6 ms·

What about digital nomads? Not my situation, but still interesting.

Normal_gaussian 4y ago
It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. This makes sense as it is very hard (though not impossible) to pretend you live at an address that is not directly sympathetic to you for a long period of time. So here HSBC seem to be saying - if you are working with a charity (ie. have a case worker), and that charity vouches for you, then we've done the dance that makes it less of an issue for the charity to help you with an address. but you still have an address; its just the charities' address. This is a good solution for homelessness. Its hacky, it will miss people, but it is quick. I expect the path to getting digital nomads a verifiable address via some kind of service will be a long one; and being able to bank without an address even longer.
- Danieru 4y ago
  Plus those accounts are going to be locked rather quick if large amounts start getting wired in. I imagine accounts setup to help the homeless would make poor money mules. Sort of the inverse situation making corporate accounts hard to get in Japan. Such an account can receive large volumes of cash without raising red flags.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Unless the rules have been tightened since then, fintechs such as Revolut and Monzo (back when it was a prepaid card) used to open accounts instantly with no KYC with low limits (which they get raised when you pass KYC), so I wonder why they wouldn't just do the same and skip the KYC step altogether.
    - data_maan 4y ago
      Is this still happening? I feel all fintechs use KYC now. Even other services, such as Airbnb, oddly have started to use KYC.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. I disagree, an address is trivially falsifiable compared to something like an ID or tax record (both of which the government can actually authenticate, and I'd expect/hope that financial institutions have a way to verify them that way). The concept of a useless, trivially-falsifiable "proof of address" became a standard in the country so what the bank is doing here is merely covering their ass. As long as the entire country believes that "proof of address" is secure then they're in the clear - whether that stops any financial crime doesn't actually matter, especially when the government would rather focus on internet filters or endless gossiping about lockdown parties.
  - Normal_gaussian 4y ago
    The bank needs an address because they verify the address themselves. They literally send your card and sensitive info to it. If you try and register 100s of cards to one address, they would notice. If you try and register to 100s of different addresses you can bet your backside that a majority of the residents would return to sender. Before your address is verified your account has much more stringent fraud flags.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > It seems from a banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. My Indentity card has chip and pin on it with my biometrix data. Some countries have cryptograpgic signatures in them. You think addresses are secure? They are not even real. They are not a spesific location like GPS coordinates. They are any written text that gets mailto you. An address of 'big yellow house' can be valid. The following 'address' was delivered: “Lives across the road from the Spar, his ma and da used to own it, his mother was Mary and da Joseph, moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar and used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the 80s. Friends with the fella who runs the butchers in Waterfoot too.”' https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico Postcards with 'England' can get delivered to the right person: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addressed-england-reaches-7069082 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addr...
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    For political reasons the U.K. (and US) are opposed to having identity cards so that isn’t really a workable solution. 8 think it’s also inaccurate to say that your address for the purposes of banking is ‘anything one can write on a letter to have the Royal Mail deliver it to you’. For example, you probably can’t give the address of a hotel where you’re staying.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      They're also against having a population register. Denmark has a population register ("CPR") [1], but does not have identity cards. It's required that you update your address in the register if you move house or emigrate. Everyone also has a NemKonto ("EasyAccount"), which is a nominated bank account linked to the CPR (somehow) to receive payments from public institutions. That should make fraud of this type even more difficult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's probably more accurate to say that it's any residential address that, in the case of the US, is in the USPS address database. Though there are probably exceptions.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
So I know someone who decided to move to the Caribbean, the UK bank stopped them from using internet banking, they could only transact with the bank using the phone. Why is this, well in the UK new legislation appeared in 2000 or 2001 iirc which allowed banks to carry out their own "security" related affairs which includes data sharing under the guise of security. Fraud and financial crimes were handled and investigated by the banks instead of the Police and if the banks felt there was a case only then did it get handed over to the Police for prosecution. Perhaps a bit of Jeremy Bentham philosophy at play but also Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society. Its like GDPR creates the impression you have control over your data when you dont if its labelled as scientific or law enforcement data.
- sfriedr 4y ago
