[IkmoIkmo]

Thing is that it's a lot easier to regulate a small number of registered businesses, with known owners, in known locations, versus a potentially endless amount of (unregistered) customers that come and go.

Not easy, just easier.

Pinpointing those companies that see large growth in an old, competitive or low-margin industry, is a risk-indicator that allows you to filter out many companies and investigate only a few. Seeing that some are selling large fractions of palladium, is a risk-indicator.

Appearing at these companies with fake offers to sell palladium, can give insight.

Requiring source-of-scrap forms to be filled in, can give a paper-trail that either leads somewhere, or is obviously fake and leads nowhere. If that happens routinely, licenses could be revoked.

Don't get me wrong, none of this solves the issue and none of it is easy. It'll always be a cat and mouse game. AML regulations have shown to be quite ineffective at rooting out the problem, it's very much alive and kicking and perhaps even bigger than ever. Yet it seems also obvious that, much, much more money laundering would be happening in absence of any such regulations. Regulations can be helpful without solving the entire problem, if well designed (AML is very much a clusterfuck for example).

[SV_BubbleTime]

When the solution is “we need more laws, more regulation, more inspections”… I tend to think this viewpoint is reactionary and not well considered.