12 ms·

> at some financial institutions, you can get a SAR filed for knowing what a SAR is, because “advanced knowledge of anti-moneylaundering procedure” is a charact

by rdtsc 3y ago

> at some financial institutions, you can get a SAR filed for knowing what a SAR is, because “advanced knowledge of anti-moneylaundering procedure” is a characteristic only of financial professionals and terrorists. That is messed up. You ask about a SAR or indicate you know about them in general, you get a SAR slapped on you, and they close your account. You're one of hundreds of thousands, why bother handling a SAR-ed user when they can just move on without you. Are individuals allowed to have a public forum to discuss and share notes of what they did in their account to learn and prevent this from happening in the future? It seems in a lot of cases it's using these payment systems like Zelle or have anything associated with phrases resembling black-listed countries or organization.

RationalDino 3y ago
Yes, individuals are allowed to have a public forum for that. We have freedom of speech after all. However such a forum is going to be of particular interest for would-be money launderers. And therefore you should expect it to be monitored by people connected to the financial system. With the result being that active participation in such a forum may itself become grounds for a SAR to be slapped on you. A SAR that, of course, you will never be informed of. Because, as patio11 documents, that is the law.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny. With AML you are assumed guilty anytime you possess money, or participate in any financial transactions, or have any assets. If called upon to do so you will have to prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, and if you fail to do so, your assets or money can be permanently seized. All of this occurs without any form of due process. The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them. The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting. I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    >and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. They should be fine as long as they show receipts.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      I really hope this is a joke lol. The amount of paperwork required today is far in excess of anything required pre-GFC. Basically any wealth acquired prior to then is up for confiscation, and this happens all the time. But again, nobody cares, because injustices delivered upon the rich are fine. Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.
      - ls612 3y ago
        >Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t. Do you have an example of what you mean by this? Like they will say "well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house, go die alone in the gutter"? Because I find that hard to believe. Most people with wealth have an obvious reason for that wealth which is documented in the formal bureaucratic system.
        AmericanChopper 3y ago
        > well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house Yes this is basically how it works. The only contrived thing about my example is that we’re talking about one house a person inherited, rather than millions of dollars in assets. Here’s a well documented example of this happening in real life https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-backs-fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba... > A federal judge ruled Friday that the FBI’s seizure of tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables from 700 safe-deposit boxes in Beverly Hills did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights. > The decision by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner endorsed law-enforcement tactics that tested the limits of how aggressive federal agents can be in seizing money and property in the absence of any evidence that the owner committed a crime. > The ruling did not address some of the most controversial aspects of the raid, such as the FBI’s attempt to confiscate assets from box holders on the presumption they were criminals, even in cases where agents had no evidence to validate their suspicions. Of course, nobody cares, because those people are rich, so they probably didn’t deserve that money anyway…
- novok 3y ago
  IMO AML should be abolished because it is ineffective, inefficient and nothing would effectively change if removed. It recovers 100x less than its compliance cost. It’s the TSA of banking, it’s motion without progress. https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-ineffective-policy-experiment https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-inef...
