[daxorid]

> We don't want money laundering

Can you explain this? It's never made any sense, at all.

1. If you earn excess unreported income, eventually the IRS will figure it out and come get their cut.

2. If you earn it through criminal means, you're already committing a crime for which, if caught, you will be punished.

Why is the act of obfuscating the source of income a crime? Who gets harmed by this, that isn't already harmed by either the potential crime committed or taxes evaded?

[sailfast]

If you make money laundering easy it becomes much easier to commit crimes and keep your gains, while the volume of the payoff gets much higher.

If drug dealers in the 80s could have started hedge funds (or even deposit funds legally) with their shoeboxes of cash, it would’ve been an even crazier ball game.

[naringas]

also, it seems to me that current money laundering didn't really exist before the early 70s

a series of legislations right around the time of declaration of war against drugs (91st USA congress) pretty much made 'money laundering' a thing

prior to that, during the prohibition era it wasn't called money laundering yet it was simple tax evasion.

[0xEFF]

It's not a crime if the source is legitimate, but if you ask me to hold on to a bag of cash which your friend will retrieve tomorrow, then it's reasonable for me to ask if the cash is legit. Otherwise, I may be harmed by being part of a crime.

It's no different for a financial institution holding onto a bag of cash.

[leetcrew]

regarding 1), the point of money laundering is that you can report that income to the IRS without clearly implicating yourself in criminal activity. laundering your money and then not reporting it defeats the purpose.

there's nothing inherently wrong with obfuscating a source of income, although it's hard to do this without committing some sort of fraud along the way. it's a (somewhat distasteful, imo) administrative convenience. people who run criminal enterprises have a variety of methods for distancing themselves from the actual crimes they are making money from. it turns out to be a lot easier to catch them doing funny stuff with money than it is to pin any of the original crimes on them.