Except Binance didn't make out too bad in the end anyways. CZ still has billions of dollars and is looking at a pretty good sentence given the allegations. Monitorship does not entail unlimited government access to records, it mostly means a bunch of adult hall-monitors reading off compliance checklists, making sure they are being followed, then writing to the government every quarter about the remaining items on the checklists.
Yes, there's the SAR lookback, but no one reads those anyways and probably won't give the government much because criminals routinely use accounts registered with fake or stolen IDs. Binance still accepts customers from countries like Venezuela, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc that "respected" financial institutions wouldn't touch with a 39.5 foot pole. There are still people making $50,000 USDT -> cash transactions every day with Binance P2P.
Who's going to be your counterparty and why would they give you the "official" rate? The whole reason why there's an "official" rate and a "black market" rate is that the government has mandated one rate, but the broader market disagrees and has agreed on a different rate. The two never converge because the government requires you to jump through hoops to get the official rate, so people can't arbitrage the difference.
> Banks I assume? You would get the market rate, not the official rate.
So where's the money making opportunity? You're short selling at the market (ie. non-official) rate, and have to buy back at the market rate. The only way you'll make money is if the market rate drops even more, but whether that happens is uncertain. This just sounds like run of the mill currency speculation.
It is if you have friends in the central bank. In Venezuela the official rate was like 10x the black market rate at one point so if you had the connections you could go say 60000 bolivars -> (official rate) 10000 USD -> (black market rate) 600000 bolivars -> (official rate) 100000 USD.
The massive profitability of this scam resulted in a number of Miami condo sales.
Reading the article:
> A substantial number of debit card holders had been using cards to make bulk purchases, often in the United Arab Emirates, of gold, mobile telephones and other products to take advantage of the Egyptian pound's low official exchange rate.
Looks like a similar arbitrage was going on here. I predict they will introduce more capital controls to stop bleeding forex reserves, which won't work and then they will eventually be forced to float the currency, resulting in massive inflation that will stabilize in a year or two. Or they'll just continue on like Argentina and let their economy languish because they refuse to recognize economic reality.
There is generally no criminal prosecution for paying ransoms. There might be if the ransomware group is sanctioned but that would true regardless of payment method. If a public company paid a ransom via cash or by buying a bunch of bitcoin through an exchange they would still have to make the same 8-K filings and accounting changes etc.
There's something called "business email compromise" with annual losses about 10x that of ransomware. It relies on tricking companies into paying invoices to an attacker controlled bank account instead of their actual vendors' bank account. Google lost over a hundred million dollars to some Latvian guy who was able to pull this off by pretending to be Quanta Computer. There's also just bank fraud in the Zeus style where they transfer $200000 out of your account to some company in China or Bulgaria.
These scams are all still incredibly profitable despite relying entirely on the regular financial system. There is no reason to think ransomware would stop in the absence of cryptocurrency given that extensive infrastructure has existed and currently exists to "cashout" proceeds of fraud. And in the ransomware case it's even easier because the victim is willingly making the payment, and the attacker can just not give the decryption key if the victim trys to stop the payment in any way.
And yes, this scales. If you ever looked at the promoted stories on Snapchat a few years ago, you may have seen a user with the name "The Billionaire Gucci Master" living a very opulent lifestyle. That was all paid for with business email compromise money.
Yes, I am aware. I just think people here overestimate the reversibility and traceability of the traditional system. If you're a business and you're defrauded/hacked and don't realize within a week (usually even less time), five will get you ten that money's never coming back. It went to a mule who withdrew it as cash or wired it overseas. And there's no Reg E for businesses so your bank isn't going to help either.
You are aware that Milošević and Tuđman both agreed to carve up Bosnia, right? And there was Varivode, "Operation Storm" where the Krajina Serbs who didn't flee quick enough were raped and pillaged, and a whole bunch of other cases. Milošević, the JNA, Srpska, or the Serb "volunteer guard" may have been the worst but there are plenty of contenders for second place. Not to mention the Bosnian mujahideen.
Is that supposed to be very complex legal language? I'm not sure if this is some reference I'm missing, but it sounds relatively simple to me: it seems to be an accusation that someone is providing services dis-honestly (i.e. hiding some aspect of how the service will be performed or how much it will cost).
