My guess is that rather than policing any of various muggle institutions, they investigate, as we do in our own world, whenever anyone appears to suddenly come into possession of large amounts of money for no clear reason, and if they find out they did something illegal, they throw them in jail.
This would require a wizarding equivalent of the IRS, which I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen mention of taxes, but they obviously have to pay the ministry employees something. One of the consequences of their primitive monetary system is that it is very easy to obtain money without the government knowing it. Perhaps they could use muggle taxes to buy gold to be minted into galleons, and pay employees that way. In cannon, the prime minister knows about the wizarding world, and it’s possible that information of it is just highly classified.
I suppose money could be magically tracked, but there would still need to be a ministry department. And if that is possible, it easily defeats most money-making strategies.
If any money tracking is going on, I suspect it’s done by the goblins, who I believe canonically have means of magically tracking things.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
If you don’t put it in a bank account, then assuming no magical tracking, you could spend lots of money so long as you don’t reach a point where anyone starts asking “Hey, where did you get all this expensive stuff?”
Since the wizarding world has so much smaller a population than ours and seems to be quite class stratified, it’s quite conceivable that every person who’s supposed to be really wealthy is already known and identifiable, and any Joe Shmoe who tries making a thousand galleon purchase is instantly flagged as suspicious.
This would require a wizarding equivalent of the IRS, which I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen mention of taxes, but they obviously have to pay the ministry employees something. One of the consequences of their primitive monetary system is that it is very easy to obtain money without the government knowing it. Perhaps they could use muggle taxes to buy gold to be minted into galleons, and pay employees that way. In cannon, the prime minister knows about the wizarding world, and it’s possible that information of it is just highly classified.
I suppose money could be magically tracked, but there would still need to be a ministry department. And if that is possible, it easily defeats most money-making strategies.
If any money tracking is going on, I suspect it’s done by the goblins, who I believe canonically have means of magically tracking things.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
That’s assuming you put it in a bank account.
If you don’t put it in a bank account, then assuming no magical tracking, you could spend lots of money so long as you don’t reach a point where anyone starts asking “Hey, where did you get all this expensive stuff?”
Since the wizarding world has so much smaller a population than ours and seems to be quite class stratified, it’s quite conceivable that every person who’s supposed to be really wealthy is already known and identifiable, and any Joe Shmoe who tries making a thousand galleon purchase is instantly flagged as suspicious.