We need to make laws in western countries that paying off these kinds of ransoms is illegal. It gives money to criminal elements and only encourages this. I also thought it would be possible for powerful law enforcement groups to follow the bitcoins even through exchanges. Why does this not run into the worldwide hunt for the perpetrators?
It's theoretically possible for powerful state-level adversaries to follow bitcoins through tumblers and exchanges (If they operate the former). Also, at some point, you're going to have to be paying rent, so you'll need to turn your BTC into dollars or pezos or pieces of eight, and may need to explain to your friendly tax authorities how you can by 4.5 million USD worth of BTC.
In practice, though, it's not clear what exactly are the capabilities of each branch of law enforcement.
In a lot of jurisdictions, your friendly tax authorities won't ask or care; international fraud is a valuable source of foreign currency for many countries as long as you're reasonably discreet about it. Banks and payment processors can't afford to be nearly as blasé, because they're at far greater risk of facing international sanctions; Bitcoin provides an essential layer of obfuscation and deniability.
In the US for example, there's an actual field in your 1040 tax return for entering income from otherwise undeclared illegal businesses. Putting your drug or extortion money there and paying taxes is not admitting guilt and can't be used against you IIRC.
Tax fraud is usually much more painful to suffer from instead of a simple drug charge or illegal gambling charge. If you get nicked on drug charges there will be parallel reconstruction to get you on tax fraud despite this "not happening" between US government branches.
I think you have it backwards. If you commit tax fraud, you will be prosecuted. And the FBI will work with the IRS to do this.
But, supposedly, putting a non-zero value in the "illegal income" field of the 1040 (which ISN'T fraud) both (1) can't be used as evidence against you in court, and (2) isn't reported by default to the IRS to the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, so you don't end up on any watch lists.
Of course you gotta take their word for part (2), but it is their incentive to get every tax dollar regardless of source.
No sorry, I agree with you. I mean if you don't declare your income THEN you get busted on the illegal activity, you are guaranteed to get busted twice.
> We need to make laws in western countries that paying off these kinds of ransoms is illegal.
That'd be the sort of counter-productive legislation we see too often. The only result would be to push this underground and to keep authorities in the dark. It might end up helping criminals.
A similar case has been made about corruption: If you're asked for a bribe by, say, a corrupt official you usually have no choice but to pay and once you have paid you are in it with them, both criminals, so no-one talks.
I disagree with “no choice but to pay”, so long as the bribery is illegal and the relevant legislation not entirely hollow.
You may be able to clearly document the attempted bribery, and report it to the relevant authority—which may be a central agency of some form, or may be just going up the chain within the same organisation. Success will vary by country, authority and magnitude of offence. But even threatening to do this (politely) normally achieves the desired result, though it does nothing to actually uproot the corruption.
Alternatively, just indicate clearly that you’re not willing to play along with this illegal behaviour.
The zero rupee note (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_rupee_note) is a fairly successful example of doing this, and bear in mind that India corruption problem is much larger than any western country’s—although it’s illegal, it’s still par for the course in a great many areas. Yet standing up to this bribery is quite possible if only you have any inclination to do so.
I am currently in India, residing with another Australian who has lived in India for forty-odd years and operated business locally, and bribes were solicited from time to time, but he would not play ball, typically by either pretend nothing had happened (that is, ignoring any “hints” that you could pay for such-and-such) or by actively declining. Flunkies that try to take bribes personally are generally quite ready to backtrack once they see which way the wind is blowing (they could get in trouble with their boss), and more institutional bribery can generally be waited out, at the least. Even if it’s occasionally a long wait (like, months instead of days, or years instead of weeks).
A large part of the fight on these sorts of issues is changing cultural norms. Consider seatbelts over time in Australia (and much of the world): fifty years ago seatbelts were uncommon, but legislation was paired with a big marketing push to normalise wearing seatbelts had the effect that before terribly long society would look down with severe displeasure on anyone that didn’t wear a seatbelt while driving, so that now most people (well over 99% of the driving population, at a guess) wouldn’t dream of driving without wearing a seatbelt. The same is possible here, and will be far easier than selling ice to proverbial eskimos, because it’s easy to take the moral high ground in advertising (and moral high ground is almost as powerful as safety and “think of the children”): we will not parley with criminals.
When you are a nobody facing a demand for a bribe by an official or police you have no choice but to pay.
> nd more institutional bribery can generally be waited out, at the least. Even if it’s occasionally a long wait (like, months instead of days, or years instead of weeks).
And in the real world that means you pay.
> wouldn’t dream of driving without wearing a seatbelt.
Because people understand that it is in their interest to wear a seatbelt. That's very different from paying a a bride that is often in the person's interest.
It was an Indian economist, and chief economist at the World Bank, that suggested making payment of bride legal to shift incentives [1]. You still have an incentive to pay but also an incentive to report it, while it increases the risk for the bribe-taker.
Whether that would work or not, it recognises that the key to influencing behaviour is to create the right incentives.
The existence of municipal police is a large part of the problem; the sheer number of police forces in the US is a huge barrier to effective oversight and accountability. A cynic might argue that this lack of accountability in routine policing is a deliberate choice.
