Aussie Police Probe Virtual Worlds For Money Trail

schliz writes "Australian law enforcement has flagged virtual worlds as a 'growing area of interest' in its fight against money laundering and cybercrime. Police are reportedly investigating unnamed virtual worlds, as well as online money transfer services such as e-gold and Hawala/Hundi."

Comments

Bit Coins?

[VortexCortex]

I wonder how hard it is to track Bitcoin laundering considering that each wallet has over 100 different keys it can use in any given transaction...

From the Bitcoin FAQ:

Bitcoin transactions need to be public, so that every client can confirm what account has how much money available. However since accounts are just numbers, it's very hard to figure out what is behind each individual transaction. Here is an example for a Bitcoin transaction:

IN: 1NqwGDRi9Gs4xm1BmPnGeMwgz1CowP6CeQ: 25.09
OUT: 1GZZUd25jbDpUghYD1EA3URdtbzobedqWr: 25.09

As you can see, the transaction only includes the Bitcoin addresses involved which by themselves don't tell you much at all. Every Bitcoin wallet contains a hundred or more addresses, which makes associating users with their wallets even more difficult.

So, I guess some sort of massive transaction "mining" operation would be needed in order to make a correlation between the keys / account holders. Launderers: get started now while transactions are still free!

Re:Bit Coins?

[Hazel Bergeron]

If only there were some way for government to eavesdrop on Internet communications.

Re:Bit Coins?

[Hazel Bergeron]

At some point the receiver is going to read the transaction. At some point he's going to do something with the BitCoin representation of his wealth.

BitCoin is absurd because the moment someone has a file on their hard drive representing the value of a house, the profitability of cracking that computer, installing a keylogger for passphrase and taking the file becomes so significant that not just average joes but even the geekiest geek will be outsmarted by organised criminals. It's a typical case of a computer scientist catching the mouse and ignoring the elephant in the room: great in a theoretical world which only has mice.

(Oh, and the government. But the government would just outlaw significant anonymous Bitcoin usage under AML regulations.)

A little late?

[Compaqt]

This seems to say that e-gold was shut down by the authorities (the ones that make it illegal to keep secrets from them, but also illegal to publicize their secrets), and all they're doing now is trying to get people's money back in some way or another.

Sidenote:

Beginning January 2006, eBay has restricted buyers and sellers from using many online payment systems and encouraged them to use Paypal, ... owned by eBay. ... eBay cited e-gold's policy of non-reversible transactions as a detriment to the buyer experience.[26]

Non-reversible is good. Are payment processors supposed to be modes of payment, or net-nannies? If anything, non-reversible would mean fewer problems as people won't buy from anything other than reputable stores.

Re:A little late?

[Hazel Bergeron]

Without the audit trail, you are proposing what, exactly? That we physically transport gold to each other? That the amount of gold we own is represented by a single entry in a database with no evidence to back it up in case of malfunction/dispute? Who protects this gold and the systems surrounding it?

Since we are eliminating reversibility and record-keeping, I look forward to working for your bank and transferring your balance to my account. That is monetary freedom, which is actually a large part of freedom. Have a nice day!

Re:In other words...

[mjwx]

They can sit at thier desks and eat donuts.

* doughnuts,

En_AU mate.

Re:nosuch

[GameboyRMH]

There is no such thing as crime, only the claim that big government has a right to know how many dead hookers are in your trunk.