> DoJ investigation found.. [banking] business had been used to launder more than $650m between 2016 and 2021 from US fentanyl sales for Chinese crime groups and drug traffickers.
Canada 2018, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33918115
> An estimated $5.3 billion of laundered money into B.C. real estate in 2018 hiked housing prices 5 per cent, two special reports released Thursday by the provincial government show.
Australia 2015, https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/06/stop-money-launderi...
> Credit Suisse estimates some $28 billion of Chinese money has been invested in the Australian housing market over the past six years
And those are just the ones I can remember from the last few years.
I like it, that somebody thinks $4B is a lot. If FIAT CASH was trackable as crypto, your head would explode.
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.