How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money? Buy expensive Lego sets with dirty dollars, and sell them locally for clean money? There's certainly an opportunity for arbitrage there, but it sounds awfully complicated for a money laundering scheme.
Not being sarcastic, just curious whether there's something special about Lego or whether they're just passing along the restrictions imposed by their payment processor.
I'd assume using dirty money to buy blocks at an inflated price from a cooperating vendor(usually the buyer themselves) would be enough ?
The vendor's money would be "clean" from an outsider's perspective.
> How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money?
AML laws aren't required to make sense in order to be enforced. Their effectiveness is basically zero:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.
I worked on a product based on micropayment transactions - most less than a dollar, and we supported tenths of a cent - and money laundering was a constant concern.
The baddies out there are numerous, dedicated, highly adaptable, and willing to throw mass volume at a small % opportunity.