TD Bank was fined $3 BILLION for laundering drug-related money! 😱
However, this is a small slap on the wrist compared to how much they profited off of this. And no one's going to jail!
Compare this to crypto, where anything and everything is used as a pretext to accuse of money laundering. And they actually send innocent people to prison over this.
I know this because many friends (and friends of friends) of mine either are currently, or were, in prison: Ross Ulbricht, Ian Freeman, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins, Alexey Pertsev (of Tornado Cash), the Samourai Wallet team, and many more.
Ross Ulbricht allegedly created the Silk Road, which simply facilitated trade for anything and everything. He's in prison for the rest of his life (12 years and counting).
Both Rizzn and Freeman operated businesses selling crypto for cash (something many thousands still do), perfectly legally (or so they thought). They were still given time behind bars.
The Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet folks just build open-source code and tools to help people get financial privacy on chains that didn't support it natively. They've been robbed of their freedom.
All of their alleged sins or harm were far, far less than those of TD Bank (or simply nonexistent), but because they dared to build on peer-to-peer permissionless tech that's a threat to the establishment, their punishments were many orders of magnitude higher.
Make no mistake: money laundering laws are an excuse for control. The greater the threat to totalitarian control, the harsher they're applied.
Crypto is a tool for radical freedom, but it's scapegoated as a tool for criminals.
Those scapegoating crypto are themselves the real criminals.