I've stumbled down a weird rabbit hole... - Steam Money Laundering Scheme?

borsabil said:
Look at half the content on Netflix and look at the budget to produce the movies and shows.

Some badly written garbage with no name actors and zero production quality costing 50 million to make. Sure.

Definitely money laundering.
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This sounds fascinating. Do you happen to know any names of these productions? I'd like to check them out.
 
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borsabil said:
Look at half the content on Netflix and look at the budget to produce the movies and shows.

Some badly written garbage with no name actors and zero production quality costing 50 million to make. Sure.

Definitely money laundering.
Click to expand...

Take a stroll through the physical media aisles at Walmart, same thing. Movies and actors you've never heard of, cheap cover art, $10-12 a pop. Mostly horror, infamously the cheapest, easiest genre to break into for a quick buck. I'd wager you are right about money laundering.
 
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Fascinating.

fascinating.JPG
 
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Caesare said:
This sounds fascinating. Do you happen to know any names of these productions? I'd like to check them out.
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It'd be hard to pin anything made these days, but anything within the $3-5 million range would be a good candidate for a potential money laundering scheme. Big enough to launder the money, small enough to fly under the radar.

The real corruption, I imagine, is in the distribution. There's a history to this - the distribution company for Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Darkstar was run by the Mafia (Colombo Crime Family) back in the 70s. After Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released, somehow after the "lawyers" and "investors" got paid, there was only $8100 left to pay the cast and crew.

It's interesting reading if you're into that sort of thing: Bryanston Distributing Company
 
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Caesare said:
This sounds fascinating. Do you happen to know any names of these productions? I'd like to check them out.
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Last October, looking for something seasonal to watch, I stumbled across a movie called Halloween Party (2012). It is an utterly terrible low-budget comedy. I can't summarize it because I can't sit through more than five minutes of it without fast forwarding, but I feel confident in declaring that nobody has ever enjoyed watching this movie, even ironically.


It has a high rating and pretty good (ie, shill) reviews on IMDB and Amazon. In fact, on Amazon, a lot of the rave reviews are from "verified purchases", so in theory they must have actually bought a copy of it. IMDB has a ton of links to "critic" reviews, but most of them are 404'd. It appears on a suspiciously high number of IMDB user-created lists. Most of the user descriptions make it sound like some kind of raunchy sex comedy or soft porn, which it is not (ie, they are clickbait). The Amazon "users also watched" algorithm mostly recommends a bunch of soft porn from the 1980s-90s, plus a couple of horror movies. Five writers are credited.

I figure there's got to be some kind of story behind this. It almost looks like they filmed it to game search algorithms or something and propped it up with bots. Whatever the deal is, I bet there's another million movies just like it, hanging around on Page 99 of any random Amazon Video search.
 
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Calandrino said:
Last October, looking for something seasonal to watch, I stumbled across a movie called Halloween Party (2012). It is an utterly terrible low-budget comedy. I can't summarize it because I can't sit through more than five minutes of it without fast forwarding, but I feel confident in declaring that nobody has ever enjoyed watching this movie, even ironically.


It has a high rating and pretty good (ie, shill) reviews on IMDB and Amazon. In fact, on Amazon, a lot of the rave reviews are from "verified purchases", so in theory they must have actually bought a copy of it. IMDB has a ton of links to "critic" reviews, but most of them are 404'd. It appears on a suspiciously high number of IMDB user-created lists. Most of the user descriptions make it sound like some kind of raunchy sex comedy or soft porn, which it is not (ie, they are clickbait). The Amazon "users also watched" algorithm mostly recommends a bunch of soft porn from the 1980s-90s, plus a couple of horror movies. Five writers are credited.

I figure there's got to be some kind of story behind this. It almost looks like they filmed it to game search algorithms or something and propped it up with bots. Whatever the deal is, I bet there's another million movies just like it, hanging around on Page 99 of any random Amazon Video search.
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You know a movie is high quality shit when watching the trailer is enough to explain the entire plot of the movie.


Not sure if actual money laundering, or amateur production.
 
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