And yes, it can involve illicitly acquired cash, but it can also be used to conceal the purchase of assets or the exercise of political influence.
Huh, I never knew about the underground trade fueled by tide detergent. Well there goes a solid chunk of today's reading time.
Old HN post on the subject for others interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204
Converting illicitly acquired money to cryptocurrency and back to cash doesn't answer the question where did you find the money in the first place. But say you have a coffee shop, then you can claim that you sell twice as much beverages as you really do, pay the taxes and have your money cleaned.
As you play the game you can unlock some characters. But it's a very slow grind. You can also buy them.
The five most expensive characters cost £19.99, £28.99, £38.99, £48.99, and 5399 sticks of dynamite. You can buy 5,400 sticks of dynamite for £99.99
A young Chinese business dude bought a vacant 20 story former bank headquarters last year in my city to supposedly convert to condos. Nothing has been done there -- it's just a way to park money out of the hands of the PRC.
Money laundering is the process of transforming the profits of crime and corruption into ostensibly 'legitimate' assets.
Consider most people legitimately needing to launder money likely already have a lot of it and aren't necessarily looking for a bargain.
They know the publisher of the game who is getting revenue from it.
The know the thousands/tens of thousands/millions of accounts which has processed a purchase (probably hundreds of purchases per user) through it.
Some fraction of the user base is 'legit' which is to say they are playing for their own reasons.
I think the only way you prosecute that is that you find someone who was told, take this money, buy an iTunes/Play /Amazon gift card, use that card to buy items in this specific game. and finding that person would be very difficult. The dealers could literally hand gift cards to addicts for their kids to play their game while they are high.
I agree that there are pretty 'classic' schemes that could process more money but some of these online games are pretty amazing at the numbers they pull in monthly. Hard to explain a nail salon doing 5 million dollars a month in revenue.