In case you're wondering: "Blue Sky" appears to be an alias used by LIMMT, a Chinese company that did business in the US while supplying the Iranian military with weapons material.
OFAC publishes the contents of the SDN and updates to it.
> The defendants, LI FANG WEI (a/k/a KARL LEE, a/k/a PATRIC, a/k/a SUNNY BAI, a/k/a K. LEE a/k/a KL, a/k/a DAVID LI, a/k/a F.W. LI) and LIMMT ECONOMIC AND TRADE COMPANY, LTD., (a/k/a LIMMT (DALIAN FTZ) METALLURGY AND MINERALS CO., LTD., a/k/a LIMMT (DALIAN FTZ) MINMETALS AND METALLURGY CO., LTD., a/k/a LIMMT (DALIAN FTZ) METALLURGY AND MINERALS CO., LTD., a/k/a ANSI METALLURGY INDUSTRY CO. LTD., a/k/a BLUE SKY INDUSTRY CORPORATION, a/k/a SC (DALIAN) INDUSTRY & TRADE CO., LTD., a/k/a SINO METALLURGY AND MINMETALS INDUSTRY CO., LTD., a/k/a SUMMIT INDUSTRY CORPORATION, a/k/a LIAONING INDUSTRY & TRADE CO., LTD., a/k/a WEALTHY OCEAN ENTERPRISES LTD.) (LIMMT) were indicted on charges of falsifying business records and conspiracy. [0]
I believe that right now every American citizen should write "Blue Sky" in every possible field on their bank forms when setting a transfer. This is lunacy and incompetence at the highest level.
"Hey, let's give wide, blunt political power to a bunch of un-elected functionaries, then we can start automating whatever their desires are! What could go wrong?"
And so we're going to end up with a government like Google, where people come to HN to beg for attention just so they can be treated like a human being.
I think it's time we just all acknowledge that the U.S. has the most onerous and insane financial laws in the world. The only reason other countries put up with them is because the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower.
There really needs to be some kind of correction here, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am specifically referring to the Treasury Department handling of overseas payments and expats living abroad, not internal tax or financial regulations. There's a lot out there Google if you want to go look for it, including how various countries have protested being forced to comply with U.S. law, expats giving up citizenship at record rates (though still small in the grand scheme of things), and so on.
"I think it's time we just all acknowledge that the U.S. has the most onerous and insane financial laws in the world. The only reason other countries put up with them is because the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower."
I'm gonna guess you don't have a whole lot of stamps on your passport.
"I think it's time we just all acknowledge that the U.S. has the most onerous and insane financial laws in the world."
You should really repeat this to an italian (italian born in Italy, speaking italian as his first language, not italian born in New York) entrepreneur.
But please record a video then share it. I'd really like to see their face :D
On the bright side, it's hard to think of a faster way to get an insane law fixed than to have it prevent a law firm from getting paid (except perhaps to have it prevent Congress from getting paid). Perhaps they might want to take this one pro bono?
[1] turns out it was launched in the first week of December, which makes it nearly 3 months old - enough time to get it noticed and flagged by the us.gov.
So if this payment needed to be stopped in the eyes of the bank then why did they suggest a measure for circumventing their own rules by sending a paper check.
This is kind of funny I recently purchased a bunch of second hard server parts from the excess department of a mid-sized bank and they insisted on checking my name against the OFAC list before completing the transaction. Insane.
What you're missing is that different players in this particular mess have different motivations.
The goal of the OFAC regulators is to stop money from going to terrorists and other bad people. So they prohibit the banks from transferring money to "blue sky" and anyone else on the list. There is no leeway here -- if a bank does not comply the banking regulators have the authority to immediately close the bank an seize its assets and give them to a different bank.
The goal of the IT and operations departments in the bank are to implement the requirements. The IT guys put a simple string match against the text of the online payments. There is no way to add a clause that checks whether it's "really" a payment to the prohibited individual or just someone who stuck a note in the memo field, because computers can't go out and interview the recipient to find out who they are. They also stuck in code to block that recipient from receiving payments in the future because otherwise anyone could circumvent the block completely by simply changing the name on the payment.
The goal of the bank representative that Mr. Dash spoke with was to help her customer. So she suggested sending the paper check. For what it's worth, the OFAC office isn't too worried about the person collecting payment on the check because banks are also prohibited from giving bank accounts to people (or organizations) on the OFAC list.
> So if this payment needed to be stopped in the eyes of the bank then why did they suggest a measure for circumventing their own rules by sending a paper check.
Making everyone accept a system which doesn't make sense is just another step on the path to a dystopia. You'd be surprised at the number of such rules that existed in communist dictatorships.
The post was on a blog, not a news article and nonsensical titles are commonplace. And the submitter followed the HN guidelines of using the same title of the post.
> In conclusion, I love my country and like our lawyers and hate our bank
Why do you hate your bank? Chase is probably the best large bank I've ever dealt with and their online/mobile tools are excellent. It's very likely they're just complying with their legal obligations.
If you're just using their standard online bill pay, I'd be curious to see what would happen if you simply added a new payee and slightly changed their name and attempted to pay them.