  "Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society." What do you mean by that? I cannot immediately see how house prices and home ownership issues drive diminishing banking privacy .
  - Terry_Roll 4y ago
    You are more likely to stay out of trouble if you own your house and have a family to support, unlike housing association tenants. When it used to be the council providing the housing, some tenants learned they could get a new kitchen every two years, so right on the two year point, they simply smashed it up and the council fitted a new one. An example of the tenants gaming the system paid for by taxpayers. Although Margaret Thatcher is despised by many for doing things like selling off council houses to their tenants, it was a clever way to offload costs back onto the tenants as many bought their homes and started to get into "property" ownership. The Northern Island troubles with the IRA largely died down because they made more money "on paper" by becoming landlords and gave up drug dealing and knee capping. A surgeon I spoke to once said some hospital in Ireland was the best for knee surgery and those skills have been lost because the IRA werent doing knee capping's any more! So Maslow's hierarchy of needs is based on things like high priority need for food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid and social media like facebook and instagram at the top to keep the ego happy with loads of bot followers. You see this everywhere now, even here on hacker news with the upvoting downvoting system, but Google's more recent removal of the dislike button is perhaps best known. Psychological population control without having to fire a bullet or bomb, deploy police and the food regulations helping to manage the hormonal fluctuations to keep people docile. Populations controlled with the push of a button, clever init! LOL
LunaSea 4y ago
As far as I know there is no legal way to be a digital nomad. You have to live about 6months in the same country at the very least.
- Etheryte 4y ago
  No you don't, where did you get this idea from? If you're referring to the EU tax residency logic, then that's based on where you spend the majority of your time, as well as where you have significant connections. Time alone isn't even the deciding factor. If we ignore the other factors for a moment, six months doesn't have any importance here either. You can live in 12 different countries in a year, a month at each if you'd like, for example. Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    > Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors. Also false. Depends on the tax laws of the countries, but most likely you wouldn’t be considered tax resident anywhere, absent of having a strong economic interests in one particular country (and tax havens wouldn’t care about this, and the burden of proof would be on the tax authority).
    - sfriedr 4y ago
      This. Tax laws are very complicated and the 6 months rule is more a rule of thumb than a "hard" rule. In practice, the tax authorities have a set of tests they perform, where the time spend in a country is just one item among many - and these rules vary from country to country.
      - refurb 4y ago
        Indeed. Every country is different. Being a "tax non-resident" doesn't necessarily mean you own no taxes either. In Singapore, tax non-residents simply pay a different rate. To be exempt from income tax entirely, you need to work in Singapore for fewer than 60 days. https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-of-individual-income-tax/tax-residency-and-tax-rates/working-out-my-tax-residency https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...
sgjohnson 4y ago
Have a P.O. Box for correspondence. Or a super low-rent place that you're "domiciled" in. Of course, it has to be in a tax haven. Otherwise there's no point in being a digital nomad in the first place.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  >Have a P.O. Box for correspondence. In the US, the USPS required you to prove your address before they will rent you a PO Box.
patio11 4y ago
Most digital nomads of my acquaintance bank in either their country of origin or in a regional hub. Getting access to an address sufficient to open a bank account is not terrifically difficult for socially established people who e.g. have family members in the middle class, capability to rent an apartment for at least a month and get a lease issued, etc. There are a lot of people in the community who play a bit fast and loose with taxes but from a banking perspective they’re low risk retail accounts and, even if not in technical compliance for KYC, not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks. (Personal opinion disclaimer, yadda yadda, I would not identify as a digital nomad but have many acquaintances who do and am intimately personally and professionally acquainted with banking internationally.)
- sfriedr 4y ago
  How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days? To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before. The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data-breaches-of-2021 https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data... And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-the-victims https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t... Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. This makes sense as it is very hard (though not impossible) to pretend you live at an address that is not directly sympathetic to you for a long period of time. So here HSBC seem to be saying - if you are working with a charity (ie. have a case worker), and that charity vouches for you, then we've done the dance that makes it less of an issue for the charity to help you with an address. but you still have an address; its just the charities' address. This is a good solution for homelessness. Its hacky, it will miss people, but it is quick. I expect the path to getting digital nomads a verifiable address via some kind of service will be a long one; and being able to bank without an address even longer.

