I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.
Guilty until proven innocent is the legal basis for civil forfeiture too. So by supporting both depriving people of access to banking and criminalizing usage of cash you can fully drive them out of society.
[1] This is the guilty until proven innocent bit
[1] https://twitter.com/OttawaPolice/status/1495367658132361216
Who's "you"? The Bank? How does the bank "decide" whether the funds are legitimate or not? Be the judge, the executor and everything else in between?
Am I crazy or this shit~ should have never been acceptable, in a sane world.
~: KYC/AML and what else.
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/marijuana-bust-shines-li...
> Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life".
You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
Perhaps better not to comment then, because it seems like you didn't actually understand it.
> with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
Right off the bat, you are misrepresenting the legal issues involved, which were explained in the article.
The issue in each case was that a really bad person had a secret bank account with a huge amount of money which they could never have acquired legally.
For generations, Swiss banks allowed this, and of course every dictator, embezzler and money launderer took advantage of this.
But finally Switzerland legally prevented this - except Credit Suisse decided not to follow the laws.
IF you are going to continue with this, please familiarize yourself with the relevant laws, starting perhaps here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
To play devil's advocate here, if those people completed their sentence and they are being resocialized they have access to what any regular citizen is supposed to access.
OTOH if they haven't been sentenced yet and the electricity company knows of it, I think they are walking on thin ice if they don't report it. I'm sure there are heavy sentences for keeping a blind eye on trafficking.
The other point worth mentioning when money laundering happens, tax evasion or even misappropriation of state money the bank is facilitating those crimes which really stands by itself.
So now I'm really wondering what the legit use case of the anonymous accounts is supposed to be.
In what country is "no electricity" (part of) the sentence for murderers? And even in a country where "no electricity" is (part of) the sentence for murder, shouldn't the electric company only impose it in response to a court order?
More to the point, if they haven't been sentenced, why is the electric company imposing a sentence?
Along the same lines, if they haven't been convinced, why is the electric company treating them differently?
The bank not questioning the source of the money they deposit is the problem here. That looks like an intentional institutional gap designed to enable money laundering and tax evasion.
Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
How do you know that the bank isn’t questioning the source of money?
In my experience these fancier banks tend to ask a whole lot of questions.
> Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
Vladimir Putin could also have come up with paperwork showing that he got this money legally. If there are no obvious issues with the documentation provided, it’s simply not the banks problem.
https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover...
Onlyfans keeps identity documents for its members so trafficking-wise they are actually safer than facebook. there are all other businesses affected by the same discrimination, e.g. sex toy shops, dating websites, nudist websites, basically anything that shows skin. I find it hard to believe that chargebacks are so much of an issue, especially since there are third parties willing to take the risk for a high fee (CCbill).
Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds.
So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone.
Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.
Julian Assange & Wikleaks had no access to the banking system because a US politician asked the banks to refuse them service at a time when they had not been charged with any crime.
Whenever you see someone you "dislike" being dealt with in an extradjudicial manner just keep in mind that these are your rights that now don't matter.
80s/90s: offshore banks, bearer shares
00s: MSBs/money orders/check cashers
10s: prepaid/gift cards, crypto, luxury real estate
Truth is that as long as you can triple your money bringing cocaine from Mexico to Texas people are gonna do it. If anything they've made it harder to track because instead of criminal proceeds just being deposited in a Miami bank account they're being used to buy cell phones for export to Colombia.
not regarding anonymity but in fungibility and capital formation, selling and trading the shares is on another level
And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
With billions slipping through from any random branch manager at any bank anywhere, how many 9/11s is that? Any time, for any reason, funding secured.
At least the state can use anything leaked no matter how it was obtained against the banks and companies.
At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.
Poor can't do that much impactful financial crime, can they
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers
Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway.
Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives.
I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem.
This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.
Differences of opinion aside, you severely underestimate the character/circumstances/motives/number of "conscientious objectors" in society.
It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.
I'm not sure why crypto got bundled in there because it's anything but private. The entire transaction history is public. That's kind of the point. Look at tainted Bitcoins [1] and the couple caught trying to launder the Bitfinex Bitcoins [2].
Crypto is not private by design.
[1]: https://cipherblade.com/blog/tainted-bitcoin-isnt-what-you-t...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/nyregion/bitcoin-bitfinex...
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency:
It's pseudonymous, which is similar to private. As long as you don't allow your pseudonym (wallet id) tied to your real identity, you can do all sorts of naughty stuff and get away with it.
Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
P.S.: Actually the restriction of business to the 75 democratic countries in the world should be the rule in every democratic country, because it would show that democratic values are more important than money.
Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is?
The article does admit this:
> It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong.
Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%.
So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671
No, but extra due diligence is required when someone convicted of taking bribes or similar corruption or drug/human trafficking record opens a bank account with huge sums of money.
Or people like those:
* former head of intelligence and vice president of Egypt https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...
* https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en... former wife of the current Kazakh dictator
Just to name a few. Their money is quite probably of dubious origin and the bank should have done better due diligence.
But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when journalists start reporting on the immense data in the blockchain, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet. I don't think it'll happen as long as the "journalists" are the kind that think it's okay to publish an encryption key to a publicly available encrypted file of confidential data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
But this is all hypothetical; evidently only one of the 30,000 people swept up in this dragnet had done anything with their account that would merit such attention: the single example of the (oddly, unnamed) cardinal with his possibly fraudulent London real estate transaction.
What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient.
There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.
Its a dumb approach, sold by populist politicians to less-than-bright voters before elections who want binary world and simple solutions to all their problems.
The worst thing about capitalism and globalism is tax dodging and bank secrecy.
> Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts.
Is there any other way to interpret this?
is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18.
Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs.
It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1]
I come from country who was invaded by them in 1968 when we showed we may head towards democracy, and the Russian mentality remained the same since then.
Its sad germans as a nation are still heavily traumatized by what their ancestors did during WWII, and probably hell will freeze sooner than german army fighting, well anything. This leaves Europe severely weakened in eyes of nearby machos like Putin or Erdogan.
He could have built a fine prosperous empire that people are actually happy to live in. Instead, everything is worse and he just siphons tens of billions to same banks as discussed here via his buddies (UBS cough cough). It may be the Wag the Dog situation, but all above is still valid.
