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disclaimer - work for a fintech. Buried in the article is this really important point: > The SARs are largely kept under wraps. Customer service representative
by dalyons 4y ago
disclaimer - work for a fintech. Buried in the article is this really important point:
> The SARs are largely kept under wraps. Customer service representatives might not know if such a report was filed (or anything about its contents), which may be why it can be hard for them to explain account closures to customers. “It is held to a high level of confidentiality, and it is a crime to disclose that a SAR has been filed,” Ms. Cohen Levin of Sullivan & Cromwell said.
Unfortunately if you or a transaction of yours "looks suspicious" or show up on any of the various AML/anti-terror lists/filters - which are full of false positives and nonsense - BY LAW we cant tell you why your account was closed. It sucks, people are rightfully angry. It doesn't seem worth it to me - if you are actually doing BadThings and your account gets closed, i'm sure you know why. Being opaque is really not providing much benefit to law enforcement here, at the cost of massive inconvenience for many.
Now, banks are also guilty of hiding behind these laws for non-mandatory account closure reasons - when they have internally decided they dont want you as a customer for whatever reason. That also sucks IMHO. Perhaps changing the law would remove the plausible deniability in these situations and lead to more transparency.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoI think the intent is to keep the bad actors from knowing exactly how they were nabbed so they don't know what to do differently the next time around. I would be amazed if they aren't punishing a lot more innocents than guilty, though. These days the government loves to do an end-run around the 5th amendment--innocent until proven guilty should apply to all government or government-directed actions (I consider the bank closing your account because you did something the government considers suspicious to be a government action), but we have been using it for toilet paper for quite a while now.
- seunosewa 4y agoIt's simply a wrong way to treat customers. Bad laws cause so much pain.
- from 4y agoArticle says 4% of SARs lead to law enforcement followup (and of those how many actually result in a conviction? Probably not even a third of that). So 95%+ of them are useless! The current system has terrible incentives because there are massive penalties for not filing but no penalty for useless filings. So they just file and file and file...
- deadly_syn 4y agoI mainly agree with you the system is abused flagrantly, on the other hand playing devils advocate potentially the low amount of follow up is because shutting an account has 0 risk to life or limb of anyone involved. If they shut down the shared bank account being used to hold all the money to a (poorly run albeit) drug empire you just put that org significantly in the hole, and the person doing the dirty work is sipping coffee in their pajamas completely ignorant to the outcome of their perscribed click.
- dalyons 4y agoYeah that’s what I was trying to say: > It doesn't seem worth it to me - if you are actually doing BadThings and your account gets closed, i'm sure you know why. Hiding the reason is such a woefully small inconvenience for actually bad actors. But the 95% of regular folk that get caught up in it can go to hell I guess?