> This article is a bit difficult to understand; there's a mixture of actual money laundering with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account". There's a difficult and IMO increasingly urgent question here, of whether the banking system is a utility or something else. There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers. Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". If a criminal hasn't had their whole wealth confiscated as proceeds of crime by the courts, is the convention now that nonetheless they should be deprived of the ability to use them? Maybe. I really don't know the answer in some hard cases. But it feels like if the banking system is going to be part of the law enforcement system, that needs to be established through actual laws passed through the parliament. As far as I can see there are some charges of actual complicity in the article, but it's hard to separate them from "this bad person was a client".
https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/149544584780670566...
Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained or unsavoury sources of funds. Eg storing money you stole from your murdered is not better than money laundering. Iirc some of the CS clients fell into this category and the bank was very keen to not ask questions.
I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.
Came here to post dsquared's comment. Compare and contrast this thread with the truckers one. We don't really want to force banks into some kind of ill-specified "account cancellation culture".
Actually, to a certain extent, yes, the electricity company is going to report you if you're using too much electricity (this is how pot growers used to be caught), and yes, preventing traffickers from using legitimate banking is absolutely a standard practice, this is literally why money laundering is a thing. Also, if you are stupid enough to get caught money laundering (people will proposition strangers/(young stupid people) and say "cash this money, I'll give you 10%") you'll be blacklisted pretty damn quick - literally penniless teenagers give away their entire future to these scams.
> the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
> Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life".
You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
Perhaps better not to comment then, because it seems like you didn't actually understand it.
> with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
Right off the bat, you are misrepresenting the legal issues involved, which were explained in the article.
The issue in each case was that a really bad person had a secret bank account with a huge amount of money which they could never have acquired legally.
For generations, Swiss banks allowed this, and of course every dictator, embezzler and money launderer took advantage of this.
But finally Switzerland legally prevented this - except Credit Suisse decided not to follow the laws.
> There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers
To play devil's advocate here, if those people completed their sentence and they are being resocialized they have access to what any regular citizen is supposed to access.
OTOH if they haven't been sentenced yet and the electricity company knows of it, I think they are walking on thin ice if they don't report it. I'm sure there are heavy sentences for keeping a blind eye on trafficking.
The other point worth mentioning when money laundering happens, tax evasion or even misappropriation of state money the bank is facilitating those crimes which really stands by itself.
So now I'm really wondering what the legit use case of the anonymous accounts is supposed to be.
You are conflating two different aspects. Almost anyone can be a bank's client, nobody is questioning their right to bank.
The bank not questioning the source of the money they deposit is the problem here. That looks like an intentional institutional gap designed to enable money laundering and tax evasion.
Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
Money, liquidity, and fungibility is a public good, it has been (and still is) a waste of public and private resources to attempt to alter that reality.
Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds.
So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone.
Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.
> it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Julian Assange & Wikleaks had no access to the banking system because a US politician asked the banks to refuse them service at a time when they had not been charged with any crime.
Whenever you see someone you "dislike" being dealt with in an extradjudicial manner just keep in mind that these are your rights that now don't matter.
I'm convinced there's always going to be some new frontier for regulators to say "if we could just get rid of this, there'd be no more crime."
80s/90s: offshore banks, bearer shares
00s: MSBs/money orders/check cashers
10s: prepaid/gift cards, crypto, luxury real estate
Truth is that as long as you can triple your money bringing cocaine from Mexico to Texas people are gonna do it. If anything they've made it harder to track because instead of criminal proceeds just being deposited in a Miami bank account they're being used to buy cell phones for export to Colombia.
I believe KYC is a very good idea fundamentally, and I wish more banks took it seriously with their top customers as well (or more) as with the rest. It’s not in banks’ interests, of course.
And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
This whistleblower is taking substantial personal risk. The Swiss banking secrecy laws provide for 5 year prison terms for people leaking client-sensitive information and when I worked on sensitive things in Switzerland I had to sign a document setting out the penalties and saying that I understood that I was personally liable and could (and probably would) receive jail time for disclosing anything.
The whistleblower could just as easily be an employee of the Russian ФСБ or the US NSA as an employee of Credit Suisse, in which case they wouldn't be at much personal risk.
I'm honestly always amazed at people in these threads who say "Oh, well in general this is a public good, so we should be hands off". Sure, the default should be hands off, but if you have enough information to know what youre doing is wrong, you are responsible. It's one thing to say it's a public service, but if you know what you're doing is wrong, you know it's wrong,and in a lot of cases, a lot of effort is put into pretending that you don't know it's wrong even though you know it's wrong.
At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.
I commend the bravery of the leaker/whistleblower and hope they can maintain their personal safety. It's time to expose the evil amongst the elite--all the elite--once and for all.
Should it be limited to just elite or everyone all the way down? Not trolling you as it might sound but how do you draw lines between elite and not elite.
Once again the leaker went to Süddeutsche Zeitung [1] and left his/her/their documents there. Panama papers [2] and Paradise papers [3] started there as well. I'm really wondering why that is.
It's this sort of thing that gives me (even more) confidence that pretty much every government conspiracy or at least the more incredulous claims (eg aliens and UFOs) are false. Such systems would rely on humans and humans tend to be really bad at keeping secrets or they simply have a crisis of conscience and release things they technically shouldn't as is the case here.
Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway.
Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives.
I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem.
This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.
People on HN often dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument as invalid when it comes to strong privacy rights, but... the fact remains that those who very much want to hide their illegal activities and ill-gotten gains are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc).
It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.
> ... are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc).
