KYC and more broadly AML efforts are meant to detect and prevent both profit-motivated crime like fraud and terrorism. It's a shame that a 2011 report by the UN

KYC and more broadly AML efforts are meant to detect and prevent both profit-motivated crime like fraud and terrorism. It's a shame that a 2011 report by the UN showed only 0.2% success rate (criminal enterprises kept 99.8% of illicit earnings) after two decades of the stuff. Things haven't exactly gotten better since then, with as little as 0.1% successfully confiscated and the proportion attributable to money laundering regulations possibly as low as 0.02% (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMLC-01-2019-0007/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMLC-01-...). It's possibly the least effective policy experiment of all time. The whole endeavor might be so entrenched now that it's "sovereign-complete" and will require complete regime change to really change it, much like other things, but from more optimistic views there's probably already enough people working at the layer of law to try and make things better (here's a random congressional testimony from 2017 https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Cassara%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Cassara%20Tes... "Modernizing AML Laws to Combat Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing"). People working at the layer of tech might help best not by making the most streamlined implementations of everything possible, though open source is certainly better than not, but by making the experience as brutally inconvenient and complaint-generating (directed/redirected at law makers) as possible, doing the minimum necessary to follow the laws and regulations as currently written to minimize their harms, since their gains are pretty much nothing. As they currently tend to exist, KYC setups end up being more useful for crime than against it.