  - RationalDino 3y ago
    The question isn't how much crime it catches. It is how much crime it prevents in the first place. (No, I'm not suggesting that I have an answer to that question. Just that you're measuring by the wrong measuring stick.)
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      How much crime it catches is directly related to how much crime it could prevent. If the measure is totally ineffective and criminals hardly ever get caught then there is no deterrent.
      - RationalDino 3y ago
        It really isn't so simple. My views on this are informed by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-aml-compliance/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-..., so you might want to read that. First, there are widely known techniques to beat AML. Criminals use them. Using them imposes costs. So you can reduce the profitability of crime, and therefore its frequency, without catching much crime directly. Secondly, one of the goals of AML regulations is to make it easy to construct a money laundering case against a criminal caught another way. This is kind of like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion. Tax evasion isn't why you want him in jail, it is just the thing you can convict him of. Prosecutors see value in these easy convictions. Are they worthwhile? That's above my paygrade. Certainly patio11 makes a case that they might not be. But both of the things that I just mentioned show that the rules are valued for reasons other than routinely catching a lot of crime.
- immibis 3y ago
  > We have freedom of speech after all. You don't, though.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    The US does. Most countries don't.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      All democracies do, one way or the other.
      - Scoundreller 3y ago
        Plenty of democracies with weak or highly overridable constitutions. Most of Canada’s is like that. Basically governments can suspend all of your “fundamental freedoms” for 5 year periods, renewed as often as they like.
        immibis 3y ago
        Every country is like that, including the USA.
        refurb 3y ago
        No it's not, as evidence by the numerous laws struck down by the Supreme Court.
        immibis 3y ago
        The laws don't mean anything if you get arrested anyway.
        refurb 3y ago
        Sure they do because you’re released.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I think it's pretty clear by now that "anti money laundering" is just the financial arm of warrantless global mass surveillance. Money laundering may be a crime but it does not justify this. "Monitoring" people and punishing them because they "might" be some money launderer or terrorist is completely backwards and should be a violation of basic rights.
tlb 3y ago
People are massively dishonest about this, though. Like there are occasional Ask HN posts where someone is outraged that their bank/payment account was closed for “no reason”, but eventually it comes out that they’re in North Korea selling cannabis to Iran or something. But it does seem like the world lacks a manual on How Not To Get In Trouble With Your Bank. “Structuring” in particular is something someone might innocently do just because they like round numbers.
- mminer237 3y ago
  CTRs are required for $10,000+. Structuring is more like if you're depositing $9,999, which is kind of the opposite of a round number.
  - idontpost 3y ago
    It would also be two deposits of $5k or 10 $1k deposits, etc.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  The only way to get any assurance about staying out of trouble with your bank is to have enough money that they start to not care so much about the risk of doing business with you, and to pay a lot of money to an expert to do the AML compliance for you.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The other way is to communicate with the bank. Talk to them. If you're doing something involving a large amount of money, or something unusual for you, call them up, tell them what you're doing and ask for their help. Don't do everything online. Do the big or unusual stuff person-to-person. It doesn't even have to be an in-person visit. Give them a call.
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      This is a woefully naive position. Unusual activity on your account is an easy way to get a SAR. Calling up to check whether you’ll get a SAR is an even easier way to get a SAR.
zb1plus 3y ago
What can be done as an ordinary people to abolish this system? I firmly believe these types of systems are gross violations of the 1st amendment
- jgilias 3y ago