I'm not sure why crypto got bundled in there because it's anything but private. The entire transaction history is public. That's kind of the point. Look at tainted Bitcoins [1] and the couple caught trying to launder the Bitfinex Bitcoins [2].
The worst apples will always find a way to protect their privacy, while the innocent majority of people is having their privacy invaded against their best interests.
Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
Democratic Switzerland should at least force its bank to only make business with customers from democratic countries. By doing that they would avoid a huge number of highly problematic customers. So basically only make business with countries which have a score of 6.0 or higher in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components
Doing so would require a vote from all the Swiss (as any real democracy would require), and a successful vote would block them from doing business with customers from almost all other countries (as they wouldn’t qualify as real democracies by Swiss standards).
I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for?"
Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is?
The article does admit this:
> It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong.
Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%.
So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse.
> Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
No, but extra due diligence is required when someone convicted of taking bribes or similar corruption or drug/human trafficking record opens a bank account with huge sums of money.
> So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
Oof. Some incredibly problematic stuff in this article:
> Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts.
> is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18.
Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs.
It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1]
barry-cotter|4 years ago
rich_sasha|4 years ago
I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.
pjc50|4 years ago
Traster|4 years ago
mrandish|4 years ago
> Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life".
You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
TomSwirly|4 years ago
Perhaps better not to comment then, because it seems like you didn't actually understand it.
> with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account"
Right off the bat, you are misrepresenting the legal issues involved, which were explained in the article.
The issue in each case was that a really bad person had a secret bank account with a huge amount of money which they could never have acquired legally.
For generations, Swiss banks allowed this, and of course every dictator, embezzler and money launderer took advantage of this.
But finally Switzerland legally prevented this - except Credit Suisse decided not to follow the laws.
IF you are going to continue with this, please familiarize yourself with the relevant laws, starting perhaps here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
blablabla123|4 years ago
To play devil's advocate here, if those people completed their sentence and they are being resocialized they have access to what any regular citizen is supposed to access.
OTOH if they haven't been sentenced yet and the electricity company knows of it, I think they are walking on thin ice if they don't report it. I'm sure there are heavy sentences for keeping a blind eye on trafficking.
The other point worth mentioning when money laundering happens, tax evasion or even misappropriation of state money the bank is facilitating those crimes which really stands by itself.
So now I'm really wondering what the legit use case of the anonymous accounts is supposed to be.
manquer|4 years ago
The bank not questioning the source of the money they deposit is the problem here. That looks like an intentional institutional gap designed to enable money laundering and tax evasion.
Vladmir Putin is free to open an personal account in any bank. However if he is depositing millions and billions and the bank is not questioning the source it has failed its responsibilities .
jdrc|4 years ago
https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover...
jimbob45|4 years ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337834
justshowpost|4 years ago
[deleted]
vmception|4 years ago
Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds.
So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.
Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone.
Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.
harry8|4 years ago
Julian Assange & Wikleaks had no access to the banking system because a US politician asked the banks to refuse them service at a time when they had not been charged with any crime.
Whenever you see someone you "dislike" being dealt with in an extradjudicial manner just keep in mind that these are your rights that now don't matter.
from|4 years ago
80s/90s: offshore banks, bearer shares
00s: MSBs/money orders/check cashers
10s: prepaid/gift cards, crypto, luxury real estate
Truth is that as long as you can triple your money bringing cocaine from Mexico to Texas people are gonna do it. If anything they've made it harder to track because instead of criminal proceeds just being deposited in a Miami bank account they're being used to buy cell phones for export to Colombia.
strogonoff|4 years ago
And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
seanhunter|4 years ago
leroman|4 years ago
sschueller|4 years ago
At least the state can use anything leaked no matter how it was obtained against the banks and companies.
kragen|4 years ago
Traster|4 years ago
At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.
nathanaldensr|4 years ago
social_quotient|4 years ago
WHA8m|4 years ago
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers
Fronzie|4 years ago
adamhearn|4 years ago
jmyeet|4 years ago
Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway.
Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives.
I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem.
This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.
salawat|4 years ago
Differences of opinion aside, you severely underestimate the character/circumstances/motives/number of "conscientious objectors" in society.
umvi|4 years ago
It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.
jmyeet|4 years ago
I'm not sure why crypto got bundled in there because it's anything but private. The entire transaction history is public. That's kind of the point. Look at tainted Bitcoins [1] and the couple caught trying to launder the Bitfinex Bitcoins [2].
Crypto is not private by design.
[1]: https://cipherblade.com/blog/tainted-bitcoin-isnt-what-you-t...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/nyregion/bitcoin-bitfinex...
ls15|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
lokalfarm|4 years ago
Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
amai|4 years ago
seanmcdirmid|4 years ago
I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
kragen|4 years ago
Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is?
The article does admit this:
> It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong.
Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system?
The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%.
So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative.
Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671
sofixa|4 years ago
No, but extra due diligence is required when someone convicted of taking bribes or similar corruption or drug/human trafficking record opens a bank account with huge sums of money.
Or people like those:
* former head of intelligence and vice president of Egypt https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...
* https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en... former wife of the current Kazakh dictator
Just to name a few. Their money is quite probably of dubious origin and the bank should have done better due diligence.
Youden|4 years ago
But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
tootie|4 years ago
leroman|4 years ago
joseloyaio|4 years ago
What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient.
There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.
sdze|4 years ago
jokoon|4 years ago
The worst thing about capitalism and globalism is tax dodging and bank secrecy.
rosndo|4 years ago
> Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts.
Is there any other way to interpret this?
mouzogu|4 years ago
is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
sinyug|4 years ago
While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18.
Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs.
It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
math-dev|4 years ago