3 ms·

The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. It co

by krupan 3y ago

The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. It could however be a technique used to hide things that are criminal like fraud or theft. Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction. "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be.

kmeisthax 3y ago
The way you actually prosecute theft and fraud is by looking at the ledger of transactions to see what happened. Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions more difficult. Because it hides the evidence of theft or fraud, we criminalize it the same way we'd criminalize theft or fraud, because it's far easier to prove the cover-up than the actual crime. Furthermore, once you've shown evidence of a cover-up, that creates suspicion to start dissolving privacy to prove the actual crime. Dragnet surveillance is illegal[0], but surveillance with reasonable suspicion is not. In the counterfactual world where money laundering is explicitly legal, crime becomes far harder to prove, the government is far less useful at stopping crime, and people spend more of their time inventing parallel structures to stop crime that are far less accountable than the government is, until we've sleep-walked into anarchocapitalism. None of this excuses 'debanking' of course. In the case of debanking, you aren't being accused of the crime of money laundering, the bank just thinks you might be, so they summarily execute your account in the same way that Google executes[1] spammers. The thing you need to be angry about is the weaponization of freedom to associate, and you need to be calling for common carrier regulation rather than legalizing financial crime. [0] Theoretically, at least - the CIA and NSA have fought tooth and nail to get full take, which is disgusting [1] Metaphorical, at least until 2035 when Google starts livestreaming executions of known spammers
- krupan 3y ago
  "Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions [ones that prove you committed a crime] more difficult." But that's not true. If it's not a deliberate attempt to hide fraud/theft but otherwise looks like actual money laundering, then it is still a crime, at least according to current KYC/AML laws. That's the real problem with this all. That's what makes the debanking problem (which you agree is bad) so easily ignored by law makers and law enforcement.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction. Totally wrong direction. > "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be. This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arrest and convict Al Capone for "not paying taxes" instead of convicting him for his actual crimes. A society which thinks its cool to send people to jail for tax evasion instead of sending them to jail for organized crime is a failed society.
- caf 3y ago
  Prohibition-era USA was, if not failed, at least a failing society. There was by this point pretty widespread public corruption and general lack of respect for the law. Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    > It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it? Tax evasion is what did Al Capone in. Because the bar to prove that he was involved in a lot of seriously criminal activity was quite high, but proving that he committed tax only required proving that he had undeclared income.
- DoughnutHole 3y ago
  This society sends people to jail for tax evasion all the time, even if the original source of their income was non-criminal. Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise. The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Is there a legitimate, non-criminal reason to launder money?
- krupan 3y ago
  Again, how exactly do you define money laundering? Currently the definition by law seems to be, "anything that could be used to hide criminal activity." In that case, yes, there are plenty of legitimate, non-criminal reasons to make transactions that "could be used" to hide criminal activity. Is privacy a crime?
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure money laundering at least requires intent. Doing anything to intentionally avoid triggering scrutiny policies is a crime, even if you're not doing anything else wrong. Unfortunately, we run into the same problems as DMCA where hugely powerful, essential corporations run into poorly crafted laws that don't function at scale, and small users that never did anything wrong get shafted.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I have a right to privacy, and a right for my actions to be free from government scrutiny until, at the very minimum, they can show probable cause with a search warrant. Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules. Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre. If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants. Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).
krick 3y ago
> we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime I'm not event sure that we, as a society, actually did decide that. When, how? Was there a vote, a referendum? I cannot speak for everyone, but to me it feels like we as a society sure as fuck didn't decide anything. Yes, somebody decided that, but we as a society never were a part of the conversation, really.
- pdonis 3y ago
  We as a society have allowed our elected representatives to pass laws that empowered unelected bureaucrats to write reams of regulations that require banks to do these things, all in the name of "security". It's not going to change unless and until we the people give our elected representatives different incentives.
runeks 3y ago
> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. It’s not criminalized. If it were, you’d go to jail instead of just having your account closed. The real problem is that politicians made banks liable if an account is used for laundering, so naturally banks terminate accounts that look suspicious in order to avoid getting fined.
jesterson 3y ago
> The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. Nothing crazy about it. All those KYCs, checks and check on checks have nothing to do with money laundering or any other sort of illegal activity but it has to do with control over YOUR money. Notice how extremely regulated the industry is? So multi-billion dollar scam ventures just can't exist under this pressure, right? Multi billion dollar dodgy deals with money laundering? They should have disappeared if my $500 txn gets so much attention, right? Wrong - it's blossoming. One may ask how - and the answer is on the surface and it has nothing to do with money laundering.

