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Regarding the OFAC story on the front, Paypal's implementation of this is stunningly brain-dead. They do naive string matching for any field in the transactio
by tyingq 5y ago
Regarding the OFAC story on the front, Paypal's implementation of this is stunningly brain-dead. They do naive string matching for any field in the transaction, including some rather short OFAC listed aliases. So you can have a situation where a very short string, like "JONAS" in a non-payee-name field, like a "note" or "memo", causes the transaction to be held. Then they won't release the funds until you produce scanned identifications, detailed write-ups, etc.
- wiredfool 5y agoThere are a lot of common names in OFAC when you get to the alias list. (because, apparently, a common name works well as an alias) Jesus. Lopez. Mohammed. Mark Taylor. Sally Jones. Park. Wong. Kim. Chuck Taylor used to be on there, but isn't anymore. (not the shoes) Since there are a lot of alias matches, you get a lot of people who wind up matching when there's no reasonable way that there's an actual match. (i.e., they're happily living in the US and have an ordinary bank account there, not the dead dictator of Liberia, or someone in Columbia, or North Korea.)
- tyingq 5y agoRight. The interesting part is that there doesn't seem to be good guidance from OFAC on exactly how tight/loose the matching needs to be, and on what parts/fields of the transaction need to be scanned or not. So, everyone implements it differently.