Lack of communications between accounts in virtual currencies and real people in combination with an opportunity to have any number of accounts allows creating new difficult schemes to conceal an illegal source of an origin of means.
Thus virtual currencies represent additional opportunities for the creation of new methods of money laundering. It is quite natural to expect criminals to continue developing ways of laundering criminal income using virtual currencies. The emergence of more intricate schemes with wide use in criminal intents the speech about will become its result.
Let’s give an example where the scheme of money laundering of illegal income using virtual currencies and prepaid cards is presented:
When the investigation was carrying out, it was established that the international criminal group used one of the providers of financial services for transferring illegal money to the East European countries, which members of this group cashed and turned the specified means into electronic money in offices on an exchange of electronic currencies. Electronic money was transferred into the accounts opened by the members of this group at one of the financial services providers engaged in operations with virtual currency in the specified countries. The mentioned provider of financial services let out together with one offshore bank the MasterCard Cirrus prepaid cards, which could be got anonymously and deposited on them the sums of electronic currency. Such cards could be used in any country in ATMs and at a payment of purchases via the terminals accepting the Cirrus cards. This scheme allowed criminals to hide illegal money effectively and provided fast and anonymous access to such means.
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