  As the Nobel laureate, economist F.A. Hayek said in 1984 - take the money out of the hands of the government using some sly or roundabout way.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  There's no hope of ever abolishing such a thing. Our only hope is to subvert it with technology. Cryptocurrency and self-custody. Monero seems like the best option.
- astrange 3y ago
  There isn't a 1st amendment for international banking; that's what international means. There also isn't a banking system without abuse prevention, and there can never be a way to write down the abuse prevention rules, or else they wouldn't work.
  - Ridj48dhsnsh 3y ago
    One could argue that cryptocurrencies solve these issues (while creating some of their own).
    - astrange 3y ago
      Oh, they've got the same abuse problems, especially if you try to start a company over them. In fact, with flash loans they managed to invent all new kinds of them!
rnk 3y ago
When I worked at google they made all the devs in my team take the anti-money-laundering class. It was pretty basic stuff like "don't carry a suitcase full of cash across international boundaries". I remember everyone was amazed that I passed the test. And it must have been suspicious ;-)
- cyberax 3y ago
  Amazon had a similar class, with nice helpful tips like "pay bribes in untraceable cash, not via bank transfers".
  - rnk 3y ago
    Wow, you aren't kidding? Wouldn't they be afraid the training material would leak out, plus that's actually wrong. At the big G they told us we weren't allowed to pay bribes. And then there was a long section about not giving people noncash gifts to influence them, but what about bringing them to the free lunch, I think that was okay.
ypzhang2 3y ago
Effectively, its all just based on what indicators have a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. If the signal-to-noise is high enough for any detectable behavior, then it can become a SAR. You can absolutely have a public forum to share tips on how to stop this from happening. Just know that said public forum will be mined by money launderers and fraudsters and whatever work around is posted will most likely fail to work within months. You have to imagine that the banking system exists in an adversarial environment with money-launderers and fraudsters. And instead of code that will always do whats written, the interface is a squishy human for a majority of these interactions.
lozenge 3y ago
If you know about SAR, you know that banks can't share information about them or their criteria with the account holder. So the only reason to mention it is if you are angling to bribe an employee to break the rules.
- Ridj48dhsnsh 3y ago
  It is possible (and likely quite common) for a layman to only have partial knowledge of how SARs work.
Seattle3503 3y ago
In a world where being connected to the global financial system is an existential question, the lack of transparency and accountability for these hostile practices does seem to violate the spirit of due process.
raincom 3y ago
Currency Transaction Reports(CTRs) are strictly dollar-driven: if someone deposits/withdraws an amount over $10K in a single transaction, CTR is filed automatically. However, if you Zelle to X for a few times, and this X seems to receive too many Zelle payments, both you and X (assuming both have accounts at the same bank) can be reported through SARs with "this transaction has no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose." How banks figure out which transactions don't serve economic, business or lawful purpose? They can only figure out in a negative way. Either you should become a private banking client (in which case, you get a royal treatment through manual overrides, different compliance teams--just like first class vs economy class flights) or your banking routine should be four paystubs, 20 billpay, and debit card purchases. The more transactions (zelle, deposits, withdrawls, money orders, cashier checks) one is engaged in, the higher the chance that one will be SAR'ed though "transactions don't serve economic, business or lawful purpose".
phil21 3y ago
The best part about all this is you explain what a SAR is to nearly anyone for the first time, and their immediate response nearly 100% of the time is to suggest committing an actual felony by structuring to avoid them. Even if there is literally no crime to hide.
- raincom 3y ago
  Yes, most of the time people worry about CTRs when they try to withdraw or deposit in an amount more than $10K in one transaction. So, people go around to avoid CTRs. CTRs are never a problem: for every SAR, 10+ CTRs are filed. In other words, people exacerbate the problem by 10 times.
deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by rdtsc 3y ago

