This story touches a nerve for me because I recently tried to make a small market service but couldn't get it off the ground specifically because of money laundering concerns from my payments processor (Stripe). They shut me down even though I was a small player and would have been very low risk for large money laundering transactions (which I could have detected anyways). I guess they had a point - it would have been very hard for me to detect and eliminate money laundering from my service, if it was done very cleverly. However, in doing research for my anti-money-laundering strategy (that they had requested) I came to the conclusion that not only could I not solve that problem - no one could! After all, all one has to do to launder money through Venmo is label all the transactions as alcohol purchases. All one has to do to launder money through Stripe is tell them you're selling pizza (hypocrites)! And now apparently all one has to do to launder money through Amazon is sell a crappy book for $25,000. For that reason I'm sort of annoyed to have been shut down. Oh well, I've got other plans now...
Edit: To be fair to Stripe, they did tell me that it was not them, but their underwriters that were responsible for the decision.
Edit: To be fair to Stripe, they did tell me that it was not them, but their underwriters that were responsible for the decision.