Not in the UK - there is a crime of handling stolen goods - where you can be asked to prove the steps you took to ensure they aren't stolen, or risk forfiting the good and the money you made selling them. Hence why KYC is so important for pawn shops etc. here.

Another UK example - a boat maker made incredibly high powered speedboats - that happened to be very popular with drugs runners. How how was he supposed to know what would be done with them? But still they end up on the most wanted list: https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/21291272.high-speed-boats-sold-d...

it's incredibly authoritarian to have to affirmatively prove that one is not committing a crime to the government

burden of proof should be squarely on the prosecution, period, end of story, don't force people to create evidence against themselves

> it's incredibly authoritarian to have to affirmatively prove that one is not committing a crime to the government

Nit: it's oppressive and quasi totalitarian, not authoritarian.

I was under the impression that you don't need an underlying act to charge or convict someone with obstruction/other crimes of concealment because if they were so good at concealing the crime you wouldn't be able to prove the underlying act, even if you could prove that they concealed it.

For example if a court subpoenaed a document while investigating a crime but then the suspect destroyed the document, you don't need to prove that the underlying crime happened to prove that the suspect attempted to conceal it.

If a court subpoenas evidence, and someone destroys that evidence, that's destruction of evidence, which is a specific crime. My point is more general than that. The reason someone could be prosecuted for that, even though it leads to a lack of conviction for the originally-investigated crime, is that destruction of evidence is itself criminal behavior.

One could construct situations where a third party with no knowledge of the subpoena destroys a document for ordinary reasons, after the subpoena is issued. That person is going to be very closely scrutinized, possibly charged, but it's entirely possible to be found innocent of a crime there. Say a corporation employs a document warehouse and the contract says that documents are to be destroyed after 60 days. A court orders on day 58 that those documents be remanded, but the corporation doesn't tell the warehouse, and the court is not aware that the documents are in that warehouse, so they don't send the subpoena to the warehouse.

The operator of the warehouse is not guilty of destruction of evidence in this case. The party at the corporation whose duty it was to produce the documents is guilty. Assuming this is a high-profile case, there will absolutely be additional subpoenas to demonstrate that the operator was not informed of the need to retain the documents, but mens rea must be demonstrated because shredding documents is not per se illegal behavior.

A casino isn't a "knowing participant" to any specific crime — no criminal comes up to them and makes a deal to launder money through the casino.

But casinos (for example) have a tacit agreement with the "criminal industry" in general, that criminals will be able to inherently launder money through the cash-in/cash-out mechanisms of the casino, in exchange for having to play some table games (and therefore lose at least a small percentage of their money, i.e. give a percentage of their ill-gotten gains to the casino) to make everything look legitimate.

If a given business has a business model where it would not possibly stay afloat over the long term, if not for some appreciable fraction of its customer base making use of the business for money laundering — then the business is a "knowing participant" to the general concept of money laundering, even if they have never shaken hands with any specific criminals. Their MBAs knowingly design the business around enabling money laundering.

Come to think of it, this is a bit like the argument the US DOJ used to take down Napster — which actually, finally somewhat convinces me of the logic they used.

The Napster company's business model depended upon some appreciable fraction of its clientele being IP pirates. For everyone else, Napster was a vitamin; but for pirates, Napster was a painkiller. Napster would never have achieved spread without a core base of pirates to spread it. The Napster company's business model (presumably something like "make the software widely used, then sell ads that display in the client" or something) depended on — was planned around — piracy. Thus, Napster was in tacit collusion with pirates; just as most money launderers are in tacit collusion with gangsters.

Isn't that the reason that (at least in the US) cashing out over a certain size requires ID? So that large amounts of cash can't be laundered easily in this way?

Yes, and the point where that became enforced, was pretty much the point where casinos in the US were sold off from the gangs that generally owned them up to that point, to “entertainment tycoons” who turned them into the “arcades for adults” / “cruise ships on land” they’re known as today.

The US just got uniquely "lucky" here, in that the people who bought up the casinos from the gangs, had a business plan that involved making Las Vegas et al "family friendly", which required moving as far away from the casinos' previous "gang-affiliated" image as possible. As such, they had no plans related to continuing to tacitly launder money for the gangs; instead looking specifically for that kind of signature and stopping it when they notice it. (The shared Vegas-casino blacklist exists 1% to stop card counters, and 99% to stop organized criminals.)

Elsewhere in the world, this particular story didn't play out the same way, though. So casinos elsewhere are still mostly money-laundering fronts. Not always operated by gangs, but often operated under the implicit business-model assumption of gangs.

What you'll see in your average casino-allowing country — Australia, say — are casino businesses run by regular people, who get very little traffic from regular gamblers (nobody travels to Australia to gamble), who do zero investment into making the casino attractive to regular people... and who instead concentrate all their effort on making sure that gangs — some even state-affiliated, apparently! — can continue to launder money through the casinos with ease.

Though, for an example of very explicit gang-casino involvement, there's the Golden Triangle, containing casinos owned directly by a particular gang — where it isn’t the gang members themselves (or their proxies) cashing in and out to wash money; but instead, customers of the gang’s drug business, cashing in at the casino, and then proceeding to lose all their money at the table, as their way of making payment for a drug shipment from the gang.

> If you make any action which has the effect of obscuring evidence of crime, regardless of mens rea, into a crime, you will end up prosecuting innocent people

Sure. This isn't how aML law works. Money laundering is specifically disguising the proceeds of illicit activity. If there is no illicit activity, it's not money laundering and it isn't illegal. Using a mixer or running your life exclusively on cash is not illegal.

Does any money laundering offence not have a mens rea, though? You typically have to have at least suspected that you were dealing with the proceeds of crime.

Structuring (splitting up cash deposits to a bank so that they don't trigger the bank to file a CTR) comes to mind. It does have a mens rea component, but the money being entirely clean doesn't make the act not-structuring, IIUC.