Developers need to know the business better than the business people. Always. Otherwise you can't implement the software very well.
When knowledge arrives at my team, is already condensed to the point of: "in X country, you must tell the prices of a call if you show a phone number for assistance"
Why should I explore every loophole of law to be compliant? That's the companies job, not mine.
This is not hard. Nobody needs to be versed in the ins-and-outs of jurisdictional compliance rules to see this was blatant and egregious.
If any of this looks remotely familiar to any software devs out there, you should really re-examine your morals. Or at least hire a lawyer.
It also might depend on seniority so you might not be on the hook.
Say you are an engineer working for a gun manufacturer. You need to know how to manufacture the gun. You don't need to know what it is used for or by whom or even how much it is sold for.
If you are aware that a crime is going on you in principle are required to report it, but not doing so is not nearly at the same level of crime as actually doing the crime. So here I think the court will look at two things?
Did the engineer know that a crime was being committed?
Did the engineer personally benefit from the proceeds of the crime more than their ordinary salary?
I am not a lawyer though so don't take my advise.:-)
You're telling me a software engineer could make a change that allowed spending money a company could not legally spend and he had no idea about it? Come on. That is preposterous. At any respectable company alarm bells would be going off everywhere and fingers would all start pointing to that change. Theres virtually 0 chance that there was not intent.