I decided to get my annual anti-money laundering training at work out of the way early this year, and it got me thinking about gold sellers in ESO and other MMOs, selling in-game currency for real world currency. I remember that early on it was a huge problem in ESO, with gold seller spam filling peoples inboxes and drowning out everything else in /zone, but over time ZOS seems to have done a good job of eliminating most of that.

I don't know for sure if it's been eliminated entirely in ESO (I don't have any desire to look for gold seller sites in order to find out if they still sell for ESO), but if it still exists I would imagine it's now much much smaller scale than it was at launch. Hell, even if ZOS hadn't already cracked down hard on gold sellers before then, the switch to B2P and the introduction of the Crown Store would have reduced (but not eliminated) demand for gold anyway.

What I'm wondering, though, is whether gold sellers in ESO and in MMOs in general use similar techniques to the techniques used by money launderers in real life. I'm talking about variants on techniques like smurfing or other forms of structuring (in real life this is where you structure transactions to avoid triggering reporting thresholds etc) and layering (using a complicated series of transactions to disguise the source). The integration stage wouldn't really seem to exist - or at least it wouldn't exist on the in-game currency side of the equation for gold sellers.

Does anyone know if gold sellers do anything like this? Or is it maybe not worth their effort? I've heard that they often don't really care about having accounts banned because they tend to buy accounts with stolen credit cards and such, but even that has a cost associated with it, as I'd assume they're buying those stolen credit cards from someone. But maybe the associated cost isn't high enough for them to go to so much effort to hide their transactions?

I don't know, I'm just curious.