Being Naive

[palandri]

So I never understood why it's so difficult to get a prepaid Visa or Mastercard gift card in France. To get a prepaid Visa or Mastercard gift card in France, it's under tight state control. You need to go to the post office, show state ID, and have the card mailed to your French address. Here in the states, you can buy a prepaid Visa or Mastercard gift cards at practically any store.

So this young girl, who looks like she's the neighborhood baby sitter walks into the store and buys a wad of Visa prepaid gift cards. Then she pulls out a wad of $100 bills to pay for them. Your first thought is where did she get all that money. Then you think, she must be buying them for her parents or she got the money from work for gifts or something. Then she goes outside and hops into a car with two shady characters, which obviously aren't her parents and drives away.

Then you think about it and figure it out. What an easy way to laundry money. Now I wonder why there aren't tighter controls on these cards in the states.

 

[HeyCori]

1) Thanks for the tip

2) Regulation (and deregulation) has its place in society. Unfortunate, the government often sided with big business to deregulate supposedly "free markets" where the only goal is to screw over consumers.

There's a book called Who Stole the American Dream? that examines political decisions dating back to the 60s that have shaped our current economy. It's pretty unnerving to see how big business came to dominant politics.

 

[Dave Blake]

Hush yall if you tell everybody I wont have a place to launder my Craigslist earnings...lol

This sounds like something I know I never thought about but does need to be addressed.

 

[palandri]

......This sounds like something I know I never thought about but does need to be addressed.

Same here and the other crazy thing that I just thought of, I've seen gift card cashing machine at the grocery store, where you can take just about any gift card and get cash for it.

 

[stmav]

Convenience stores also are big for selling pre paid burner phones for less than legal activities .