Money laundering

Money laundering is the process of transforming the profits of crime and corruption into ostensibly 'legitimate' assets. In a number of legal and regulatory systems, however, the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial and business crime, and is sometimes used more generally to include misuse of the financial system (involving things such as securities, digital currencies, credit cards, and traditional currency), including terrorism financing and evasion of international sanctions. Most anti-money laundering laws openly conflate money laundering (which is concerned with source of funds) with terrorism financing (which is concerned with destination of funds) when regulating the financial system.

Some countries define money laundering as obfuscating sources of money, either intentionally or by merely using financial systems or services that do not identify or track sources or destinations. Other countries define money laundering to include money from activity that would have been a crime in that country, even if it was legal where the actual conduct occurred. This broad brush of applying money laundering to incidental, extraterritorial or simply privacy-seeking behaviors has led some to label it financial thoughtcrime.

The concept of money laundering regulations goes back to ancient times and is intertwined with the development of money and banking. Money laundering is first seen with individuals hiding wealth from the state to avoid taxation or confiscation or a combination of both.

In China, merchants around 2000 BCE would hide their wealth from rulers who would simply take it from them and banish them. In addition to hiding it, they would move it and invest it in businesses in remote provinces or even outside China.

Over the millennia many rulers and states imposed rules that would take wealth from their citizens and this led to the development of offshore banking and tax evasion. One of the enduring methods has been the use of parallel banking or Informal value transfer systems such as hawala that allowed people to move money out of the country avoiding state scrutiny.

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Wikipedia