As a counter opinion, I hate Chase. Ignoring their deep involvement in illegal activity during the mortgage crisis and manipulations of our economy through revolving door lobbying, and merely speaking from a customer perspective:
1. High fees for international bank wires.
2. Befuddled telephone support when money isn't where it's supposed to be (for whatever reason) with frequent transfers to other departments.
3. Bankers on-site often don't know anything about the more complicated aspects of business accounts.
4. International travel with a Chase card is...an adventure. It took me three or four phone calls to Chase after I was already deep in the rain forest in Chiapas, Mexico in order to free up money to simply buy gas and other stuff. I never got the Chase card working for directly buying gas (while other cards did work, most of my funds were in Chase). I would have to go to an ATM, pay exorbitant fees, and use cash for everything. This was incredibly stressful...being 1000 miles inside Mexico on a visitor visa in a motorhome that gets 10 MPG (so, I needed a pretty big chunk of change to get back home, just on the fuel front, not to mention all the other living expenses).
The online experience has finally gotten better in the past few years, but it used to be pretty awful. One still had to call for almost everything interesting; I used to have to pay them for old statements, to boot!
I didn't choose Chase. My first bank was Texas Commerce. Chase acquired them. I stuck with them for a while after, despite my discontent (it's a lot of trouble to move banks, especially for a business that has incoming credit card payments, and outgoing payroll, among other things). When I moved to California, and formed a new corporation for my company, I opened an account at Washington Mutual. A year later, Chase acquired WaMu as part of the mortgage bailouts. So, Chase has been following me around all my damned adult life. I've given up on getting away from them, though I do have a credit union account for my personal money.
Also, they don't treat their employees very well (an ex-girlfriend worked there for a while in college, before going on to work at Google, and she hated it, especially after uniforms became required).
In short, if I were starting anew, Chase would not be on the list of banks I would consider.
I'd like to concur. I've been banking with Chase in some form or another since their Bank One merger, and they are easily the best large bank I've been a customer of. They even beat most regional banks I've used.
Their online and mobile tools are a big part of that. Their military support is also pretty good (my daughter is USCG) with true cost free banking and low activity military accounts. In fact, they beat USAA on almost every gauge (the exception being USAA makes pay and allowances available a few days early).
As a side note, I find the hyperbole of "killing trees" as a description for "writing checks" a little annoying and uneducated. Does one believe that the energy that makes the Internet possible is free?
Not free, but I would suspect that paying electronically is at least a magnitude less impactful on the environment. That checkbook had to be produced, shipped to the bank, mailed to you, and then the individual check has to get moved around as well.
The energy spent by the humans who have to touch/move/look/process this obsolete, unneeded artifact is more than the energy needed to process a thousand normal deals on the Internet.
"In conclusion, I love my country and like our lawyers and hate our bank, like all good Americans." Oh my sides.
I get the dim sense, knowing nothing about this stuff, that the job of that office is one of the more headache-inducing ones in administrative government. Preventing people to sending money to (or receiving money from) a list of bad actors is a horridly difficult thing to begin with, but then when they screw up (either like this or in the more common case of money getting through), placing the blame is easy.
On another note, I haven't the faintest idea what the meaning of "blue sky" is, and I can't find anything by searching. Anybody know?
On the contrary, it's simply a property of being a consumer financial service provider in USA - if a company would offer the exact same bill settlement in bitcoins instead of dollars, all the same restrictions would apply.
No, it just suffers from having all your cash, hard-mined by skimming off the drug economy, regularly stolen by people breaking into poorly secured exchanges ;)
Is it just me or does everyone has to do this: when you need to file more taxes (you need to pay more to the treasury), do you have to put your SSN in the memo field? My accountant said I have to which I dont't feel happy about it...
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
OFAC publishes the contents of the SDN and updates to it.
(This comment is descriptive, not normative).
[+] [-] pizza|12 years ago|reply
[0]: http://www.iranwatch.org/library/government/united-states/st...
[+] [-] gpvos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambiting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
While you're at it, retransmit bitcoin transactions that have been slightly altered but that still have valid signatures.
[+] [-] lesterbuck|12 years ago|reply
in Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau, 1849
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
Would you expect anything else from the US gov't?
[+] [-] squintychino|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joedevon|12 years ago|reply
"I'm going to write "Blue Sky" on checks sent to Time Warner Cable so they can never take online payments from anybody."
[+] [-] elwell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
And so we're going to end up with a government like Google, where people come to HN to beg for attention just so they can be treated like a human being.
I think it's time we just all acknowledge that the U.S. has the most onerous and insane financial laws in the world. The only reason other countries put up with them is because the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower.
There really needs to be some kind of correction here, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am specifically referring to the Treasury Department handling of overseas payments and expats living abroad, not internal tax or financial regulations. There's a lot out there Google if you want to go look for it, including how various countries have protested being forced to comply with U.S. law, expats giving up citizenship at record rates (though still small in the grand scheme of things), and so on.
[+] [-] anildash|12 years ago|reply
I'm gonna guess you don't have a whole lot of stamps on your passport.
