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Comment by mrhappyunhappy | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that the fraud and laundered money is always blamed on the bad guy when in fact it should be the banking system that is held accountable. If you take large sums of money with a deposit description “for bills” without doing anything about it, well, sorry to say but you’ve failed to do your part in ensuring that money is not dirty. Banks are incentivized to look the other way and when they do get busted, nobody goes to jail, they pay a small fine considering the large picture and go on business as usual - see HSBC

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I think you've set up a false dichotomy here.

Fraud and money laundering should be blamed on the people doing the fraud and the money laundering.

However, there's no reason we can't also blame facilitators of fraud and money laundering for facilitating crime.

A pawn shop can be a totally legitimate business. And thieves should be blamed for their thefts. But if a pawn shop is profiting from moving stolen goods, that is also wrong. When asking "who's to blame?" between the thief and the fence, there's nothing stopping us from saying "both".

Pawn shops don’t take deposit and engage in fractional reserve banking. Money laundering is only possible on the scales mentioned when financial institutions fail to do their job.

I completely disagree.

It's correct to blame crimes on the bad guys. Theft and fraud are actual crimes with actual victims. Money laundering is a non-crime, and the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer an authoritarian financial system just because some people commit crimes.

Banks should provide a dumb service like phone companies do. It wouldn't be reasonable for the phone company to interrogate you about why you're making so many late-night phonecalls, and it's not reasonable for the bank to interrogate you about why you're depositing so much legal tender.

Money laundering is fraud. Most of the transactions involved companies created and owned by the Troika Dialog. This money laundering directly enabled a number of very harmful and illegal activities.

While I can understand valuing and protecting financial privacy, I fail to see how you can see Troika Dialog as blameless here.

In general, financial privacy must be balanced against financial transparency and enforcement. Tax evasion, embezzlement, bribery and other financial crimes come with significant costs to society.

If it really should, opening a bank should not be easier than opening a bank account. In, I think, half of Western world, banking licenses are issued with no questions asked aside basic formalities.

You can't justify at all how anal are the banking regulations towards individuals, when bank owners are allowed an effective anonymity and life free of state intrusion.

Today's AML mass hysteria is not much different from the terrorism "security theatre" – completely ineffectual

> Money laundering is a non-crime

I don't agree with this, by definition of ML as illegal operation as made with illegal money.

> Money laundering is a non-crime

By that logic, a Ponzi scheme would also a "non-crime," since in both cases there's "real money", and in both cases someone is lying (i.e. committing fraud) about the details of its flow.

>Money laundering is a non-crime

Burning the body isn't a crime either? He was already dead, so it's OK.

> when in fact it should be the banking system that is held accountable

Why instead of, and not in addition to?

You could in addition to, but if you made sure the banks pay out their ass for their crimes then they’d make it extremely difficult for criminals to move their plunder.

I work for a major bank. None of that is correct. Ethics and reputation are extremely important to my employer and they are held accountable.

Sure, the banks will make their staff sit through mandatory anti money laundering training videos. But HSBC is routinely fined for money laundering, and in Australia the big 4 banks are constantly being dragged through commissions around predatory lending and misleading money management schemes. See also: the LIBOR scandal.

The fines are a pittance compared to the money made. Basel II seems to have had little effect on this behavior.

Well you might be lucky but a sizable chunk of major banks were implicated in ML for drug cartels, ISIS or both at various times.

Do you have any specific examples or information besides an appeal to authority?

Using a search engine I was able to find this (first result) http://investor.bankofamerica.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71595&p=ir...

If you are hoping that I would reveal some internal information I will leave you disappointed.

So for BofA the first two results for "Bank of America Money Laundering" are:

from July 2012 [1] FBI: Drug Cartels use Bank of America to Launder Money

and Nov 2018... [2] Deutsche Bank, BofA, JPM Drawn into Danske Money Laundering Probe

Both make for good reading... [1] https://mic.com/articles/10959/fbi-drug-cartels-use-bank-of-... [2] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2018/11/...

I was hoping you had something to contribute to the conversation besides appeals to authority and PR sites.

> Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) is no stranger to paying fines. According to data compiled by investment firm Keefe, Bruyette and Woods Inc., the Brian Moynihan-led company has shelled out the most money in fines over the years, especially in the time span following the 2008 financial crisis.

> “Bank of America Merrill Lynch went to astonishing lengths to defraud its own institutional clients about who was seeing and filling their orders, who was trading in its dark pool, and the capabilities of its electronic trading services,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Friday.

https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/03/23/bank-of-...

Why didn’t you use a search engine and find what you were looking for in the first place instead of asking me to do it for you? Apparently prodding you to be less lazy is my contribution. I refuse to do people’s homework for them. You can call that any negative description you wish.

You made a pretty strong claim, asking you to provide evidence or an argument to support that claim is not at all unreasonable, Especially when that claim contradicts the generally available evidence.

It is unreasonable when you can just as easily do it yourself.

In Russia it’s the same bad guys controlling the whole country, including it’s financial institutions. The largest bank in Russia is Sberbank, 50% state owned, managed by Putin’s friend from 90s. Second largest is VTB, this one is 60.9% state owned.

85% of market (by assets) is controlled by government owned banks. There is only one large private bank in Russia after collapse of so-called Moscow Bank Ring (4 pretty big banks were basically frauding the regulator with holding other's stocks as reported assets, one went bakrupt - all others did).

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