Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Yes they would, the fines are up to 250,000 per incident. If you share a name with someone on the AML list, good luck opening up a financial account anywhere and if you do manage to get an account, being able to fund the account from another source.

View on HN

You're not comparing like with like there. If you share a name with a suspicious group, yes, that's a hard problem to solve. That's not this. This is a _product_ with the same name as a suspicious group. It's categorically irrelevant.

It doesn't matter. The searches are based on the same methodology. Scanning fields for the banned entity or individual. Also if you spell it phonetically, it should get blocked as well. Even if you can raise to the compliance officer, they aren't going to change it. There's are also criminal penalties that enforce AML.

No, aggressive filtering is the rational move here. The risks are highly asymmetric. A false positive gets you a frustrated customer that, as in this case, you can work with to modify the product description. Annoying.

A false negative can get you a fi ne of $250,000 and criminal penalties.

This isn't an issue of ( or not just an issue of) "not solving scale". Even if filtering issues if this sort were 99.9999% solved the risk asymmetry would still come down on taking an abundance of caution on nation-state levels of "oh crap" if you miss something.

There is precious little "working" with PayPal. We had an unauthorized transfer of $1000 out of our bank account by PayPal, and they have a completely useless circular IVR, their chat bot is nigh non-functional, and their support documentation is woefully out of date. We ended up detecting the odd activity early enough to redirect the funds before someone (who added an unknown number to the account) did anything with it, but we started a dispute and chargeback just-in-case. Further business being cut off be damned.

I've worked in fintech/self-banking institutions. PayPal is a mockery of the entire industry. The example of the literal worst implementation anyone can think of and which leaves everyone scratching their head at how they manage to get away with running as fast and loose as they do.

Is there any way to access this list so I don't end up naming any product, service or company with something on there?

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.pdf

Or you can do searches.

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov

Reply on news.ycombinator.com