RationalDino 3y ago

Yes, individuals are allowed to have a public forum for that. We have freedom of speech after all. However such a forum is going to be of particular interest for would-be money launderers. And therefore you should expect it to be monitored by people connected to the financial system. With the result being that active participation in such a forum may itself become grounds for a SAR to be slapped on you. A SAR that, of course, you will never be informed of. Because, as patio11 documents, that is the law.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny. With AML you are assumed guilty anytime you possess money, or participate in any financial transactions, or have any assets. If called upon to do so you will have to prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, and if you fail to do so, your assets or money can be permanently seized. All of this occurs without any form of due process. The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them. The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting. I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  >and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. They should be fine as long as they show receipts.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    I really hope this is a joke lol. The amount of paperwork required today is far in excess of anything required pre-GFC. Basically any wealth acquired prior to then is up for confiscation, and this happens all the time. But again, nobody cares, because injustices delivered upon the rich are fine. Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.
    - ls612 3y ago
      >Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t. Do you have an example of what you mean by this? Like they will say "well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house, go die alone in the gutter"? Because I find that hard to believe. Most people with wealth have an obvious reason for that wealth which is documented in the formal bureaucratic system.
      - AmericanChopper 3y ago
        > well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house Yes this is basically how it works. The only contrived thing about my example is that we’re talking about one house a person inherited, rather than millions of dollars in assets. Here’s a well documented example of this happening in real life https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-backs-fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba... > A federal judge ruled Friday that the FBI’s seizure of tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables from 700 safe-deposit boxes in Beverly Hills did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights. > The decision by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner endorsed law-enforcement tactics that tested the limits of how aggressive federal agents can be in seizing money and property in the absence of any evidence that the owner committed a crime. > The ruling did not address some of the most controversial aspects of the raid, such as the FBI’s attempt to confiscate assets from box holders on the presumption they were criminals, even in cases where agents had no evidence to validate their suspicions. Of course, nobody cares, because those people are rich, so they probably didn’t deserve that money anyway…
novok 3y ago
IMO AML should be abolished because it is ineffective, inefficient and nothing would effectively change if removed. It recovers 100x less than its compliance cost. It’s the TSA of banking, it’s motion without progress. https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-ineffective-policy-experiment https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-inef...
- RationalDino 3y ago
  The question isn't how much crime it catches. It is how much crime it prevents in the first place. (No, I'm not suggesting that I have an answer to that question. Just that you're measuring by the wrong measuring stick.)
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    How much crime it catches is directly related to how much crime it could prevent. If the measure is totally ineffective and criminals hardly ever get caught then there is no deterrent.
    - RationalDino 3y ago
      It really isn't so simple. My views on this are informed by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-aml-compliance/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-..., so you might want to read that. First, there are widely known techniques to beat AML. Criminals use them. Using them imposes costs. So you can reduce the profitability of crime, and therefore its frequency, without catching much crime directly. Secondly, one of the goals of AML regulations is to make it easy to construct a money laundering case against a criminal caught another way. This is kind of like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion. Tax evasion isn't why you want him in jail, it is just the thing you can convict him of. Prosecutors see value in these easy convictions. Are they worthwhile? That's above my paygrade. Certainly patio11 makes a case that they might not be. But both of the things that I just mentioned show that the rules are valued for reasons other than routinely catching a lot of crime.
immibis 3y ago
> We have freedom of speech after all. You don't, though.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  The US does. Most countries don't.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    All democracies do, one way or the other.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      Plenty of democracies with weak or highly overridable constitutions. Most of Canada’s is like that. Basically governments can suspend all of your “fundamental freedoms” for 5 year periods, renewed as often as they like.
      - immibis 3y ago
        Every country is like that, including the USA.
        refurb 3y ago
        No it's not, as evidence by the numerous laws struck down by the Supreme Court.
        immibis 3y ago
        The laws don't mean anything if you get arrested anyway.
        refurb 3y ago
        Sure they do because you’re released.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
I think it's pretty clear by now that "anti money laundering" is just the financial arm of warrantless global mass surveillance. Money laundering may be a crime but it does not justify this. "Monitoring" people and punishing them because they "might" be some money launderer or terrorist is completely backwards and should be a violation of basic rights.

tlb 3y ago

People are massively dishonest about this, though. Like there are occasional Ask HN posts where someone is outraged that their bank/payment account was closed for “no reason”, but eventually it comes out that they’re in North Korea selling cannabis to Iran or something. But it does seem like the world lacks a manual on How Not To Get In Trouble With Your Bank. “Structuring” in particular is something someone might innocently do just because they like round numbers.

mminer237 3y ago
CTRs are required for $10,000+. Structuring is more like if you're depositing $9,999, which is kind of the opposite of a round number.
- idontpost 3y ago
  It would also be two deposits of $5k or 10 $1k deposits, etc.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
The only way to get any assurance about staying out of trouble with your bank is to have enough money that they start to not care so much about the risk of doing business with you, and to pay a lot of money to an expert to do the AML compliance for you.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The other way is to communicate with the bank. Talk to them. If you're doing something involving a large amount of money, or something unusual for you, call them up, tell them what you're doing and ask for their help. Don't do everything online. Do the big or unusual stuff person-to-person. It doesn't even have to be an in-person visit. Give them a call.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    This is a woefully naive position. Unusual activity on your account is an easy way to get a SAR. Calling up to check whether you’ll get a SAR is an even easier way to get a SAR.

