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!

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.