On that note, I know a person working in an anti-money laundering office in a major bank. It's like a private detective force. Their system throws a bunch of au

On that note, I know a person working in an anti-money laundering office in a major bank. It's like a private detective force. Their system throws a bunch of automatically flagged accounts, they go through each one, looking for signs of not paying taxes, money laundering, crime, etc. They not only look at what you do in their bank but also they'll look at your social media profiles or anything else they can get their hands on. A lot of anecdotes of people receiving lots of small payments and when you look at their Facebook profile you see their selfies with guns and drugs. They would then compile a dossier and pass that on to the real cops. Apparently, 9/11 is relevant here, because the bank through which it was financed just stopped paying the fine a few years ago. It was a pretty big sum. The bank was guilty of not policing its clients well enough. One way in which a lot of terrorism is financed relatively safely is simply by switching banks, because banks don't have an adequate data-exchange mechanism. So for example, you fool one bank that the money being sent from Saudi Arabia to UK is an uncle sending money to a niece studying abroad. That looks normal. But then that money is sent from the niece to some third person, which might be suspicious. But if that third person uses a different bank than the niece, then this third person's bank will actually have no idea that one bounce ago the money was in Saudi Arabia. If the bank where the money first landed in UK didn't react, the money was moved successfully. I.e. the chances of it being traced back to Saudi Arabia are slim. Add a few more hops through different banks and tracing theses transactions becomes a nightmare. This mess has two reasons, as far as I can tell. One is that there isn't a good way for banks to exchange data. They pretty much have to call the other bank and ask. The other reason is that they're policing themselves. Why do we have a decentralised money police? That last question sort of leads me to my last point. This person I know confided that the distressing part of the job is that often you're helping put people in jail for dabbling in small crime (think selling some weed), but you're instructed to not pursue the big clients. In my friend's words, that's because the bank makes money off of the big clients, but the small ones are numerous, therefore expendable. They have to be able to demonstrate that they are thwarting money laundering and terrorism financing, meanwhile the big money crimes slip by unnoticed. So for the bank it's advantageous to do the policing themselves, because then they can discriminate.