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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

> Not surprisingly, many people in Road Town argue there are perfectly legitimate reasons to use a jurisdiction such as the BVI. The Panama Papers leak revealed, for example, that British actress Emma Watson bought her London house with a BVI company to prevent stalkers from tracing where she lives.

> But transparency threatens none of that.

It sure seems like transparency threatens Emma Watson's use case...

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But we can and should have onshore mechanisms - convince a judge you need it, get an onshore anonymous trust whose details are sealed except to law/tax. Seems like a darn good idea, in fact.

(This is where a lawyer steps in and points out that something like this already exists, right? I know nothing about British law...)

In the US, in most if not all states, a stalking victim must present either court papers or a police report showing actual bodily harm before the victim may participate in the state's anonymity program. These programs also only cover the state's information systems, not commercial systems.

On the commercial side, if you finance anything at all, it will show up in your credit report, and your street address will as well. It is a quick Net search from there to find you through the aggregators.

To stay off the aggregators' radar, you need a willing volunteer who will let you use their residence address, own your home outright through a trust, put your utility bills in their name, and a few other tactics. Note that private mailbox addresses are now identifiable, and many financial institutions under KYC regulations tap those databases and will recognize and refuse to let you use such an address to sign up for services, demanding a real street address.

Source: I'm handling a female relative's stalking situation for them before it escalated to physical harm, and it was much harder than I thought it would be.

> get an onshore anonymous trust whose details are sealed except to law/tax

So you want to give government the unilateral right to determine who merits anonymity. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it might be preferable to protecting only the super-rich. :)

but, just as seriously, it's not clear that we actually value anonymous property ownership when it has serious repercussions for our tax base and things like holding properties vacant. (See Vancouver). It's just another place that we have to walk a careful line between individual rights and not causing huge social problems.

This usually exists. In the UK, there's a registry of persons with significant control over companies and individuals in it can be marked "super secure" if there is a sufficient reason to do it.

https://developer.companieshouse.gov.uk/api/docs/company/com...

Ya, totally. I just thought it was weird that the Bloomberg article contradicted itself about two sentences apart.

It is trivial to hide your identity in the UK / US / Australia etc.

You must understand that the "City" (London's financial district) has different rules than the rest of the country. It is an off-shore jurisdiction in the centre of London.

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