Strictly speaking, money laundering is any activity that makes it impossible to follow a monetary trail. Whether that is in game tokens, some sort of block chain technology, or gallon jugs of Tide detergent.

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.

> gallon jugs of Tide detergent

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

Not really. Money laundering is about making your money seem like they're coming from a legit source. And the best way to do that is by buying a company that's hard to trace customer's money, a casino is the prime example. No one can tell if customers spent 50k or 500k.

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.

Cryptocurrency is handy though, as you can setup a digital download store offering "legit" stuff like reports, paid in coins. Especially if you offer sales via a hidden site, you really wouldn't have any useful records like IPs to corroborate.

In this instance isn't the money illegally acquired and then laundered by way of app store gift cards purchased with cash?

Suddenly the more expensive IAPs in games such as Talking Tom Gold Run make a lot more sense.

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

Ah gotcha, that makes more sense. I was wondering why they went through the trouble of tying their App Store/Play Store to their bank accounts and purchasing IAP all over again.

In many cases it's about exporting cash.

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.

I'm not seeing how cryptocurrencies help you to get "legit" money. And you can buy gift cards for iTunes and the Play Store using cash, so this is a good way to launder cash into legit money that is paid out by the owner of the app store.

per wikipedia

Money laundering is the process of transforming the profits of crime and corruption into ostensibly 'legitimate' assets.

It's 2017 and we're still looking up the reference book definition of laundering. Office Space was onto something.

Let's be honest, Office Space was onto everything.

Probably because it's such a non-thing, a fake crime invented to make prosecutors lives much easier.

I think you can buy app store gift cards with cash.