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
Bank KYC is a bit different. A bank, certainly at this level, is supposed to know who you are and where your money is coming from ahead of setting up the account. They have to satisfy themselves it’s a legal source. If they become suspicious, they should tip off authorities who can investigate etc.
At no point here can the bank judiciously freeze your assets. All this should mostly happen before the bank even touches your money.
There is not reason other than that, and it's circular logic to sidestep due process to point to the law that says that they have to do it as the reason they have to do it.
Note the difference (1) if you deposit $50 the bank by default assumes you didn’t just murder someone and take their money, this is true even if you served a sentence for that crime and (2) the bank defers to the government on what to do, they’re not expected to run a parallel justice system figuring out who’s worthy for a bank account
And for the record, nanes going on the OFAC have blast radius. If the U.S. finds out terrorist X has an alias of Temperence Prudence, the other Temperence Prudence's out there can expect some disruption while compliance department's try to figure out if you're a terrorist or not. All without breathing a word of it to the customer.
I know, because I ended up having to troubleshoot that system. It is quite horrifying, and to say the least duplicitous.
I can well imagine the implementation of such rules is done badly, especially in US, but that’s a bit different to this sub thread I think.
This has zero, nothing at all, to do with "guilty until proven innocent". Anonymous banking is simply not allowed anymore, because of literally trillions of dollars in crime money going through Switzerland. Now you are legally required to know your customer, even in Switzerland.
Forcing banks and customers to obey financial disclosure laws and punishing them if they break the law is how the law works.
If you or I walked into a bank with tens of millions of dollars in cash, we would be asked to show ID, and information about the deposit would be sent to the government because it's the law.
It strikes me that you just don't like the law and instead of saying that, you move the goalposts and pretend the law itself doesn't exist.
[1] https://twitter.com/OttawaPolice/status/1495367658132361216
Protest.
Even the police are telling on themselves here. What's great about the tweet is that the verbiage is context-independent. You can apply that to anything. Imagine a tweet from e.g. the Portland Police Bureau saying this about protests in Downtown Portland - protests which often devolved into violence and actual damage to businesses, something which hasn't happened at all in Ottawa.
So to answer your question, it's an example of where if you are protesting for the "wrong" thing, your finances are now threatened. Are people actually okay with this?
And that's a damned good thing.
Well I guess we have one person who actually is okay with this.
Like I said farther up thread, the next frontier of this debate really is going to be about if we will "allow" people with the "wrong" politics access to the banking systems we all depend on for our livelihood.
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.
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.
How do you know they do ? The recent leaks, U.S. government position on Swiss banking laws and money laundering tells me they don't question too hard.
> In my experience these fancier banks tend to ask a whole lot of questions.
Are you High Net Worth Individual with 100's of millions of dollars in shady assets from a developing economy ? Otherwise your experience doesn't compare.
> Vladimir Putin could also have come up with paperwork
Vladimir Putin or any government official do not show the same sources of income and wealth in their home countries, if the income/ wealth declarations don't match to the money deposited the due diligence process is clearly not working.