zb1plus 3y ago

What can be done as an ordinary people to abolish this system? I firmly believe these types of systems are gross violations of the 1st amendment

jgilias 3y ago
As the Nobel laureate, economist F.A. Hayek said in 1984 - take the money out of the hands of the government using some sly or roundabout way.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
There's no hope of ever abolishing such a thing. Our only hope is to subvert it with technology. Cryptocurrency and self-custody. Monero seems like the best option.
astrange 3y ago
There isn't a 1st amendment for international banking; that's what international means. There also isn't a banking system without abuse prevention, and there can never be a way to write down the abuse prevention rules, or else they wouldn't work.
- Ridj48dhsnsh 3y ago
  One could argue that cryptocurrencies solve these issues (while creating some of their own).
  - astrange 3y ago
    Oh, they've got the same abuse problems, especially if you try to start a company over them. In fact, with flash loans they managed to invent all new kinds of them!

rnk 3y ago

When I worked at google they made all the devs in my team take the anti-money-laundering class. It was pretty basic stuff like "don't carry a suitcase full of cash across international boundaries". I remember everyone was amazed that I passed the test. And it must have been suspicious ;-)

cyberax 3y ago
Amazon had a similar class, with nice helpful tips like "pay bribes in untraceable cash, not via bank transfers".
- rnk 3y ago
  Wow, you aren't kidding? Wouldn't they be afraid the training material would leak out, plus that's actually wrong. At the big G they told us we weren't allowed to pay bribes. And then there was a long section about not giving people noncash gifts to influence them, but what about bringing them to the free lunch, I think that was okay.

ypzhang2 3y ago

Effectively, its all just based on what indicators have a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. If the signal-to-noise is high enough for any detectable behavior, then it can become a SAR. You can absolutely have a public forum to share tips on how to stop this from happening. Just know that said public forum will be mined by money launderers and fraudsters and whatever work around is posted will most likely fail to work within months. You have to imagine that the banking system exists in an adversarial environment with money-launderers and fraudsters. And instead of code that will always do whats written, the interface is a squishy human for a majority of these interactions.

lozenge 3y ago

If you know about SAR, you know that banks can't share information about them or their criteria with the account holder. So the only reason to mention it is if you are angling to bribe an employee to break the rules.

Ridj48dhsnsh 3y ago
It is possible (and likely quite common) for a layman to only have partial knowledge of how SARs work.

Seattle3503 3y ago

In a world where being connected to the global financial system is an existential question, the lack of transparency and accountability for these hostile practices does seem to violate the spirit of due process.

raincom 3y ago

Currency Transaction Reports(CTRs) are strictly dollar-driven: if someone deposits/withdraws an amount over $10K in a single transaction, CTR is filed automatically. However, if you Zelle to X for a few times, and this X seems to receive too many Zelle payments, both you and X (assuming both have accounts at the same bank) can be reported through SARs with "this transaction has no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose." How banks figure out which transactions don't serve economic, business or lawful purpose? They can only figure out in a negative way. Either you should become a private banking client (in which case, you get a royal treatment through manual overrides, different compliance teams--just like first class vs economy class flights) or your banking routine should be four paystubs, 20 billpay, and debit card purchases. The more transactions (zelle, deposits, withdrawls, money orders, cashier checks) one is engaged in, the higher the chance that one will be SAR'ed though "transactions don't serve economic, business or lawful purpose".

phil21 3y ago

The best part about all this is you explain what a SAR is to nearly anyone for the first time, and their immediate response nearly 100% of the time is to suggest committing an actual felony by structuring to avoid them. Even if there is literally no crime to hide.

raincom 3y ago
Yes, most of the time people worry about CTRs when they try to withdraw or deposit in an amount more than $10K in one transaction. So, people go around to avoid CTRs. CTRs are never a problem: for every SAR, 10+ CTRs are filed. In other words, people exacerbate the problem by 10 times.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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