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Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

theguardian.com

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Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#41

Post by starkred »

me_me_me wrote: post #24
jaywalk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is saying these haven't been dealt with? Filing a SAR doesn't mean the person is guilty, as the name indicates it's just suspicious.

I dunno, but Collateral Damage, Snowden panama papers... Imagine if they spend 10% of resources that they spent going after leakers punishing real perpetrators.

They may be going after the real perpetrators.

If they are, they probably don't want the perpetrators to know how much information they have.

If so, their cases may have just been blown apart by these leaks, and the perpetrators are even less likely to get persecuted.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#42

Post by edoceo »

vmception wrote: post #34
xvector wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. If the reports are “years old” then there is no excuse for these to not have been dealt with.

SARs are just spam. There is nothing to deal with. No different than an oddly named receipt.

If it's "just spam" couldn't they be evaluated and closed quickly and thus become a non-issue for leakers?

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#43

Post by vmception »

gooseus wrote: post #13

Kind of ridiculous if you ask me... "possibly corrupt"? Is the court of public opinion taking on suspicious financial activity reports now? My gut says these leaked reports will have a greater negative impact on current corruption investigations than any positive impact from public consumption.

you're right. this is the weakest leak, specifically aimed to perturb the public consciousness. the legislature called them "Suspicious Activity Reports" and then forget they did it. but they are "Useless Spam Reports". An investigative journalist decided to use the name and the current sentiment against "Banks" and "money" to write these articles.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#44

Post by shawn-furyan »

sailfast wrote: post #26
syspec wrote: post #4

> In a statement released earlier this month FinCEN condemned the disclosure of the leaked documents and said it had referred the matter to the US Department of Justice. > “The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is aware that various media outlets intend to publish a series of articles based on unlawfully disclosed suspicious activity reports (SARs), as well as other sensitive government documents, from several yea…

Well, yeah. The leaker signed an NDA. You of course take the risk that you will be punished by the NDA’s consequences that you sign unless you are using whistleblower statutes. That’s the whole point of the NDA. Edit: you don’t publish your company’s proprietary source code and then expect you just walk away right? You’d be sued into oblivion. It’s important that people abide by their agreements. Whistleblower statut…

What's you're point? This is a normative discussion. The presence of NDAs says nothing about what is morally correct. For example, Harvey Weinstein systematically used NDAs to silence his victims and cover up his violent crimes.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#45

Post by vmception »

edoceo wrote: post #42
vmception wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SARs are just spam. There is nothing to deal with. No different than an oddly named receipt.

If it's "just spam" couldn't they be evaluated and closed quickly and thus become a non-issue for leakers?

yes, they are a non-issue. you answered your own question. they are evaluated as spam. this leak is as dumb as you are close to thinking it is.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#46

Post by defterGoose »

vmception wrote: post #36
me_me_me wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, but Collateral Damage, Snowden panama papers... Imagine if they spend 10% of resources that they spent going after leakers punishing real perpetrators.

SARs are just spam. There is nothing to deal with. Its an odd name for a receipt that gets printed at the bank's discretion.

Can I just ask...WTAF are you talking about? Because you sound like a troll.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#47

Post by wemblee »

shrubble wrote: post #33

SARs are filed automatically any time the amount is over a certain number, I think the simplest one is at $10k and then there is a more detailed one for some larger threshold amount. There must be millions filed per week. Have never been able to determine if what someone told me is true... that publicly traded companies are exempt from many of these regulations.

That's incorrect. You're confusing SARs with CTRs, which are reports of cash transactions. SARs are for the most part at the discretion of bank compliance officers, although there are a few "automatic" ones.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#48

Post by wemblee »

beh9540 wrote: post #35
m-nolan wrote: post #2

"However, the filing of an SAR does not require the bank to cease doing business with the client in question." This feels broken. Was this intended to prevent competitors from falsely filing SARs against each other to freeze their business? What are the penalties for abusing this system?

SARs are required to be reported for all daily cash deposits greater than $10K by the Bank Secrecy Act.[1] Cash heavy businesses could easily hit this level, as well as large transactions that are perfectly legal, so you wouldn't want to stop doing business with a customer, just because they deposited a large amount of cash. [1] https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/supervision-and-examination...

I mentioned this above on another comment but you're confusing SARs and CTRs.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#49

Post by defterGoose »

vmception wrote: post #43
gooseus wrote: post #13

Kind of ridiculous if you ask me... "possibly corrupt"? Is the court of public opinion taking on suspicious financial activity reports now? My gut says these leaked reports will have a greater negative impact on current corruption investigations than any positive impact from public consumption.

you're right. this is the weakest leak, specifically aimed to perturb the public consciousness. the legislature called them "Suspicious Activity Reports" and then forget they did it. but they are "Useless Spam Reports". An investigative journalist decided to use the name and the current sentiment against "Banks" and "money" to write these articles.

"Crimes don't matter" "Democracy doesn't matter" "Nothing matters" "You should just accept it"

Does that sum it up pretty well? You seem to have a pretty vested interest in this being ignored if judged by the volume of similar comments you've left in this thread.

Re: Leak reveals $2T of possibly corrupt US financial activity

#50

Post by JauntTrooper »

syspec wrote: post #4

> In a statement released earlier this month FinCEN condemned the disclosure of the leaked documents and said it had referred the matter to the US Department of Justice. > “The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is aware that various media outlets intend to publish a series of articles based on unlawfully disclosed suspicious activity reports (SARs), as well as other sensitive government documents, from several yea…

I work at a bank, and we get training on this regularly.

One of the main reasons FinCEN requires strict confidentiality on SARs is to not tip off the account owners that they're being watched/investigated.

Investigators will often monitor the accounts to gather enough evidence to prosecute them or to gain intel into broader criminal networks. Regulators also rightfully don't want money launderers to know the playbook and tactics they use to track down these networks.

The secrecy also protects bank employees. If you're a compliance department worker that's reporting on potential criminal activities of terrorists or a criminal network to the authorities, and you think there's a risk you'll be outed, you might be less willing to submit the SAR.

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