too, but my car is fine and the service was prompt). Some people don't trust banks; some come from countries where banks cannot be trusted.

There is no upper bound on legal cash transactions. We have cash for a reason, and people who pay in cash (even large sums of money) should not be assumed to be criminals (despite what tyrannical forces like the DEA tell you).

There are limitations on how much you can carry/fly/drive over the border without declaring. The limit is 10k. When you do declare it the IRS gets involved and they're going to question you about it.

And if you got the money legitimately and if you have a legitimate purpose for having it on you (or even no purpose!) then you're fine.

Read here for an interesting story about $247K:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unione_Corse

As in the story there, it doesn't prevent them from legally roughing you up at bit or confiscating the money.

First I would point out that the people he would be working with are businessmen like anyone; they don't twist their mustaches and have maniacal laughs.

If he was working with companies in Costa Rica then he was working with companies that are open to US citizens, which he knew because everyone does. That's why the gambling company scene in Costa Rica is so strong, it's like we like it in the US, but at a safe distance.

The idea that a supplier can be held accountable for the actions of the company they are supplying to though... well he would have to have been very closely embedded into the company for him to have had dealings with the payment processing for this to stand a real chance.

In the eyes of the law a wire transfer is considered cash, money orders are negotiable instruments. Probably copy and pasted from a court filing somewhere without realizing what it actually meant.

Maybe we're reading it wrong, but "cash" doesn't have to be hard bills, just in money that he actually received. If they had received wire transfers into a checking account it would be accurate to describe that as "cash".

Maybe I misread the article but I didn't get the sense that the $2.3M was in the last year. If the company has been operating for just over a dozen years that could be total revenue which given the type of software really isn't all that alarming.

If the company has been operating for over a dozen years, I'd expect to see product info on their website. Why is it practically empty? Kinda weird if you ask me.

When you work business-to-business in an industry with few players and mostly fixed relationships, you pretty much never get new clients through your website. Especially for service providers in this industry it's much more about your reputation and network. So it's not as strange as you would normally think when a company does not have a decent website, although it's clearly something that could be fixed without too much work.

(Also don't forget that any specifics you put out there is potentially new information to your competitors.)

I've known successful software companies with no websites, yet alone bare websites. Sometimes it works better to focus purely on building relationships and not to waste time on hoping potential customers will find you online.

A friend of mine works for a large private investment firm. He runs their very large Oracle databases. The webpage is a picture of a sailboat with the only text being the postal and email addresses to their various offices. That is their entire web presence.

Most non-web companies don't have a large web presence. Nothing weird about that.

You'd be surprised. I have dealt with a large number of specialized software vendors and very few have websites of any usefulness.

There are a lot of small shops out there selling one of a few packages that everyone in the industry (whatever industry it is) uses and they have been doing it for 20 years. It's a different world. They are frequently making millions selling desktop software that's not very effective and without any marketing budget.

Can you share any examples? Sounds like a fun weekend project to try to put one of those companies out of business :)

It's hard since so many don't have websites, but think about blue collar service industris (mechanics, plumbers, car washes, etc). Here's a company that kills it selling web based software to auto glass replacement facilities. It looks like it is out of 1995:

http://www.edirectglass.com/default.htm

That's is about as hip and modern as I have seen.

This is the website for Berkshire Hathaway - http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Just wow:

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY

Well, it does look like it was made with a WYSIWYG editor using Trident (MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828) for visual layout. With "what you see is what you get" can sometimes be "what you get is what you don't see".

My favorite is the anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor. This happens twice for reasons that don't seem to exist since no link on the page apparently points to them.

I'm curious what their "web" presence looked like in 1978, which is the initial copyright date listed at the bottom of that page.

It's prosecutions like this one that make businesses wary of providing too much of a paper trail. There are plenty of cases of unjust indictments of innocent people by ruthless and ambitious federal prosecutors, and it is not suspicious that someone distrubuting this kind of software would want to be careful.

This is aside from the fact that gambling is a victimless crime, and it is only made illegal to allow a government monopoly over it.

Not necessarily; what is a Paypal payment? "Money Order" implies simply a monetary transfer in some circles, similar to a Western Union/moneygram transaction.

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