Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive
Nickname:
Password:
Nickname:
Password:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Just make crime illegal.
Or decriminalize crime to remove the black market so that only above-board regulated companies deal drugs and commit robberies instead of petty street thugs.
Or tax crime. Governments know fully well the more you tax a vice, the less it happens, so why aren’t governments taxing crime?
The recent wave of legalizing cannabis doesn’t seem to have halted the black market on weed.
Hell, there is a black market for Tide laundry detergent and other perfectly legal items.

Hell, there is a black market for Tide laundry detergent and other perfectly legal items.
If they’re perfectly legal, how can the market be “black”?
Are people just avoiding VAT?

If they’re perfectly legal, how can the market be “black”?
It’s when the items put up for sale are stolen and/or counterfeit.

Are people just avoiding VAT?
We don’t have VAT in the USA, but I’m reasonably sure that sales taxes are not being collected or paid out.

Hell, there is a black market for Tide laundry detergent and other perfectly legal items.
If they’re perfectly legal, how can the market be “black”?
Are people just avoiding VAT?
There’s a subtle distinction to be had here. Tide, the laundry detergent made by Proctor and Gamble for the purpose of washing clothes, is perfectly legal, and sold at stores, no problem.
Tide, however, is a currency in an underground economy, because it has most of the useful properties of cash. It’s fairly difficult to counterfeit, it’s a store of value, that value is stable, it can be exchanged freely, and its movement is fairly difficult to track. Even more importantly, it can be purchased with WIC/EBT/F
Uh, no. Specifically, it CANNOT be purchased with WIC/EBT/SNAP/Food Stamps. You’re just making that part up. It isn’t in the article you linked and the official gov’t page on SNAP [usda.gov] says “Households CANNOT use SNAP benefits to buy: Cleaning supplies, paper products, and other household supplies.”
The article is good, and it points out that Tide is one of the most brand-loyal products in the country, regardless of income level, which is why the scheme works. But, all of it was obtained by theft — shoplifting.

Tide ranked in the top three brand names that consumers at all income levels were least likely to give up regardless of the recession, alongside Kraft and Coca-Cola.

If they’re perfectly legal, how can the market be “black”?
Depends on the locale, obviously. Here in the great state of MN, it is now perfectly legal to grow, possess, smoke, and gift marijuana. The limits are around how many plants I’m allowed to have, how much dried plant I can have in my house, and how much I can have out in public, blah blah. Something I’m specifically NOT allowed to do is sell it (without a permit) which is where the “black market” part comes into play.
“there is a black market for Tide laundry detergent and other perfectly legal items.”
That’s called a grey market…
In Sweden?
An even easier fix. Get rid of the criminals. If you do that it is a guarantee they will never criminal again.
Sure, someone else might come along, but get rid of them as well. Eventually the criminals will realize it’s not worth the effort.
We could put them all on an island somewhere….
Is it me or it sounds very fitting that “Swedish criminal gangs” use something like spotify to launder money? The Swedes are always so progressive!

Is it me or it sounds very fitting that “Swedish criminal gangs” use something like spotify to launder money?
Spotify’s commission is eating up 30% of their profit.
NFTs work better, but NFTs are well known for laundering and attract too much attention.
Imagine the money you gained from a kidnapping, where you have to suspect every bill’s number to be noted, or forged money you want to bring into circulation. Compared to them, 70/100 is a magnificent deal!
I don’t know what the return is on other money laundering avenues like operating a restaurant and fudging the number of meals sold, or [Saul Goodman’s voice] Laser Tag.
I’d argue that if “NFTs are well known for laundering and attract too much attention”, that they don’t actually “work better”. They might have a lower commission rate, but if they don’t remove the suspicion of laundering, then they’re basically useless for purpose.
It’s generally known, at least with those familiar with it, that laundering money comes with expenses. By that standard, 30% isn’t actually that bad.
In addition, while music isn’t a traditional form of it, art is very much a traditional form for

Spotify’s commission is eating up 30% of their profit.
NFTs work better, but NFTs are well known for laundering and attract too much attention.
It doesn’t cost $1 to generate $0.70 if that’s what you’re trying to say. You don’t pay spotify per stream and there’s no cap on the revenue a single account can bring artists. On the low end you can use free accounts but it pays very little, on the other end you get family subscriptions in a low cost country and travel by vpn to south korea to get the highest pay/stream.
Want to know which artists do this, just ask the booking agencies and venues who’d sign on artists that mysteriously don’t sell any ticket
That is a horribly inefficient way to launder money. Streaming payments are a fraction of a cent.
You’re forgetting the story of the guy who wrote software to put all the fractional cents into an account and made quite a bit of money until they caught him.
Tiny amounts? All you need is scale.
and that coder is going to get some FPMITAP time
I believe it happened back in the 70s or earlier. So that’s over and done with, but the point is that the salami attack was proven to work.
Is it? What do you pay for?
It’s definitely *economically* roundabout, but bandwidth is pretty cheap, so it’s mostly about stringing everything together at scales large enough to matter.
Like: if a single phone can generate $.12 per hour ($.004 for a 2 minute stream), I’d expect a box of 1k crappy used phones (maybe $50k, generously, and taking up around 50 cubic ft – so a pallette or two) to generate $120/hr or $2880/day. You could probably string it together for probably less than $10k, so then you’re just
Instead of phones, use botnets. I’d be surprised if they didn’t set this up with botnets.
They probably rented a botnet: much cheaper than any other way of “buying listeners”, and they could run a small program on each botted device to streamline/hide the “listening” to a stream.
Yup, thinking the same thing. I don’t know how they are doing it but I’m sure there are much better ways,
The Swedish Chef from the Muppets comes to mind.
That would be the one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?… [youtube.com]
This is probably the worst idea when it comes to laundering money.
I mean, why not set up a chaturbate/onlyfans account instead? You’d make more money more quickly.
1) Rent large botnets for cheap
2) run a small tailored app on each botted device that streamlines/hides the streaming of songs: no one sees it, no one “hears” the songs.
3) make the songs real short/”listen” for the minimum time required to generate a payout.
4) no ??? needed, profit
All automated and simple.
I mean, just to make it clear, this has already been shown to be the method whereby many upcoming and already-established major label artists inflate their stream count.
https://www.outlookindia.com/b… [outlookindia.com].
Money laundering is a whack-a-mole scenario. You want a business where the customers can be largely anonymous and then y
It’s amazing to me how the crime problem in Sweden is self-created. The government essentially stopped arresting people in immigrant neighborhoods, while at the same time allowing masses of “refugees” into the country without so much as a passport.
Here’s one example from 2020: “Gothenburg’s most notorious crime family, the Ali Khan gang, set up roadblocks in the northeast of the city, shining torches into cars to hunt for members of a rival mob. Police broke up the checkpoints and made 20 arrests. But in a
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.
Top Tech CEOs To Discuss AI in a Meeting With Senators
France Halts iPhone 12 Sales Over Radiation Levels
Work smarter, not harder, and be careful of your speling.

source