[nixtaken]

This still seems to be happening two years later. A person complained about seeing a book sold under their name for 550 USD. It contained gibberish and the sales were recorded as income to the IRS even though the owner of the account couldn't find out where the money went. Amazon wouldn't tell her who had opened a bank account in her name. I suppose they prefer to deal with such accounts behind the scenes.

[bserge]

It's happening on eBay for over a decade. Cheap trinkets and books for insane prices. Except for the impersonation part, I don't understand that tbh.

[therealx]

It's not too confusing to me. It gets the IRS off the trail of the actual person getting the money - they don't care that the IRS still wants money - they are confident that it wont get traced. It's truely obfuscation.

[rwmurrayVT]

You avoid the taxes.

[bserge]

Oh, so any income reported won't be in your name? Clever, although you would also need bank accounts in others' name.

Basically you'd need to use their whole identity, then withdraw the cash, possibly with fake IDs. Which is what they're doing, I guess.

[smokelegend]

Wire the funds offshore to a place more willing to look the other way for a small fee:do this a few times to other accounts in other countries, park the clean non-taxed cash offshore, get a cc or debit credit for the clean account...profit

Sure you spend sum cash on cleaning the funds, you're still not paying taxes on that cash win/win

[rwmurrayVT]

You can open accounts online with ease. I posted about it before if you peek in my profile.