Two Ways To Launder Money With Bitcoin
By Evan Ducktator on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
According to Bromium report, cybercriminal laundered proceeds consist of 8–10% of total illegal profits globally and estimated in $80-$200 billion per year. It won’t be a surprise if I tell you that Bitcoin is pretty popular among scammers and criminals due to the fact that it’s very complicated to regulate even for governments and law enforcers.
Unfortunately for the criminals, Bitcoin is not anonymous as they used to think, and a detailed investigation can bring to light all the bad apples. That is why some of the smartest criminals use additional methods to launder money with crypto. So what do they do?
Bitcoin Mixers
In short, BTC mixers are the way to transfer dirty bitcoins to laundering service and after, to withdraw clean bitcoins. The thing is that dirty bitcoins mix between lots of different addresses in numerous small transactions so it becomes a hard nut to identify the original address. However, this laundering scheme has pitfalls, such as 0.5–5% fees and some centralized services can collect your data. What is more, one can get bitcoins that can appear even dirtier than sent bitcoins since there are too many scammers.
Crypto Exchanges
The second way to launder bitcoins is to exchange bitcoins to altcoins which are more anonymous. However, a criminal should use unregulated services that have no connection with Know-Your-Customer and Anti-Money-Laundering (KYC/AML) programs. Nevertheless, some exchanges have specific restrictions to prevent money laundering and anonymous altcoins can be volatile, so it’s possible to lose a lot of money because of any unexpected currency rate change.
On the one hand, new technologies make money laundering process more accessible than it used to be. On the other hand, new technologies allow the police to catch criminals faster, so any small mistake can cause cybercriminal to end up in custody. So if I could make any advice, I would suggest everyone to obey the law.
