Virtual worlds are a very good way to do some money laundering, or to evade some tax.

I had myself some experience about that when I was younger and got working for a finance consultantancy firm, so I know something of the business of ast least evading tax officer….

In a Virtual World u can move your money quite fast, thorugh a long chain of ALT, this make quite long to identify clearly the entry and the exit points of the money especially if they are in different countries!

A good investigation is usually able to track down all the flux of the money, the games is being enough fast to be really far with your money in cash, when police arrive to the last ring of the chain.

Of course building up a chain of bank account is usually a not cheap effort… building up a chain of SL account could be easier and and much more convenient.

I do not think however that money laundering or tax evasion in SL is a real problem now, for the simple reason that the financial flux in the game are still too small to be interesting (as someother pointed out: to be smart you cannot move larger than average quantity of money if not is too easy to discover you), so I guess the effort is not worth the money you can save till now.

But SL is growing, fast, and the problem will (not could, it will) arise.

coco

Here is the link if anyone is interested:

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7537&highlight=

coco

And seriously, like LL cares one iota about 3rd party exchanges. They’d rather they just all curled up and died.

No, I’m sorry, I just don’t see anything on the internet as being viable for money laundering. Not unless you want to risk losing everything.

That being said, yikes for Philip if some dumb mobster decides to launder and then loses his L$ …

Do you honestly thing that LL hasn’t created a UI for the government to query whenever they want? Seriously now…

Raph Koster has pointed to a sobering post by Kenneth Rijock, on the World-Check site. World-Check is a site that tracks risks world-wide, and Rijock is an attorney who has a rather interesting resume, to say the least:

He has more tha…

Seriously, I’ve seen this scenario played out a few times with some big wheelers and dealers in Second Life. I’ve watched them do exactly this, and not even be so careful with the alt-main fingerprints.

The problem with this concept is that it is a crazy way to try to move around and liquidate large amounts of money. Large amounts of money ALWAYS come to the attention of the Lindens — they have built-in alarms for things now and there is no way you can move large amounts off the Lindex, and into the PayPal, without them slowing it down or even stopping it.

It’s also a slow and painful way to take, say, $10,000, and convert it into something. You’d have to first buy the islands and wait for the delivery for weeks. You’d have to sell the islands, developped, or rent them and wait for the proceeds to trickle in. Then you have to go sell your loot on the LindEx, and wait even more for LL to send it to PayPal.

With that long wait and its many filters, why not just go to PayPal itself directly from a business set up on a web page?