Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny. With AML you are assumed guilty anytime you possess money, or participate in any financial transactions, or have any assets. If called upon to do so you will have to prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, and if you fail to do so, your assets or money can be permanently seized. All of this occurs without any form of due process.

The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them.

The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting.

I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.