There is no "federal government" list other than sanctions/commerce department lists. These are both public. Either both banks decided they didn't want to deal with Pakistan anymore (maybe there was a warning about Pakistan by the Treasury department or in some AML publication they read, Pakistan was also recently on the FATF greylist) or he or the people sending him money mistakenly ended up on something like the [World-Check](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-Check) database. Someone can publish slander about you online and the monkeys that run World-Check will automatically find the article and put a note on their file about you saying you are "high risk."