1) It would obviously be stupid to connect all of them to Molly's identity directly. The point would be that they're run by proxy, and largely used for things we don't want or need Molly's name stamped on.1) A big bang windfall looks like an unlikely, but very real event that happens to hundreds of American lottery winners every year.
Lots of smaller cash flows starts to fit the profile of money laundering, and draws attention.
Molly is 17 years old, 18 in 3 months, and hasnt finished high school.
She has no current skills that would legally translate to millions of dollars; she isnt Hannah Montana or a STEM wunderkind that coded Skype in their bedroom and sold it to Microsoft.
Melee 5 is best in the world, but at best it would get her Olympic gold in fencing.
You're going to be hard pressed to find any vaguely plausible way she has lots of smaller cash flows that total up to tens of millions of dollars in a couple months and doesnt peg someone's bullshit meter hard.
2) Structuring financial transactions in an attempt to avoid Federal scrutiny is an actual Federal crime in the US.
We would be risking finessing our way into actual financial crimes that we can actually be charged with. Not that we cant beat them in court, but it would require an investment of time and effort and charms we would otherwise not have to make.:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/WhatIsaSmurfandHowDoesSmurfingWork-eb30178970b44b6abe59213023ce7d41.jpg)
What Is a Smurf and How Does Smurfing Work?
A smurf is a colloquial term for a money launderer who seeks to evade scrutiny from government agencies by breaking up large transactions.www.investopedia.com
3)I strongly disagree about prereqs for winning a lottery. All you need is a winning lottery ticket and you use that to get a big law firm on contingency. If we wait till we have the financial infrastructure to move large amounts of money, that means we have large amounts of money and we would not need the lottery any longer.
We need a lottery win, or a large gold find, or a large gem find, as a Big Bang move to take us from Resources 0 to Resources 4ish or better.
There are no other legalish ways I can think of for a soon to be 18 year old high school junior/senior to become a multimillionaire in the next three months; we arent inheriting a massive fortune, and everything else that has been suggested, like suddenly becoming a genius daytrader on the stock market, is frankly a lot more ridiculous and eyecatching than suddenly winning the lottery.
Or a lot more illegal, like going Breaking Bad and cooking high grade drugs.
4) Lara Raith de facto runs the White Court. She lives in Chicago, at the Raith family estate.
Her half-brother (and Harry's half-brother)Thomas Raith was on the squad of people who rescued us. I dont think its an actual concern that someone as smart as Lara is going to intentionally go anywhere near enthralling the daughter of a Knight of the Cross and known associate of Harry "Oops I did It Again" Dresden, even before we developed occult superpowers.
Last time that happened, the offending party's estate caught fire, with them inside it.
Besides, Thomas Raith would be my second choice for selling gold safely after Harry Dresden himself.
He's a forty something year old from a rich family, he knows at least the basics of rich family finance, and he wont gouge us.
Plus, we owe him enough that a reasonable commission off a financial transaction is not actually a hardship.
5)Short of a massive organization effort like you see with federal Witness Protection, anonymity is designed to fend off nuisances and harassment, and give you a modicum of protection against scrubs. Its not an iron curtain.
The local IRS office know who is rich. Your financial managers know. Your law firm knows.
The CPA who handles your taxes knows. Your bank branch, and the national dept detailed to handle accounts of high net worth individuals know. Whoever issues your credit card account knows.
The real estate agent selling you a house and checking your credit rating, the car agent selling you a new truck; they all know.
Hell, your barista might be able to tell depending on your credit card.
This stuff is designed to fend off the riff raff.
Its not designed to stop people with connections willing to invest the effort from figuring out who's actually balling.
Worrying about it is a futile endeavor.
You significantly underestimate the world appetite for precious metals, I think. And our ability to move stuff legally.
Faking a find of Confederate gold, or a stash of mined gold that was buried and forgotten, is not all that difficult if you have Tool Constructs and the ability to check what such a find would look like online. For example:
Just pay your taxes on it and the IRS wont care.
But there will definitely be chancers trying to claim it belongs to them or a relative, because people are like that.
Thats why lawyers exist.
Beside, once we have a solid financial base, the major use of gold is for off the books transactions.
Both with supernatural side players, and with grey market humans for things that we might want or need thats not easily accessible on the open market.
And in that case, having enough jewel-quality diamonds for the Resources 5 expense of building a Rating 5 magic robot?
Or enough free gold to bribe some supernaturals for crafting reagents?
Rather useful.
Gathering bribe money, renting office space, purchasing materials, paying contractors, that sort of thing.
2) So is killing vampires, since the law doesn't acknowledge they aren't humans, and half a dozen other things we're considering doing.
We just got done wiretapping the FBI, and almost voted to call and try to intimidate them with a record of their own phone calls.
Done right we wouldn't need to defend ourselves on this, certainly no more so than we already would if someone followed us around and recorded what we're doing anyway.
3) The whole point of any of this would be to avoid being known as a teenage multimillionaire.
On the specifics; we don't own any land out where coins or gold deposits can be found and legally claimed by Molly. One big multimillion dollar find is going to have some people sniffing for their cut, so we'd need a hell of a story. Smaller ones will similarly eventually raise questions.
4) You say this like their internal politics hasn't repeatedly resulted in them playing games that aren't good for the current leadership of the court. For that matter, that the reluctance to mess with Harry will protect us when to the supernatural community at large we basically didn't exist and aren't known to be connected to him.
Micheal might be a shield from attempts, but he's not exactly a public figure to these sort of people.
5) The problem is that unless you have infrastructure and influence to move money around having a lot of it sitting in an account makes you a target. Especially in an a world like the DF. Which is why I'd prefer if it isn't in Molly's name for a large portion of the money, just something we control by proxy.