The full scope of what that encompasses is very hard to know, as it depends on essentially every other regulation and common law practice and precedent that applies in the particular legal jurisdiction (and which jurisdiction that is can itself be a somewhat thorny issue).
But this problem isn't solvable by code. It's part of the intrinsic complexity of the legal system.
> For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.
Yes, it lowers criminal margins by 10-20%. So what? For it to make a meaningful difference that number would have to be a lot higher. And it's unlikely that the current approach to AML will result in that number changing substantially because criminals only need one weak link in the financial system to undermine the whole AML apparatus.
Most economically driven crime has very high margins. Wholesale drugs in the Netherlands cost ~10 times what they do in Colombia, and I don't think "only" 8xing your money on a drug shipment instead of 10xing it is a very good deterrent.
Edit: And you can look at threat intelligence company reports to find that Russians already sometimes pay in excess of 40% to "cashout" business email compromise or investment fraud wire transfers. They happily pay this because even getting half of $80000 when all it took you was sending a few emails with forged From headers is a great deal if you are already morally bankrupt enough to stomatch stealing.
> 7% of GTO reports identified individuals or entities connected to ongoing FBI cases
So... 93% of people had their privacy violated for no reason. And that was with the current highly targeted measure. When it is applied to all real estate purchases it'll be more like 99.9%. But sure, we should be willing to give anything to satisfy a handful of "transparency activists" who don't do anything besides complain all day (read about the scandals at Transparency International and you'll find that perhaps these people are not the saintly do-gooders they are reported to be).
No, >99.9% of people will never have their privacy violated because they aren't afforded the ability to hide their ownership. Check out your county's plat maps -- if you own property, you're probably in there.
TBH? I don't think anonymously owning land should be allowed, full stop. If you want police and courts to recognize your arbitrary stat-granted right over a piece of dirt, then own up to what you own.
There is a difference between there being a record of it in some county's database and a team of Treasury department and federal law enforcement members scrutinizing the sale (and being given additional records on it from the intermediaries involved).
Right. The difference is that you don't NEED a whole damn team to do financial forensics on the sale if the actual owner is recorded on the fucking plat map.
For normal people docs with equivalent or more info are definitely provided to tons of intermediaries and available to the gov.
The FTC's incredibly low win rate in federal court should be a source of agency-wide embarrassment. The only place they reliably win is their kangaroo "administrative courts" in which they act as the judge, jury and executioner but those are probably on their way out. But it doesn't even matter anyways because the new strategy is going to be outsourcing enforcement to Europe.
I would expect the FTC to have a low win rate. Let's leave aside how atrophied enforcement of antitrust has been over the last 40 years, and the subsequent implications for case law, regulations and human skill of litigators.
This is a 75 billion dollar event between two giant companies. They can pay for legal advice. That legal advice is well incentivized to predict how the case will go, and signed off on it. I assume MS has to pay a hefty fee if the acquisition is blocked for antitrust reasons, in addition to the time and embarrassment for all involved.
Therefore, the only cases the FTC should expect to see are ones where highly paid lawyers said "we will probably win this case". They might be wrong (and the FTC does seem unable to stop too many cases), but no matter how tough the enforcement gets, I would expect the FTC to usually lose at trial. The standards will just be applied pre-merger announcement (or probably pre-offer).
It might be an exciting couple of years when the FTC regrows its backbone and the lawyers assessing mergers have not caught up yet.
The FTC is still spooling anti trust enforcement back up from a nonexistent state. A lot of the rules governing mergers and acquisitions haven't been enforced since the 1980s due to regulatory capture.
Read up on developments in anti-trust in the last couple of years here:
Is the low win rate a surprise though? As a foreign observer, the US justice system seems to largely be based on who can spend the most - so large company > government > small company > citizen is pretty much the assumed outcome. I have a vague sense the order also wraps around (individual > large company) because of cases like the McDonald's boiling coffee, but in those cases headlines and bad PR are just acting as a proxy for money.
Yes, there's the SAR lookback, but no one reads those anyways and probably won't give the government much because criminals routinely use accounts registered with fake or stolen IDs. Binance still accepts customers from countries like Venezuela, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc that "respected" financial institutions wouldn't touch with a 39.5 foot pole. There are still people making $50,000 USDT -> cash transactions every day with Binance P2P.