Danieru 4y ago
Plus those accounts are going to be locked rather quick if large amounts start getting wired in. I imagine accounts setup to help the homeless would make poor money mules. Sort of the inverse situation making corporate accounts hard to get in Japan. Such an account can receive large volumes of cash without raising red flags.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Unless the rules have been tightened since then, fintechs such as Revolut and Monzo (back when it was a prepaid card) used to open accounts instantly with no KYC with low limits (which they get raised when you pass KYC), so I wonder why they wouldn't just do the same and skip the KYC step altogether.
  - data_maan 4y ago
    Is this still happening? I feel all fintechs use KYC now. Even other services, such as Airbnb, oddly have started to use KYC.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> It seems froma banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. I disagree, an address is trivially falsifiable compared to something like an ID or tax record (both of which the government can actually authenticate, and I'd expect/hope that financial institutions have a way to verify them that way). The concept of a useless, trivially-falsifiable "proof of address" became a standard in the country so what the bank is doing here is merely covering their ass. As long as the entire country believes that "proof of address" is secure then they're in the clear - whether that stops any financial crime doesn't actually matter, especially when the government would rather focus on internet filters or endless gossiping about lockdown parties.
- Normal_gaussian 4y ago
  The bank needs an address because they verify the address themselves. They literally send your card and sensitive info to it. If you try and register 100s of cards to one address, they would notice. If you try and register to 100s of different addresses you can bet your backside that a majority of the residents would return to sender. Before your address is verified your account has much more stringent fraud flags.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It seems from a banking perspective an address is more secure than most forms of identity. My Indentity card has chip and pin on it with my biometrix data. Some countries have cryptograpgic signatures in them. You think addresses are secure? They are not even real. They are not a spesific location like GPS coordinates. They are any written text that gets mailto you. An address of 'big yellow house' can be valid. The following 'address' was delivered: “Lives across the road from the Spar, his ma and da used to own it, his mother was Mary and da Joseph, moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar and used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the 80s. Friends with the fella who runs the butchers in Waterfoot too.”' https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico Postcards with 'England' can get delivered to the right person: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addressed-england-reaches-7069082 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addr...
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  For political reasons the U.K. (and US) are opposed to having identity cards so that isn’t really a workable solution. 8 think it’s also inaccurate to say that your address for the purposes of banking is ‘anything one can write on a letter to have the Royal Mail deliver it to you’. For example, you probably can’t give the address of a hotel where you’re staying.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    They're also against having a population register. Denmark has a population register ("CPR") [1], but does not have identity cards. It's required that you update your address in the register if you move house or emigrate. Everyone also has a NemKonto ("EasyAccount"), which is a nominated bank account linked to the CPR (somehow) to receive payments from public institutions. That should make fraud of this type even more difficult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister
  - ghaff 4y ago
    It's probably more accurate to say that it's any residential address that, in the case of the US, is in the USPS address database. Though there are probably exceptions.

Terry_Roll 4y ago

So I know someone who decided to move to the Caribbean, the UK bank stopped them from using internet banking, they could only transact with the bank using the phone. Why is this, well in the UK new legislation appeared in 2000 or 2001 iirc which allowed banks to carry out their own "security" related affairs which includes data sharing under the guise of security. Fraud and financial crimes were handled and investigated by the banks instead of the Police and if the banks felt there was a case only then did it get handed over to the Police for prosecution. Perhaps a bit of Jeremy Bentham philosophy at play but also Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society. Its like GDPR creates the impression you have control over your data when you dont if its labelled as scientific or law enforcement data.

