Amazing what the promise of getting a few billion dollars does to a money hoarder’s attitude
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Let me elaborate @happybeing’s caution based on the experience of crypto p2p exchanges in Russia.
You are selling BTC/USDc/USDt for fiat
You find a whatever offer/quotation from the list and start an exchange. No matter if the other person asks you for KYC.
- Your crypto is locked by the platform and you provide your bank account.
- Frauder hustles a victim into sending fiat onto your bank account
- You receive all the sum you wanted, confirm to the platform to release crypto to the fraudster (which you have no idea is) and happyly close the deal and write a positibe review for him.
It literally doesn’t matter if you have chosen counterparty with 5000 (completed) deals / 5 star rating / 99% successful deals and lots of good reviews.
After a few days/weeks/months when a victim realises that he/she was deceived, he/she creates a claim at police which in turn notify your bank to start investigation.
Boom! Your bank doesn’t like investigations. If you are not their beloved client with good turnover and/or juicy balance they won’t even try to listen to your story. Bank will close your account immediately. They mostl likely won’t freeze your money but you will have three days to choose another bank account or open a new if you don’t have one.
And you know bank’s security department will most likely exchange this red flag notice with some other banks. So in a couple days you will have troubles opening account in other banks.
Now imagine that during the police investigation they end up discovering a money laundering scheme and all that stuff. Now you are part of this. In Russian experience in particular this will most likely be a part of Ukrainian frauders which just withdraw their loot. And you are now accused of financing the Ukrainians lol. This doesn’t effectively means that you would end up sentenced. But for some time you a part of a criminal trial because you sold 300 USDC a few weeks ago. Now you are officially flagged in Central Bank and ALL banks know this and will act accordingly.
Around 15-20% of crypto > fiat trades end up with this “triangle of death” scheme here.
You are buying BTC/USDc/USDt for your fiat
Last year we had a huge terrorist attack 150 victims + 600 injured people.
So as you might understand people who bought say 300 USDc from a stranger months ago, received a wake up doorbell ring at 5 am from officers questioning your commitment in financing terrorists. Imagine your banks’ reaction if you become a part of such an investigation.
Even if in your country these particular risks are way smaller it doesn’t mean that they are non-existant.
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This is a wonderful advance in free trade.
Regarding banks - do a search for banks in your country that are crypto-friendly. It makes a big difference. Don’t risk using a bank that has a history of shutting down or locking accounts that deal with crypto-related/tied/link accounts.
In Australia ANZ Bank is pretty good for crypto (so far) according to my research and experience.
This tech also means it would be easy for Autonomi to integrate it!! Which would enable native token. Not that I expect Maidsafe will do so, but just saying.
The scenario described isn’t a unique “crypto” risk — it’s a well-known fiat-world problem known in law enforcement and AML/financial crime contexts as a money mule situation. A “money mule” is someone who receives or moves funds on behalf of others, often without knowing that those funds originate from fraudulent activity or criminal schemes. You can read the official definition here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_mule
In the scenario you quoted:
- A third party (the victim) sends fiat to your bank account;
- You appear to have sold crypto for that fiat;
- Later the police/bank conclude the fiat was associated with a fraud;
- Your bank flags or restricts your account.
That outcome is driven by fiat banking and AML risk controls, not by crypto protocols.
How ZKP2P with V3 Escrow changes the crypto side of the equation
ZKP2P’s V3 Escrow architecture protects you in ways that traditional P2P doesn’t:
Your crypto is never sent directly from your wallet to the counterparty’s wallet.
Instead, it’s locked in a smart contract escrow before the trade begins.
The protocol only releases crypto from escrow after a valid cryptographic proof (zero-knowledge proof) shows that the agreed fiat payment condition has been fulfilled by the counterparty.
That means:
If there is a police or AML investigation later, you can demonstrate that:
- Your crypto was held in a smart contract, not transferred directly to a third party;
- The crypto release was conditioned on a cryptographic proof of payment, not on your manual decision to send coins;
- There is no direct on-chain link tying your wallet to a supposed “fraudster” wallet.
This significantly limits the evidentiary basis for claims like “you sent crypto to a criminal” because the on-chain flow isn’t a simple wallet-to-wallet transfer — it’s controlled by a neutral smart contract.
What about the real risk of becoming a money mule?
Across financial crime research (Europol, law enforcement cases, AML reports):
- A substantial portion of identified money mule networks involve unsuspecting individuals receiving or passing on funds from scams, phishing, romance frauds, or other schemes.
- Money mule activity is widespread because fiat rails and banks tie names/accounts to payments, and banks are required to act on suspicious activity even if the account holder claims innocence.
However, that risk is a function of the fiat banking layer — not crypto protocols. The crypto protocol itself cannot prevent someone from wiring you fiat from a scam victim.
How this risk changes with broader adoption of ZKP2P-style technologies
As non-custodial, zero-knowledge proof-enabled P2P settlement becomes more common:
Fewer centralized platforms will hold your funds or collect personal data;
Fewer intermediaries mean fewer places where your identity or transaction history can be logged and shared during an investigation;
Escrow logic enforced by smart contracts creates clear, verifiable proofs of execution that are not dependent on centralized operators or subjective moderation decisions.
Together, these factors reduce the probability that someone ends up entangled in a fiat-side investigation because of a crypto trade — though they don’t eliminate the underlying fiat-rail risk itself.
As I described above, the crypto comes from a smart contract and has no direct connection to anyone’s wallet - there is no way to prove that you personally bought specific USDC. This is the smart contract for the zkp2p escrow:
Check out the Impossible Futures!
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@Dimitar you’re aware of basicswapdex.com?
chain to chain, no intermediate, pure p2p2, pure privacy
They’ll integrate a fiat onramp at some point
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Yes you are very correct here and this is my main point. The protocol can be very safe and even prove your innocence (if authorities would treat such an intermediate custodian smart contract as a proof). But banks close your account the first hour the victim shouts out at the police station “I’ve been deceived and sent money to this account”.
Since then it doesn’t matter if you are innocent or not but you are flagged and bank acts accordingly - they don’t want a client who is potentially involved in any such activity and they spread this rumor further. So you quickly lose your ability to have account in say top-50 banks before someone asked you to tell your story of what happened.
So in 2-6 months you would end up being clean from accusations but blacklisted across good banks anyway. From practical experience people here say that the only way to save bank account is either be a juicy client for which banks would really care or simply instantly refund the victim his money.
They don’t connect your USDc. They connect your fiat: you “topped-up a terrorist account” which he later used say to rent an appartment.
Again in both cases you end up having troubles before anyone hears the words “crypto/smart contract” from you. All comes from banks infrastructure.
Almost 100% of p2p exchanges here happen between 2-3 banks which are considered crypto-friendly and this is already goes without saying and included in the described experience.
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This kind of scam has been happening for years in non-crypto contexts as well. In Bulgaria, for example, similar schemes are common on local eBay-like marketplaces, yet people haven’t stopped selling their old items because of it.
The same basic fraud pattern can be applied to almost any P2P transaction worldwide. Crypto P2P trades are actually a very small subset of all P2P exchanges, and even if scams appear more frequently in percentage terms, the absolute personal risk remains extremely low — arguably lower than many everyday risks people routinely accept, like traveling by car.
That said, it’s still useful to share these examples publicly. Not everyone immediately recognizes such schemes, and raising awareness helps people make better, more informed decisions.
Check out the Impossible Futures!
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Im assuming there is no actual record of who swapped what?
I perrsonally wouldnt be to worried about a knock on the door..
If you traded a legal asset, i dont see a problem
15 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ukraine
There is no direct connection between your Ethereum address and your bank account, but of course records are kept on the blockchain.
There is a record from the seller that he send USDC into the escrow smart contract, and from the buyer that he received USDC from the escrow smart contract.
The bank keeps a record that you transferred money from your bank account to someone else’s bank account, but why you transferred it is not given except when the bank checks it and ask you.
Check out the Impossible Futures!
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Please keep political commentary out of any topic not in Off-Topic, this is primarily a technical forum and not political.
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@Dimitar What happens to your crypto if the buyer never pays? Is there a mechanism to get your crypto back?
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Each purchase order is locked in the pool for a period of 6 hours. After the 6-hour window expires, the order is automatically released if it has not been completed.
Additionally, ZKP2P uses Taker Tiers 
based on on-chain reputation. This reputation system determines:
- the maximum order size a user can place
- the cooldown period between consecutive orders
As a user builds on-chain reputation, they gain access to higher limits and shorter cooldowns.
Taker Tiers
Peer Peasant – up to $100
(all new users start here)
Peer – up to $250
Peer Plus – up to $1,000
Peer Pro – up to $2,500
Peer Platinum – up to $5,000
Check out the Impossible Futures!
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