Follow the Money, Indeed. How Cryptocurrency And Tax Evasion Form a Map to All Illegal Assets, Crypto And Otherwise
Part 13 of Artificial General Intelligence (And Superintelligence) And How To Survive It
“When somebody says ‘It’s not about the money,’ it’s about the money.”
―H.L. Mencken
So let’s talk about the money.
Because it is about the money.
Trillions of dollars, perhaps tens of trillions in illicit wealth have found their way, directly or indirectly, into every corner of the world.
Profits from the trafficking of drugs, weapons, contraband and people, money laundering, tax evasion, sanctions evasion, the financing of espionage and terrorism and even relatively legitimate vehicles such as sovereign wealth funds mobilized as weapons of economic warfare…
All of it finds a home somewhere.
Offshore bank accounts, shell corporations, real estate, legitimate businesses for generating and laundering more money, art, precious gems and metals, cash and more people and goods to be trafficked…
Effectively it gets reinvested.
A seemingly overwhelming and unstoppable financial tide.
Unfortunately for those who have sipped from this poisoned chalice, it is all too easily tracked and retrieved.
Here follows something relatively basic discussing the almost unfathomable exposure many tax evaders and more-brazen criminals are facing, based on little more than known cryptocurrency wallets, automatic reporting from the major US cryptocurrency traders to the IRS… and the degree to which this digital currency intermingles with every other kind of wealth.
This message from roughly 7/15/2020, though, barely touches on the machine learning available even three years ago, much less what we can do now.
Here’s the key, and why it matters, again, to AI safety and the future we’re building together.
All this financial data can be merged together, growing exponentially more powerful and precise as evidence source after evidence source is introduced to the databases to enrich all the rest.
Then the information can be leveraged further using the other machine learning tools I’ve discussed so far, and others I have not shared, and others, undoubtedly, I do not know.
But even more importantly, once you have AIs sifting and analyzing this ocean of integrated data, looking for the red flags they know, and the red flags they learn…
Even more red flags will emerged, even before the machines can articulate what they are, and these will be turned to our search as well.
Some will expect to turn this aside by corrupting or intimidating investigators.
But this, too, is part of the larger plan.
And there is a plan.
Evidence of obstruction, of collusion, of coordination - all of this further enriches our data as the alchemy of truth and guilt mingles to transmute it into evidence.
And open actions and confidential confessions illuminate every corner of the evidentiary map.
We have time. But we are moving very swiftly indeed.
And when we are done, we will done more than seized money and leveled networks. So many illicit tools will stand exposed.
And the red flags around them will teach us more red flags in turn, and expose yet more methods of subtlety and subterfuge before we - or any computer - can conceive them. Which means a superintelligent AI will already be contending with incredibly powerful systems which have long since analyzed a multitude of moves before an artificial superintelligence can even glimpse the chessboard.
We’re playing hard, because we’re playing to win.
And so, to continue, another message regarding evidence sent to the FBI.
Data Mining Tax Returns Serving as Unknowing Guilty Pleas
To Whom It May Concern:
US taxes are due on July 15 this year.
Today, as it happens.
Many tax evaders and other criminals are likely, unknowingly sending guilty pleas to the IRS by the thousands, if not considerably more.
Cryptocurrency profits of any kind are their own, separate entry on the form. The IRS has accounts from companies like Coinbase, so they already know many large US cryptocurrency wallet holders.
But there are considerably more cryptocurrency identities and de facto guilty pleas to be harvested here.
So you can plead guilty, in effect, to tax evasion, as soon as you file your taxes in 2020, if you neglect to mention profits accrued in 2019 and associated with a cryptocurrency wallet already known to be yours.
Or, if you have a top-secret clearance, then you already all-but-pled guilty to having an undisclosed source of income.
Reportedly, Coinbase alone turned over thousands of accounts to the IRS, though they only agreed to disclose American accounts holding more than a certain set value. Thousands of de facto guilty pleas leading to IRS investigations and forensic accounting are apt to include many leading “straight” (sometimes in a tangled, money launderer’s path) to the offshored trillions of dollars reputedly hidden for purposes of tax evasion and/or money laundering. Particularly as the IRS, one of the few organizations with the means and authority to audit all those accounts and money trails, follows thousands upon thousands of tax-evasion cases at once.
These offshored funds were referred to when the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers surfaced, though little has been said about them publicly since. But that much unaccountable and illegal wealth represents a potentially deadly threat to global democracy, and should viewed and dealt with accordingly.
However, the above likely understates the scale of the forensic exposure.
Dutch police reportedly collected over 420,000 personal profiles when they took over the Hansa Darknet black-market site.
Presumably many of these were paired with cryptocurrency accounts, and belonged to Americans.
https://www.wired.com/story/hansa-dutch-police sting-operation/
IRS – Criminal Investigation, the organization responsible for investigating violations of our tax code and “related financial crimes, such as money laundering, currency violations, tax-related identity theft fraud, and terrorist financing that adversely affect tax administration.”
If the Dutch police were sharing the Hansa identities with US Federal law enforcement, IRS-CI presumably qualifies. Between these identities and others seized from the Darknet, those wallet owners whose identities can be legally shared can be assessed accordingly.
Further, because cryptocurrencies like bitcoin leave a permanent, open-source, unerasable ledger of every transaction in the blockchain, individuals attempting to launder money from identified accounts are essentially identifying additional accounts and financial resources of interest, particularly for auditors interested in tracking down hidden assets.
But they also have great potential to link to other, active cryptocurrency accounts, particularly ones accruing value in 2019. Not all of these will be immediately self-evident, though given many accounts which may have surfaced during investigations of drug rings or anything on the Darknet, we may find communications or proffered pleas identifying the owners of an expanding network of no-longer-anonymous accounts.
Where they do not somehow disrupt investigations, these could be forwarded, as legally appropriate, to IRS-CI for further investigation.
Again, Darknet black market sites may be very useful sources here. Given IRS-CI is almost certainly starting with thousands of investigations in which the subjects have effectively already plead out on their tax forms, albeit unwittingly, they will find it relatively simple to expand their investigations from there. For example, with the communications, bank records and other data of indicted suspects.
Not all of this is mysterious. For individuals who have shared their cryptocurrency keys publicly, you can Google the number string, and obviously more sophisticated tracking and analysis software exists.
But briefly, undoubtedly someone – if only in intelligence – will do a mass public search - or has done a mass search - on all cryptocurrency identifiers. It's hard evidence or intelligence, depending on your perspective. But however they are collected, other data points will crop up with it, including emails, names, pseudonyms, organizations, businesses, hang-outs.
For example, if the Bureau followed up on my 1/2/20 message on data mining online illegal influence networks, the cryptocurrency and/or other payments traced likely unveiled a host of relevant accounts, not only to this investigation, but to many others.
If other branches of law enforcement refer these identities, as appropriate, to IRS-CI and receive evidence back, as appropriate, in turn, we can rapidly increase the number of accounts under investigation, and more importantly, trace the funds back to other assets forming the foundation of the offshored trillions of such strategic concern to the United States and the entire democratic world.