Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
Couldn’t you just like… sell those stolen gift cards on G2A, Kinguin and such instead? You wouldn’t have the 100 euro posting game fee + needing to have it checked and such.
I’m not talking about stolen gift cards. The goal of money laundering is to move dirty cash from the criminal underworld into lawful society. Selling stolen gift cards on G2A doesn’t help with that. You want to create proof for the tax man that the money you earn comes from a legitimate source. If you sell stolen gift card you don’t have a paper trail for where you have sourced those cards. It’s suspicious. And selling cards on G2A you buy with your dirty cash from a legit store is still suspicious since you still have to proof if the money you used to buy those cards was earned legitimately.
If you buy gift cards with your dirty cash at a store and then pretend to be a customer by buying your own game you have created a money paper trail for the tax man since your earnings will come from Valve with receipts and all and you don’t have to proof where and how your “customers” have bought those gift cards. And then once that money is taxed that money is earned legitimately.
You could buy stolen gift cards from another criminal but good chance stores report to their supplier if a batch of cards is stolen and then it gets reported to Valve. And Valve knows which numbers those are. If they see a game getting bought with cards from the same stolen batches and have almost no other sales there is a chance the game gets flagged automatically by their systems and they probably report it to the authorities.
Couldn’t you just like… sell those stolen gift cards on G2A, Kinguin and such instead? You wouldn’t have the 100 euro posting game fee + needing to have it checked and such.
I’m not talking about stolen gift cards. The goal of money laundering is to move dirty cash from the criminal underworld into lawful society. Selling stolen gift cards on G2A doesn’t help with that. You want to create proof for the tax man that the money you earn comes from a legitimate source. If you sell stolen gift card you don’t have a paper trail for where you have sourced those cards. It’s suspicious. And selling cards on G2A you buy with your dirty cash from a legit store is still suspicious since you still have to proof if the money you used to buy those cards was earned legitimately.
If you buy gift cards with your dirty cash at a store and then pretend to be a customer by buying your own game you have created a money paper trail for the tax man since your earnings will come from Valve with receipts and all and you don’t have to proof where and how your “customers” have bought those gift cards. And then once that money is taxed that money is earned legitimately.
You could buy stolen gift cards from another criminal but good chance stores report to their supplier if a batch of cards is stolen and then it gets reported to Valve. And Valve knows which numbers those are. If they see a game getting bought with cards from the same stolen batches and have almost no other sales there is a chance the game gets flagged automatically by their systems and they probably report it to the authorities.