Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 491 posts

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#181

Post by ehvatum »

jonny_eh wrote: post #160
CaymanCruiser wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...unfair, extra-legal competitive advantage. It is not unfair, and it is not extra-legal. Anyone can offshore their company and in some cases it can take less than an day (incorporating an LLP in the UK takes a couple of hours) with virtually zero barriers of entry, all fully compliant with the relevant legislation. If legal regulatory arbitrage (through tax havens) is unfair, then the corollary is that any kind o…

> It is not unfair, and it is not extra-legal Then why are you using a pseudonym?

If such a scheme were the only thing allowing you to make a profit, would you appreciate this guy drawing attention to it? In fact, you could protect your operation by submitting numerous tips to tax agencies across the world, causing his business to fail due to the immense cost of litigating such complex cases, even though he would be cleared if he could afford the defense. Everyone gets the right message: the public hears that tax havens "don't work", whistleblowers learn to keep quiet, regulators notch up another win, and the truly powerful get to continue dodging taxes.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#182

Post by dv_dt »

mars4rp wrote: post #159
mlazos wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it was a deliberate agreement per se, I feel like it was just the natural outcome after the US helped rebuild a lot of Europe. The previous world order had been ripped apart by the war, and the US was the world’s largest economy by the end.

It was deliberate, on one of the financial summits over the future of financial system after WWII a US changed all the word of GOLD to USD. there was a planet money episode about it.

Yes it was agreed upon that the US Dollar became the underpinning of international finance at the Bretton Woods conference near the end of WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

This has a link to the PMoney episode you're thinking of, as well as a more recent discussion of the economic fight other nations possibly trying to supplant or at least be adjacent to the dollar as a reserve currency.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/07/30/746337868/75-y...

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#183

Post by bouncycastle »

karambahh wrote: post #173
bouncycastle wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> place to store anonymously your illicit cash What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash? Unfortunately, it seems the normal people lost their privacy nowadays at the expense of the criminals and the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument has taken a stronghold in the financial sector.

Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities? You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).

By "legally gained cash" I mean that taxes have already been paid for it.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#184

Post by fao_ »

woah wrote: post #180
karambahh wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities? You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).

It was possible for many empires to tax effectively before modern bookkeeping. Property tax needs very little in the way of financial records to administer.

> modern book-keeping

Can you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement? Most empires historically-speaking have had sophisticated book-keeping methods. Chinese empires used to tax anyone who exited a city on the profits they made during their visit. The Romans when they took over Egypt, taxed the hell out of it and for that purpose kept meticulous records on all of the transactions that happened. The notion of Tax itself goes back to Mesopotamia.

(I wrote that based from history books I've read over the years. But this link will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_accounting#Ancient_...)

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#185

Post by seibelj »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #136
seibelj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s legality and morality. Moving all my wealth to Cayman (or Texas) may be 100% legal but I thought we were debating ethics. All of these HNers decamping from NYC and SF to Florida and Texas are horrible awful people depriving the local governments of California and New York their deserved taxes!

When you say "deserved taxes", what precisely is the reasoning behind this deservedness? it seems to me that there's no reasonable way to lay claim to the work product of another person without being a total jerk... maybe i'm mistaken.

It's mind blowing to me that people get angry about moving wealth to a lower tax country like Cayman, but are totally milquetoast about moving someplace within the same country that has the same effect of lowering one's effective taxation.

If you are worked up about this Cayman thing, then you should be apoplectic if your neighbor moves to Texas or Florida. What horrible, disgusting people who are leaving their former communities to rot! They raised taxes on the rich in order to transfer more wealth to the community, and then the rich up and leave! Such completely selfish actions are galling and it fills me with anger, as it should any self-respecting person. We need the government to track where people live each day, and then make them pay their taxes proportional to where they lived for the rest of their lives. It's only fair to the communities that protected and nurtured them.

We need to outlaw each and every tax dodge. Clipping coupons deprives the state of their sales tax, as the total price is on goods is lowered which reduces the total tax bill, which is why I'm against coupons. How long will we allow this madness to continue?

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#186

Post by hedvig »

seibelj wrote: post #58
52-6F-62 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tax and legal purposes This may be terribly naive, but doesn't that make the business de-facto illegal? What kind of legitimate business deserves to buck paying into the systems that support them? As a default I want to disagree, but I would like to know what business needs to operate outside of these constraints. Surely the businesses utilizing the favours of banks like Cayman are not being operated within tyranni…

I still can’t believe it’s legal to move from SF to Texas if you were born and raised in SF. You owe the good people of San Francisco repayment for raising and nurturing you. Leaving after all that education and local services is a corrupt tax-dodge into a state without income tax.

Terrible analogy.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#187

Post by sumedh »

jokoon wrote: post #21

After watching The laundromat, I think it's big news. Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth, and why they're trusted to do it. This can't be secure or safe. I'm curious about the diplomacy and the political implications of this. What if their office get robbed? What if the island gets attacked? What if one of those shady ban…

> why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth

Some of the tax havens like Jersey, Isle of Man are British territories, Curacao is territory of Netherlands.

The big countries know what goes on on their little islands they just choose to ignore it for obvious reasons.

Treasure Islands is a great book if you want to learn more about this.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#188

Post by phyzome »

tetha wrote: post #79
goatsi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was pretty clear. They had already developed a Sonic Wall VPN exploit. They used zmap to scan for vulnerable devices then grepped the hostnames for "bank". When they exploited the VPN it gave them the whole network. >In this case, on the other hand, it was the same Windows domain passwords that were used to authenticate against the VPN, so I could get a good user password, including that of the domain ad…

To me, the scary part about this is: After Equifax, this is another big hack... and practically, it's one layer of defense and that's it. Shellshock, one password, everything's fucked. And yes, expletives are appropriate there. The rest is largely access maintenance, keyloggers and execution. That's scary. Maybe I'll need to badger my boss about a serious pentest of everything.

Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#189

Post by benmw333 »

bouncycastle wrote: post #183
karambahh wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities? You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).

By "legally gained cash" I mean that taxes have already been paid for it.

because "You didn't build that!"

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#190

Post by sumedh »

pavlov wrote: post #73
CaymanCruiser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I have a fair bit of insight into this industry, both from friends, acquaintances, and family who use a variety of offshore structures to manage their wealth and from my own dealings (the company I founded and currently manage is offshored for tax and legal purposes). What people don’t realise is that aside from a couple outliers offshore jurisdictions aren’t that shady at all a…

> ...the United Kingdom being the leader here. Having lived in the UK, I'm convinced that the real reason for Brexit is to preserve these offshore tax havens from any meddling by EU regulations. It's not an accident that Brexit suddenly became crucially important to the Conservative Party only when the EU developed a new interest in unified financial regulations after all the turmoil of 2008-2011.

Netherland has Curacao as its tax haven even when its part of the EU.
Post reply on HN