
IRS Says ‘Dozens’ of New Crypto, Cybercriminals Are Identified - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-08/irs-says-dozens-of-new-crypto-cybercriminals-are-identified
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wonderwonder
They are creating new techniques to tackle people potentially avoiding paying
taxes on crytpo. By and large, this is not going to yield a ton of money as
its likely small traders, just trading and hoping to avoid paying on what are
likely small to no profits. There are obviously going to be exceptions.

They could instead just open up the Panama papers and target people and
companies hiding billions. The issue is that this would then target those with
money and power something the IRS appears loath to do. So instead the rich
continue to pay a far lower proportion of taxes than they actually owe and the
poor and middle class get hammered.

The IRS already openly admits to not auditing the rich as its too complicated
and to instead going after the less wealthy.

No wonder the rich get richer...

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tptacek
Your argument appears to be that lighter tax evasion shouldn't be prosecuted
as long as there are heavy tax evaders that haven't been prosecuted. There are
no doubt people right now plotting highly technical 15-person bank vault
heists, but I absolutely expect the police to investigate a B&E of my house.

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uncoder0
In my experience the police don't investigate B&E's into people's homes that
often or with any vigor.

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ska
That probably depends a lot on whose house and where it is.

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uncoder0
Twice for me. Both in lower rent apartment row houses in college in different
locations. Tons of electronics stolen and I had the S/N for 80% of them and
one firearm, cops didn't seem to care. On one instance I gave them the likely
culprit. Which was someone I had known from the neighborhood that I saw
looking in windows when I drove left the afternoon I got robbed, didn't think
too much of it at the time; just thought he was trying hang out with friend
and was trying to see if they were home.

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ChuckMcM
Perhaps this is phase 2 of the IRS "we're going to crack down on crypto coin
transactions." articles. First we had the various letters went out, now we
have them testing their tools that sift through peoples returns to identify
possible tax avoidance.

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nyolfen
[https://github.com/nopara73/ZeroLink/#ii-chaumian-
coinjoin](https://github.com/nopara73/ZeroLink/#ii-chaumian-coinjoin)

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edm0nd
or, just use Monero.

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davidgerard
Monero's trading volume is not that great - you can reveal information through
relatively-large movements, a sort of side-channel attack.

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RandomBacon
That's the first time I've heard that claim before.

I know its volume is way higher than Zcash's shielded transactions.

Do you have any details on how it might work?

I assume you're just not talking about simple timing correlation combined with
trading BTC->XMR->BTC (poor opsec).

As far as I know, you can't reveal XMR amounts, receipent, or sender if you're
just remaining in XMR and not going through a third party (exchange,
conversion service, etc). So I'm really curious about the details of your
claim.

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davidgerard
Mostly just simple timing correlation, because coiners turn out to talk a much
better game about opsec than they practice.

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peter_d_sherman
Would love to see a cryptocurrency that is fully auditable by everyone... That
is, when did a cryptocoin come into circulation, who got it first, why did
they get it, who did they send it to next, what was traded for it, etc., etc,
down the line...

And finally, if/when the cryptocoin is ever decirculated, and/or held for too
long a time period in a single individual or entity's account...

The IRS would love such a system, but also every Professor of Economics (and
government financial policy makers) would, too...

Such a system would exist as the nexus between cryptocurrency, hard identity,
transactional tracking, big databases, regulation, macroeconomics, and
monetary/fiscal policy.

If a rule was made in the system to automatically take 1% out of the accounts
of the account holders that earned/owned the most, and equally distribute it
(every year) to the accounts of the 1% of account holders that earned or owned
the least, then basic income could also be created by the system...

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HammockWarrior
That would also be interesting because it would essentially make the
cryptocoins non-fungible. For example, people might be willing to pay more for
a coin if it was used in the past by a movie star.

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backtobecks
The IRS already openly admits to not auditing the rich as its too complicated
and to instead going after the less wealthy.

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BurningFrog
Not true.

This is a "viralization" of the article linked below, with this very clear
headline:

    
    
        The IRS Now Audits Poor Americans at About the Same Rate as the Top 1%
    

That's of course a problem in itself, but very far from the "internet truth"
that the rich don't get audited at all.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-
ameri...](https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-
about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent)

~~~
diffeomorphism
So totally true, but using not perfectly precise language for the sake of
brevity, got it.

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BurningFrog
No.

"The rich are not audited" is not an imprecise way of phrasing "The rich are
audited at much as everyone else".

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diffeomorphism
Yes, you misread a chart and did not read the article you linked yourself.

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toptal
Finally!

