#WashTrading #NFTs #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Fraud: "If you've heard of wash-trading, it's probably something you picked up during the NFT bubble, which was a cesspit of illegal wash-trading. Remember all those eye-popping NFT sales? It was just grifters with multiple wallets, buying NFTs from themselves, making it seem like there was this huge, white-hot market for monkey JPEGs. Wash-trading.

Turns out that crypto really did democratize finance…fraud.

Wash-trading has been illegal for a century, but brokerages have invented modern variations on the theme that are legal-ish, and the most lucrative versions of these scams are only available to billionaires, through companies like Goldman Sachs.

There are a bunch of these variations, but they all boil down to this: there are lots of ways to sell an asset and buy it again, while making it look like you bought a different asset. Like, say you're invested in Chinese tech companies through an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that bundles together "all the Top Chinese tech stocks.""

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego