Not actual laundering per se, but an interesting case study.
Having recently acquired a fleet carrier, I thought of a way to transfer my credits from my mostly unused PS4 account to my PC account, after I noticed that FCs are visible on all platforms.
I had a couple of hundred millions on PS4 plus a couple of hundred millions more in ships and components sitting around. I could have gone the FDEV route of requesting a credit transfer but if I read it correctly, the source account gets disabled after?
So what I did was look at my cargo, I had kilotons of Tritium in the FC. In the FC's market you can sell for up to 10x the galactic average. So what I did was set up Commodity Trading for Tritium at 10x the going rate. My PS4 account ship would buy and haul the super-expensive tritium to a nearby station to sell at a loss and repeat until most of the credits from my PS4 were in my PC fleet carrier account.
Now I could have gone one step further to just buy and sell at the fleet carrier at different prices and sped things up immensely but I went with the transfer to a nearby station to make it a little more realistic in-game. It was 12 trips though because I'd sold my most expensive ships on PS4 already and was left with a Dolphin and 70T of cargo space. Still, it worked out quite well.
What are your thoughts on this technique? Do you think it's a legal in-game way to transfer funds or should it be considered an exploit? I know in the past FDEV have confiscated profits people made by exploiting a bug of buying/selling commodities at one station that bought for more than it sold. But I think this is different, and I did avoid buying/selling at the FC.
TL;DR Transferred credits from PS4 to PC by selling a commodity at an exorbitant price to the PS4 account, incurring a loss there but an equivalent profit on the PC account's Fleet carrier.
Thoughts?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/paqckm/credit_transfer_between_platforms_via_money/