Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

Yep.

They've colluded with the US federal government in the past on those issues as well. "Operation Choke Point" was ostensibly about fraud, but included transactions related to firearms in its scope. As a result, several major banks and payment processors dropped legitimate firearms dealers. For a while it got to the point that I was helping a couple of local gun stores contract with "high risk" payment processors that also serve the porn industry and get set up.

To this day if you're on a gun forum and mention that you use Bank of America, people will pile on to tell you horror stories of both companies and individuals having their accounts closed and funds held for weeks or months after completely legal transactions. In one case in particular, they claimed it happened after buying a backpack at a gun store.

Again, these are 100% legitimate and legal businesses. Federally licensed (FFL) gun stores had trouble for years even keeping a working business account. It was clearly not about fraud, at least not in practice.

Politics completely aside, the financial landscape for gun stores today looks a lot like the cannabis industry: a few institutions are quietly known in those communities to allow them to operate, but many choose to do business only in cash and most prefer it if given the option. The porn industry is similar from what I can see.

Unfortunately, cash is slowly getting phased out.

Try buying a second hand car and you want cash from the bank. Used to be very easy, but now you need to declare what your spending your money on.

You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?

Over here they are even cracking down on stuff like ebay, amazon because some people run a business on those sites and do not report the taxes. Result: If you make over 3k in the year on ebay, you need to provided your tax number, or ebay closes your account. And above 3k, it get reported to the IRS.

But wait, what happens if your a foreign national from some specific Asian countries and want to open a bank account? Refused, refused, refused... But you need a bank account for a lot of basic things. Well, tough luck. Lets not talk account closing issues.

And that is the EU, and just normal people. Nothing tax evasion, guns, or whatever. Just everybody putting up umbrella's to be sure, not understanding that when everybody does it, it really screws with people.

They are going crazy with this over regulation. Yes, i understand you want to fight black money but the people who get the big amounts will have ways to hide it. Your just hurting the normal people wanting to know what everybody is doing exactly with every cent.

You see this gradual effort to slowly phase out cash. Cashless payment are getting encouraged, cash withdrawals cost your money more and more, more questions regarding origins (so you say f it, and use bank deposits with release approvals).

Its not a surprise that we seen the increase in cryto usage (and the efforts of governments to control that also).

>You sold your car. O, its over 7 or 10k, well, this is getting reported to the local IRS. Where is that cash coming from, questions, questions?

(I'm not in the US)

I'm curious about how does that happen. Do they reach out to you? Your bank?

In the US, it’s a “Currency Transaction Report”: https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/2021...

The bank collects the information necessary to submit that form at the time of transaction.

You’re also required as an individual to file IRS Form 8300 if you accept >$10k in payment: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Your bank will file a report with FinCEN that says that you withdrew (or deposited, or transferred, or whatever) the money. They can/will also separately report suspicious transactions, including patterns of transactions that seem designed to evade the reporting requirements.

What if you cash your paychecks at the grocery store?

What grocery store is cashing checks in the 7-10k range?

Not sure. Apparently walmart you can cash up to 7500 for half the year and 5000 other half for tax return purposes I guess. Still maybe you can get paid weekly instead of biweekly.

Also not in the US, i am using the term IRS because people are very used to it on the internet.

Banks in the US and EU are legally required to report large transactions. I know for a fact that in Europe, that cash handeling over 10.000 euro gets reported.

That includes withdrawals and deposits. The later gets even more questions asked regarding the "origins" of the money.

There are other fun events that we have seen, like transferring 15.000 euro from my wife to her brother (between countries), that had the money blocked as the bank needed to investigate the origin of the money. So the bank starts calling you to figure out what the money is, what is it used for, where does it come from, bla bla bla...

Why are you giving 15.000 to your brother. Is it a GIFT!!! Translation: Can we TAX it! I suspect that banks in some EU countries get a cut from reported money that can be taxed by the tax office (that is just my speculation).

No, it was his money that he loaned to us for a house buying, and that we returned, but they really tried to push the "gift" narrative. Large money transfers (above 10k), triggers investigations.

And as you can guess, large cash deposits or withdraws get even more questions.

Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.

So ironically, you perform actions like a criminal (will do to avoid detection), just to avoid getting questioned like your a criminal. Hahahaha...

I feel like we have no more privacy in our lives with everything being monitored and checked. Your browser spies on you, your OS spies on you (W11 Recall even worse), your smartphone, you get tracked by Wifi signal in the streets, your customer store card (that they push and push) is to track your buying habits, the banks track your every movement for the tax office, you can not even freaking sell stuff on ebay and get reported.

Like 3000 Euro is nothing. You sell a few piece of PC hardware and you hit that limit. And Amazon/Ebay/... report your behind. And now its about backdoors in encryption because you may be hiding something. What, you do not want to share your talks on XYZ platform to your wife, family. What are you saying, illegal stuff????

We are really moving to a dystopian world and have been for a long time.

> Here is a fun tip: Just transfer or deposited money in small amounts, whenever you feel like it. Avoids the questioning like your some kind of criminal.

Breaking up deposits into smaller amounts is a crime called structuring.

I wouldn't recommend doing this as an alternative to dealing with the reports and scrutiny on larger transactions.