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Notes -
My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?
I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.
For the record, I don't think this is a pedophilic operation and I agree with you that they probably wouldn't do things this way - I just assumed the pedophile ring was real for the purposes of the discussion. That said...
There have actually been several cases of this happening where I'm from. They've been selling fake products on UberEats for a while and there have been multiple busts - check out this story for one example, but it is far from the only one: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/uber-eats-driver-s-one-star-review-for-refusing-to-deliver-crystal-meth-20230430-p5d4dd.html
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