Why do people buy huge canvases with a few dots on from an arts unheard of for millions? I know it’s commonly used to launder money. Can someone explain how the process works?
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So Im going to give a broader perspective of what have being said, laundering money means “move through legal transctions ilegal money” so laundering per se its not that hard, you sell drugs and go buy to Walmart and you are succesfuly laundering money.
So that answers your question but I suspect you were going to another direction, more about “why is so often used for laundering” rather than laundering itself, and that is a really good topic.
You see often times governments have some mechanism that allow goods to have some price limits or at least some price references i.e. real state in most countries need a certification that says your property is *around* some range of price, so any transaction lower and higher than that price seems really suspect for the governement (which they can or can not take action on it). The thing is, that for ages, art has being conceived as the maximum subjective economical good in the human kind history, this means that while of course there are official art appraisals, there is a lot (A LOT) of room for a subjective appraisal (the most common example being a blank canvas going for millions) and somehow governments have been satisfied by this systems.
So generally money launders actually buy at high prices (thats when news report stupidly high prices) and then quietly sell at lower ones (not necesarelly) just to launder money quickly.
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