The cash argument is not a good take at all. When you travel with large amounts of cash people ask questions, you are obligated to declare it when crossing borders if it’s over certain amount(over 0,25BTC as USD will make you fill out declarations and it may be confiscated until you can prove that it is legitimately yours) depositing it to your bank account rings all kind of bells, the banks can refuse to work with you and can trigger law enforcement interest.
We can be cynical about it but actually number of banks paid fines in the billions of dollars and they take it seriously now. Some hard hit banks like BNP that got fined for $9B would even refuse to work with cash intensive businesses.
The criminals need to go through trouble of creating shell companies to launder or transfer money, cash is no good anymore.
That’s not my argument. Crime is not gone, tools are changing and the enforcers are trying to catch up.
Cash is now for petty criminals only. For anything beyond car level of money you need involvement of politicians or high end criminals.
They tend to use gold and fake bank transactions BTW.
Just today there is a trial of the Turkish bank Halk Bank that was allegedly caught laundering money for Iran. High ranking Turkish and Iranian politicians are involved, the funds in form of gold were transferred using private jets and laundered through Dubai. The defense of the person who run the gold operations includes Rudy Giuliani. The things are at that level now.
We can be cynical about it but actually number of banks paid fines in the billions of dollars and they take it seriously now. Some hard hit banks like BNP that got fined for $9B would even refuse to work with cash intensive businesses.
The criminals need to go through trouble of creating shell companies to launder or transfer money, cash is no good anymore.