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Not much different from other stolen goods like jewellery. It has value, people want to pay for it ignorant or disregarding of its (stolen) origins. You do it in person. The buyer has limited culpability. In addition, after some time (I don't know the English legal term for this), ownership transfers from the victim to whoever possesses it for long enough. (i.e. if B steals a bike from A, and sells it to C, then C possesses the bike but doesn't legally own it, ownership is still with A. But after a while, ownership transfers to C. At least in many legal systems). The sale occurs in cash and identities are generally not registered. In other words, the banking system is circumvented and everything is done with cash. The other option is to employ the banking system in a way that is also used for business fraud in general: use throw away accounts from socioeconomically fragile and 'disposable' people. Criminals will approach someone who is (semi) homeless, or a minor in high school. They probably have a bank account with $50 on it. You pay them $100 for their ATM card & bank account and promise more with some story, e.g. employment as 'jr. financial controller' in the criminals' non-existent company. The victims (who fall for it) argue to themselves "I have $50, I get $100, and have been promised $500 more, what do I have to lose?" Will there be people who deny this opportunity? Yes, probably most. Will there be people who won't? Yes. And you only need a single card and you can run 3-5 days of scams on it before the account gets reported, flagged and blocked. And you can run thousands of dollars of money through in that period. The criminal now has a regulated bank account on which he can receive payments without it leading back to his identity. At this point you can scam people on Craigslist (send me $200 for the Playstation and I'll send it to you asap, do it at 3AM and it won't get deleted manually by an admin, and you'll find 3-4 people who'll fall for a too good to be true price because they're desperate), or indeed actually sell stolen bitcoins at 95% of market value (inviting arbitrage who will buy up everything you have). You then go to the bank, use your card to withdraw everything, and disappear. The guy who gave you his card gets a call from the police and tells his story. Sometimes he gets a minor fine, but generally he is a victim, too and has no means of covering any damage. Will there be people who deny stolen bitcoins? Yes. Will there be people who either have no clue at all which bitcoins were recently stolen or not, or if they do, not care? Yes. It's really messed up and pretty fool-proof. The big criminals get caught eventually. (they leak information to friends who report them. They run $500k of scams through Craigslist and get priority and get traced via their ISP, usually they barely know what an IP is). Or they do this + a bunch of other stuff like break ins and get caught when the police finds $100k in cash at their home. Or they get reported trying to recruit lots of kids for their debit cards etc. But I'd bet if you did it small-time/smartly you could easily get away with it. |