If only there were an entire profession and legal system that has been asking and answering questions like this for hundreds of years.
I know programmers want to believe otherwise, but common law can't be boiled down to single line "if statements."
It often can, but programmers often don’t like that, either, because instead of hinging purely on acts that enable simple hacks, it often hinges on things like knowledge and intent.
Civil law is an interesting solution to that problem. Lets go live to Paris, France to ask them how it's going!
When you know that the transaction you're part of is directly involved in their crimes. It's one thing to know, statistically, the some portion of your customers are doing crimes. It's an entirely different thing to know that this customer is doing that crime with your assistance.
> Binance MLRO agreed that "we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes."
You're not allowed to see illegal things happening with your service and turn a blind eye.
It goes beyond that though. https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640380291817635843/p...
Having had an account that was identified as involved in illegal activity, leadership told them to make a new account. Not go away, and at least make a half-assed attempt at a ban. Make a new untainted account and be a bit more careful with your transfers, and even "here's some things to be a bit more careful about". If they had actively taken steps to ban the user, even if the user evaded the ban they could make an argument that they had done due diligence.
If there was nothing in the chats, no evidence that they were aware these things were happening, and no evidence that they were encouraging it to still happen, then the government would have a much harder case, but these chats cited seem to make it hook, line and sinker.
It shows that they very deliberately chose not to be in compliance with "Know Your Customer" (KYC) regulations, that they knew applied to them by law, knew what the risks were (ignorance is no excuse under the law, but penalties are much higher if you know what you're doing is illegal and still chose to do it), and even actively worked to help customers help them avoid it.
If you're going to do crime, writing it down, and keeping that evidence trail is just the absolute dumbest thing you can possibly do.
Yes. At a minimum, it's aiding and abetting [1]. What's going on here looks like terrorist financing and willful sanctions evasion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiding_and_abetting#cite_note-...
If you don't see the difference between knowingly helping a designated terrorist organization launder money (specific and known criminal and crime) and operating an honest business in a high-crime neighborhood (statistical likelihood of aiding a criminal), you shouldn't be making business decisions or running a financial services firm. It's an obvious distinction, one that a roomful of people with basic legal instruction will agree on 99% of the time, except for the one with a profit incentive to argue the opposite.
I fully agree on the line, in general, being fuzzy. It's not here.
Multiple texts describe Binance helping Hamas circumvent money-laundering flags by moving small amounts, helping a Chicago-based trader hide his U.S. origin, et cetera.
If someone buys a bunch of lye, the line is blurry. If they walk in hitting a meth pipe, ask you in which aisle are the meth supplies, and when they hand you their credit card, you advise them to pay in cash so you don't have to draw up a receipt, the line isn't blurry so much as very far away.
I was unable to find these. The only hamas bit I found in the indictment was Binance describing generally how Hamas launder in low value quantas like $600. Not texts showing they identified specific hamas accounts and developed individualized plans to assist them.
If you know the criminal, you sell that criminal knives, and after police come looking you tell the criminal, you are at the very least complicit.
And since they aren't doing out any particular political principle, it seems that they were just as happy to support 'bad' terrorist groups as they were 'good' terrorist groups.
It's one thing if you're supporting violence because you legitimately believe that its cause is just. We do that all the time. It's another when you're supporting any violent group that will pay you.
One makes you an idealist that may, or may not be on the right side of morality and history. The other simply makes you a criminal.
[1] Understatement of the century, but what those problems are isn't at all relevant to this thread.
I'm sure you heard about Russian receiving sanctions from the US but often when you look into the details it's restrictions against specific named Russian nationals. If you can name specific Isrealies that are involved in terrorism then you might be able to get sanctions against them but to just blanketly claim the whole country is guilty of an unspecified sanctionable offense isn't going to get you anywhere.
That’s the difference: if you are aware that they’re making the transaction to further criminal activity, then you need to worry. You will find gas station owners who were charged: they’re the ones who helped fence stolen property or launder money.
This is why anti-money laundering laws exist in the first place. Criminals would otherwise seek out a bank which doesn’t ask questions and the bankers would be hard to charge unless they were idiots and wrote something like “They are here for crime”. AML removes the ability not to ask or report certain types of activities, which is much easier to prosecute than e.g. proving that a banker should have known there was no legal way for a small Italian restaurant to be so profitable.
And do you think criminals come in and tell crypto exchanges that they are about to commit a crime? AML regulations do not apply to gas stations as they're not "money transmitters", it is that simple. I'm a bit surprised so many on HN don't seem to be aware of that. And luckily they don't, because those laws are immoral, ineffective and costly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34667051
> And do you think criminals come in and tell crypto exchanges that they are about to commit a crime?
Well, ignoring the fact that they are unlike a gas station in having financial regulations, consider that the disbelief and mockery in this thread might have something to do with a defense based on not knowing that your customers are using you to launder money works much better when you don’t give prosecutors written statements such as "Like come on. They are here for crime." or "we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes." showing that you did in fact have knowledge.
I believe the point was that AML regulations only apply to some categories of businesses and others not, which makes them ineffective. They can be a slight annoyance to criminals but they do not stop them. For money transmission, it is trivial to work around them. And for spending, at a gas station, there's no problem at all.
It is is just all a very costly and ineffective security theater, not to mention the many moral issues that come with it (e.g. billions of law-abiding, unbanked people).
Just like any other service you might sell to him. Except you know, for services for which there is a law...
So for example you don’t have any real obligation to inquire about source of funds when someone comes into your shack to buy a burger and a shake.
If they come into your shack to open a financial account or do any kind of exchanging of financial instruments then you do.