by krupan 3y ago

kmeisthax 3y ago

The way you actually prosecute theft and fraud is by looking at the ledger of transactions to see what happened. Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions more difficult. Because it hides the evidence of theft or fraud, we criminalize it the same way we'd criminalize theft or fraud, because it's far easier to prove the cover-up than the actual crime. Furthermore, once you've shown evidence of a cover-up, that creates suspicion to start dissolving privacy to prove the actual crime. Dragnet surveillance is illegal[0], but surveillance with reasonable suspicion is not. In the counterfactual world where money laundering is explicitly legal, crime becomes far harder to prove, the government is far less useful at stopping crime, and people spend more of their time inventing parallel structures to stop crime that are far less accountable than the government is, until we've sleep-walked into anarchocapitalism. None of this excuses 'debanking' of course. In the case of debanking, you aren't being accused of the crime of money laundering, the bank just thinks you might be, so they summarily execute your account in the same way that Google executes[1] spammers. The thing you need to be angry about is the weaponization of freedom to associate, and you need to be calling for common carrier regulation rather than legalizing financial crime. [0] Theoretically, at least - the CIA and NSA have fought tooth and nail to get full take, which is disgusting [1] Metaphorical, at least until 2035 when Google starts livestreaming executions of known spammers

krupan 3y ago
"Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions [ones that prove you committed a crime] more difficult." But that's not true. If it's not a deliberate attempt to hide fraud/theft but otherwise looks like actual money laundering, then it is still a crime, at least according to current KYC/AML laws. That's the real problem with this all. That's what makes the debanking problem (which you agree is bad) so easily ignored by law makers and law enforcement.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction. Totally wrong direction. > "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be. This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arrest and convict Al Capone for "not paying taxes" instead of convicting him for his actual crimes. A society which thinks its cool to send people to jail for tax evasion instead of sending them to jail for organized crime is a failed society.

caf 3y ago
Prohibition-era USA was, if not failed, at least a failing society. There was by this point pretty widespread public corruption and general lack of respect for the law. Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  > It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it? Tax evasion is what did Al Capone in. Because the bar to prove that he was involved in a lot of seriously criminal activity was quite high, but proving that he committed tax only required proving that he had undeclared income.
DoughnutHole 3y ago
This society sends people to jail for tax evasion all the time, even if the original source of their income was non-criminal. Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise. The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.

dclowd9901 3y ago

Is there a legitimate, non-criminal reason to launder money?

krupan 3y ago
Again, how exactly do you define money laundering? Currently the definition by law seems to be, "anything that could be used to hide criminal activity." In that case, yes, there are plenty of legitimate, non-criminal reasons to make transactions that "could be used" to hide criminal activity. Is privacy a crime?
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure money laundering at least requires intent. Doing anything to intentionally avoid triggering scrutiny policies is a crime, even if you're not doing anything else wrong. Unfortunately, we run into the same problems as DMCA where hugely powerful, essential corporations run into poorly crafted laws that don't function at scale, and small users that never did anything wrong get shafted.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I have a right to privacy, and a right for my actions to be free from government scrutiny until, at the very minimum, they can show probable cause with a search warrant. Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules. Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre. If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants. Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).

krick 3y ago

> we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime I'm not event sure that we, as a society, actually did decide that. When, how? Was there a vote, a referendum? I cannot speak for everyone, but to me it feels like we as a society sure as fuck didn't decide anything. Yes, somebody decided that, but we as a society never were a part of the conversation, really.

pdonis 3y ago
We as a society have allowed our elected representatives to pass laws that empowered unelected bureaucrats to write reams of regulations that require banks to do these things, all in the name of "security". It's not going to change unless and until we the people give our elected representatives different incentives.

runeks 3y ago

> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. It’s not criminalized. If it were, you’d go to jail instead of just having your account closed. The real problem is that politicians made banks liable if an account is used for laundering, so naturally banks terminate accounts that look suspicious in order to avoid getting fined.

jesterson 3y ago

> The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. Nothing crazy about it. All those KYCs, checks and check on checks have nothing to do with money laundering or any other sort of illegal activity but it has to do with control over YOUR money. Notice how extremely regulated the industry is? So multi-billion dollar scam ventures just can't exist under this pressure, right? Multi billion dollar dodgy deals with money laundering? They should have disappeared if my $500 txn gets so much attention, right? Wrong - it's blossoming. One may ask how - and the answer is on the surface and it has nothing to do with money laundering.