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.
Anyone can dispose of £50 or even £5000. If your bank sees a £2k salary come in every month, they won’t be surprised that suddenly you have £50k in your account.
If you knock on their door and say, I’m a lowly administrator in a country in the bottom decile of human development index, can you look after my $100m, the should definitely dig deeper. In such case, yes you should actually document where the money is coming from.
It shouldn’t be such a high burden of proof. Money doesn’t spontaneously appear like particle-antiparticle pairs. Maybe you sold something, or were paid for some services. You should be able to demonstrate that with ease.
Remember, the bank, other things being equal, wants your custom. So they’ll apply the lowest bar possible to make sure the money isn’t stolen, lest the regulators slap them hard.
With CS the issue was, they basically didn’t even do the bare minimum with any degree of honesty and integrity.
This is the job of a judge within a court where the defendant can argue otherwise (to the legitimacy of his money). Period.
Any other system (KYC/AML) should have been anti-constitutional, especially today when most transactions require a bank account. If KYC/AML is required, it should be done by the state (or the local government) itself and let the bank be, you know, a bank.
When a client approaches you, broadly, you have to sort them into low risk, medium risk and high risk.
Low risk you waive through.
Medium risk you do some digging on but if you’re then happy, you continue.
High risk, you alert the authorities. Then they take care of this. You put the client on hold. The authorities may later give you a formal go-ahead. At least this is how AML works in Europe, I’m less familiar with US.
So if the institution is concerned enough to refuse services, they absolutely must alert financial supervisors too, and it’s up to them how to proceed. They give you the go-ahead or the red light.
Strictly speaking you could still refuse a client then, eg if you think they could be on a sanction list soon enough, but that’s business reasons, not supervisory.
