For the short term definition, money laundering is the process of hiding the origin of the money you have and where it came from. Money laundering in crypto is very similar where the people doing it are hiding the money being transferred. People may do this in crypto by sending digital assets across blockchains, bypassing a centralized service that can trace and freeze transactions. More people who attempt money laundering refer to using cryptocurrency to do so as it’s easier to hide their identity through the process

Consequences of money laundering are having to pay tons of money and spend jail time. A template of that is they are sentenced to up to 20 years of jail time and fines of up to $500,000 or twice the value of the property that was involved in the transaction. If you are an owner of a cryptocurrency, you will lose trust from customers and will most likely never use anything that you have been involved in no matter if it’s good. Some other consequences aside from the person doing it, people are also affected in the process and lose tons of money that they won’t really get back ever.

There’s been multiple different ways money has been laundered in crypto but they all have been relatively laundered through the same process. There’s typically 3 stages: placement, hiding, and integration. Placement is where you pick the cryptocurrency the laundering will be taken in. After that is hiding where criminals can use an anonymizing service to hide the funds source, breaking the links between bitcoin transactions. Finally, integration, this is where the hacker has to explain how they have all this crypto and the way they do it is making it seem as the result of a profitable venture or other currency appreciation