[+] [-] trumbitta2|12 years ago|reply
You should really repeat this to an italian (italian born in Italy, speaking italian as his first language, not italian born in New York) entrepreneur.
But please record a video then share it. I'd really like to see their face :D
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|12 years ago|reply
Onion link:
http://blueskyplzv4fsti.onion/
edit: screenshot of the market homepage:
http://imgur.com/O9fvlxI.png
[1] turns out it was launched in the first week of December, which makes it nearly 3 months old - enough time to get it noticed and flagged by the us.gov.
[+] [-] pmorici|12 years ago|reply
This is kind of funny I recently purchased a bunch of second hard server parts from the excess department of a mid-sized bank and they insisted on checking my name against the OFAC list before completing the transaction. Insane.
[+] [-] mcherm|12 years ago|reply
The goal of the OFAC regulators is to stop money from going to terrorists and other bad people. So they prohibit the banks from transferring money to "blue sky" and anyone else on the list. There is no leeway here -- if a bank does not comply the banking regulators have the authority to immediately close the bank an seize its assets and give them to a different bank.
The goal of the IT and operations departments in the bank are to implement the requirements. The IT guys put a simple string match against the text of the online payments. There is no way to add a clause that checks whether it's "really" a payment to the prohibited individual or just someone who stuck a note in the memo field, because computers can't go out and interview the recipient to find out who they are. They also stuck in code to block that recipient from receiving payments in the future because otherwise anyone could circumvent the block completely by simply changing the name on the payment.
The goal of the bank representative that Mr. Dash spoke with was to help her customer. So she suggested sending the paper check. For what it's worth, the OFAC office isn't too worried about the person collecting payment on the check because banks are also prohibited from giving bank accounts to people (or organizations) on the OFAC list.
[+] [-] swombat|12 years ago|reply
Making everyone accept a system which doesn't make sense is just another step on the path to a dystopia. You'd be surprised at the number of such rules that existed in communist dictatorships.
[+] [-] psychometry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anildash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beedogs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eksith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renownedmedia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|12 years ago|reply
Why do you hate your bank? Chase is probably the best large bank I've ever dealt with and their online/mobile tools are excellent. It's very likely they're just complying with their legal obligations.
If you're just using their standard online bill pay, I'd be curious to see what would happen if you simply added a new payee and slightly changed their name and attempted to pay them.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|12 years ago|reply
1. High fees for international bank wires.
2. Befuddled telephone support when money isn't where it's supposed to be (for whatever reason) with frequent transfers to other departments.
3. Bankers on-site often don't know anything about the more complicated aspects of business accounts.
4. International travel with a Chase card is...an adventure. It took me three or four phone calls to Chase after I was already deep in the rain forest in Chiapas, Mexico in order to free up money to simply buy gas and other stuff. I never got the Chase card working for directly buying gas (while other cards did work, most of my funds were in Chase). I would have to go to an ATM, pay exorbitant fees, and use cash for everything. This was incredibly stressful...being 1000 miles inside Mexico on a visitor visa in a motorhome that gets 10 MPG (so, I needed a pretty big chunk of change to get back home, just on the fuel front, not to mention all the other living expenses).
The online experience has finally gotten better in the past few years, but it used to be pretty awful. One still had to call for almost everything interesting; I used to have to pay them for old statements, to boot!
I didn't choose Chase. My first bank was Texas Commerce. Chase acquired them. I stuck with them for a while after, despite my discontent (it's a lot of trouble to move banks, especially for a business that has incoming credit card payments, and outgoing payroll, among other things). When I moved to California, and formed a new corporation for my company, I opened an account at Washington Mutual. A year later, Chase acquired WaMu as part of the mortgage bailouts. So, Chase has been following me around all my damned adult life. I've given up on getting away from them, though I do have a credit union account for my personal money.
Also, they don't treat their employees very well (an ex-girlfriend worked there for a while in college, before going on to work at Google, and she hated it, especially after uniforms became required).
In short, if I were starting anew, Chase would not be on the list of banks I would consider.
[+] [-] anildash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdw|12 years ago|reply
Legal != !stupid
[+] [-] jmj42|12 years ago|reply
Their online and mobile tools are a big part of that. Their military support is also pretty good (my daughter is USCG) with true cost free banking and low activity military accounts. In fact, they beat USAA on almost every gauge (the exception being USAA makes pay and allowances available a few days early).
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pangram|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anildash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srl|12 years ago|reply
I get the dim sense, knowing nothing about this stuff, that the job of that office is one of the more headache-inducing ones in administrative government. Preventing people to sending money to (or receiving money from) a list of bad actors is a horridly difficult thing to begin with, but then when they screw up (either like this or in the more common case of money getting through), placing the blame is easy.
On another note, I haven't the faintest idea what the meaning of "blue sky" is, and I can't find anything by searching. Anybody know?
[+] [-] eskil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raymondduke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromulent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geon|12 years ago|reply
> Customs when returning home to the United States. See? It was all just a harmless mixup.
I suppose it was meant as a joke, but I find it chilling.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsukikage|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Pay-by-Check-or-Money-Order
You can probably arrange to make the payment electronically.
[+] [-] altero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobwise|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|12 years ago|reply