Stripe, Balanced, WePay for Payments: Not big enough to #fail

Risk mitigation is definitely the reason that the banks are backing away from crowd funding. There is personal liability for the owners of a company that is found to be abetting money laundering, even accidentally.

A crowd funding request is a bank account that anybody can throw money into. Once the funding goal is reached, the money is released, and no more controls exist over it.

Have you spotted the risk?

It's quite simple: 1) Set up crowd funding request for some service. Make it a web service, so there's no expectation of a tangible good. 2) Evil people "crowdfund" your project, the funding goal is reached, the money is released. 3) You bugger off and do bad things to the geopolitical status quo.

It really is the same old money laundering scheme updated for the internet age.