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Traditionally, rare stamps were also used as means to hide large sums of wealth and transport them around the world. You can see this in old crime and spy stories, rather accurately - per weight in gram, these tiny squares of colored paper are probably the most valuable things in the world (excluding some really exotic substances).
There were good paranoid reasons for Stalin's holocaust of stamp collectors.
This now fell into abeyance, because stamp collecting is now just niche hobby with limited appeal. Stamp nerds know each other, and if sus strangers arrived with suitcases full of rare philatelic treasures for sale, it will be instantly noticed.
Fortunately, modernity offers new, ever better alternative.
Imagine small pieces of paper, looking innocent and childish to ordinary normie (or ordinary orangutan in uniform rummaging through your pockets and luggage at border or airport), that can have value up to 7-8 $ figures, are not registered anywhere, are not on any blockchain and can be bought and sold all over the world with minimal or zero oversight.
Imagine collectible cards. If you are serious criminal neededing to move/launder large sums of money, and are not nerdy enough to trust crypto, Pokemon and other cards are the things for you. It began in East Asia, bellwether of the world and is now a thing worldwide.
You can add it to your crime mastermind files, if it isn't already there.
The counterargument is not that crypto or collectible cards or contemporary art aren’t used to launder money. Clearly they have been and are. It’s that anti money laundering work isn’t really about preventing any transfer / ‘laundering’ of ill gotten funds, which while ideal is very difficult when dealing with competent criminal organizations.
Modern anti money laundering legislation is more about the IRS or FBI arbitrarily showing up at the newly purchased $10m house where a foreign government official or minor boxing promoter lives (whoever happens to legally own it) and saying or implying “we’re essentially going to take this from you, freeze all your accounts and stop you from travelling unless you can explain exactly how you or your associates legitimately made every single cent of the money used to buy this property”. The specific mechanism of the laundering isn’t relevant here, what is relevant is being able to satisfy whatever test the tax collectors or police demand.
"Since my childhood, I loved cards and collected lots of them, this was my passion. And one day, when I bought card pack and opened it, all world's luck fell on me!"
"Yes, Rainbow Fire Farting Crocodile Mouse was there! One of the most valuable cards in the world, worth 10M bucks!"
"Here is my card collection, here is the receipt from game shop where I bought the pack, here is the capital gain tax I reported and paid as a good citizen."
"Sure this misunderstanding is cleared now?"
Ok, so if I ask one hundred of the top card industry people, auctioneers, collectors in the business if they’ve worked with you for the last 20 years, many of them will have done business with you, right? You’ll have newspaper clippings and online articles about playing in Pokémon card competitions when you were 12 years old, right? You can show me eBay accounts you control that show you purchasing the cards you just resold a decade ago in competitive auctions?
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The market liquidity is low, appraisals are inflated, and valuations can be anihilated at the whim of a random guy at a game company
This matters if you intended to hold these cards as long term investment (that would be indeed unwise).
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