sfriedr 4y ago
"Maslow's hierarchy of needs considering the wide picture of house prices, home ownership and the wider changes seen in UK society." What do you mean by that? I cannot immediately see how house prices and home ownership issues drive diminishing banking privacy .
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  You are more likely to stay out of trouble if you own your house and have a family to support, unlike housing association tenants. When it used to be the council providing the housing, some tenants learned they could get a new kitchen every two years, so right on the two year point, they simply smashed it up and the council fitted a new one. An example of the tenants gaming the system paid for by taxpayers. Although Margaret Thatcher is despised by many for doing things like selling off council houses to their tenants, it was a clever way to offload costs back onto the tenants as many bought their homes and started to get into "property" ownership. The Northern Island troubles with the IRA largely died down because they made more money "on paper" by becoming landlords and gave up drug dealing and knee capping. A surgeon I spoke to once said some hospital in Ireland was the best for knee surgery and those skills have been lost because the IRA werent doing knee capping's any more! So Maslow's hierarchy of needs is based on things like high priority need for food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid and social media like facebook and instagram at the top to keep the ego happy with loads of bot followers. You see this everywhere now, even here on hacker news with the upvoting downvoting system, but Google's more recent removal of the dislike button is perhaps best known. Psychological population control without having to fire a bullet or bomb, deploy police and the food regulations helping to manage the hormonal fluctuations to keep people docile. Populations controlled with the push of a button, clever init! LOL

LunaSea 4y ago

As far as I know there is no legal way to be a digital nomad. You have to live about 6months in the same country at the very least.

Etheryte 4y ago
No you don't, where did you get this idea from? If you're referring to the EU tax residency logic, then that's based on where you spend the majority of your time, as well as where you have significant connections. Time alone isn't even the deciding factor. If we ignore the other factors for a moment, six months doesn't have any importance here either. You can live in 12 different countries in a year, a month at each if you'd like, for example. Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > Your tax residency will be based on where you spent the most time between all those and then all the other additional factors. Also false. Depends on the tax laws of the countries, but most likely you wouldn’t be considered tax resident anywhere, absent of having a strong economic interests in one particular country (and tax havens wouldn’t care about this, and the burden of proof would be on the tax authority).
  - sfriedr 4y ago
    This. Tax laws are very complicated and the 6 months rule is more a rule of thumb than a "hard" rule. In practice, the tax authorities have a set of tests they perform, where the time spend in a country is just one item among many - and these rules vary from country to country.
    - refurb 4y ago
      Indeed. Every country is different. Being a "tax non-resident" doesn't necessarily mean you own no taxes either. In Singapore, tax non-residents simply pay a different rate. To be exempt from income tax entirely, you need to work in Singapore for fewer than 60 days. https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-of-individual-income-tax/tax-residency-and-tax-rates/working-out-my-tax-residency https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...

sgjohnson 4y ago

Have a P.O. Box for correspondence. Or a super low-rent place that you're "domiciled" in. Of course, it has to be in a tax haven. Otherwise there's no point in being a digital nomad in the first place.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
>Have a P.O. Box for correspondence. In the US, the USPS required you to prove your address before they will rent you a PO Box.

patio11 4y ago

Most digital nomads of my acquaintance bank in either their country of origin or in a regional hub. Getting access to an address sufficient to open a bank account is not terrifically difficult for socially established people who e.g. have family members in the middle class, capability to rent an apartment for at least a month and get a lease issued, etc. There are a lot of people in the community who play a bit fast and loose with taxes but from a banking perspective they’re low risk retail accounts and, even if not in technical compliance for KYC, not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks. (Personal opinion disclaimer, yadda yadda, I would not identify as a digital nomad but have many acquaintances who do and am intimately personally and professionally acquainted with banking internationally.)

sfriedr 4y ago
How can you skip (at least parts of) KYC requirements these days? To me it seems KYC gets ever more pervasive: I had opened a bank account 5 years ago in the EU/UK space and 4 years ago closed it again. Now I opened an account again at the same bank - and the process was significantly more involved, more documentations needed to be provided for the same service, even though I had been their customer before. The KYC requirement makes me feel uneasy from a privacy point of view: If it would be an eyes-only verification, I would be happy to provide a lot of data to prove I'm not a bad guy. But since the data gets stored and potentially forwarded to third parties, this significantly increases my risk for data and identity theft, as number of increasing data breaches show: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data-breaches-of-2021 https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/96667-the-top-data... And there is also a long-term risk associated with excessive KYC data hoarding about individuals: The atrocities in Nazi Germany were in part possible because the government gathered data about the Jewish population (e.g. by enacting essentially KYC-like requirements for its citizens; though I guess through this lense the word should be "KYJ") and then subsequently used that data to round them up: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-the-victims https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/locating-t... Also, what do you mean by "not out of bounds for tens of percent of the retail portfolio of many banks"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]