Another poster in the world of financial crime prevention at a large financial institution, chiming in -
There are lots of ways to launder money, and lots of way to do it through games like this.
But here is a super basic example - a criminal has money from criminal proceeds and needs to do three things - placement (get the dirty money into a financial system), layer it (create transactions to obfuscate the source of the money), and integration (getting “clean” money back to themselves).
Here, a criminal could set up (or, more likely, have associates set up) a company in a jurisdiction with lax company formation rules that limit what identifying information is provided. Lots of jurisdictions to do this in - Panama, British Virgin Islands, heck even some U.S. states like Wyoming. They also set up a bank account at a bank that doesn’t ask a lot of questions.
After the company is established, this company becomes the place to get the “clean” money to. How does the criminal do that in a game? The criminal, using its company, starts out by “buying” ships from others on the black market, but at vastly under-priced amount, from numerous accounts it set up - these accounts can be set up with “mules”, people hired by the criminal to establish lots of CIG accounts. Say, a $1,000 jpeg ship is purchased by a mule and sold to the criminal company for $100. The criminal has now sold itself a ship way under value, on purpose. The criminal company then goes out and sells those ships out on the resale sites and message boards to real player accounts, probably at just under whatever the current market rate is for those ships. Even if the rate is less than $1,000, let’s say $800, the money launderer is okay taking a slight loss on the transaction, because now that $800 looks clean. The players buying the ships from the criminal have no idea that they were part of the layering stage of money laundering.
The criminal company does this over and over and over - if they can use third party sites to do the transactions, CIG would never even need to be knowledgeable of it. The limiting factor though, is that at some point the criminal saturates the resale market and has to keep lowering prices to keep selling. I have never looked at the star citizen market, so no idea what point that would be at for it. But the sheer amount of money people have put into this game gives it a scale that could be attractive for money launderers to try to work with.
This stuff can and does happen, even with game companies - I have seen it. If the actual game company is knowingly or unknowingly facilitating via first party sale transactions (i.e., the game company handles the resale market themselves), it is not hard to spot if you look at the bank account fund flows - gee, why is this game company having massive transaction flows to and from known money laundering hot spots like Panama, Russia, Cyprus, BVI? And why do those transactions end up at some unknown company located in a PO box/rent an office in those locations?