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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

#91

Post by f-securus »

starkred wrote: post #68
f-securus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may, If they are, if so... but extremely doubtful given the history of prosecuting white collar crime in this and other countries. Didn't we have many financial crime leaks this past decade with essentially no repercussions?

It seems to be widely believed that nothing came from the Panama Papers, but I think that's only because people hoped to see some CEOs perp-walked to a waiting cop car. There certainly have been repercussions. >Twenty-three countries have already recovered at least US$1.2 billion in taxes, heads of government implicated in corruption or tax avoidance have resigned or faced prosecution and there have been investigatio…

How big of a proportion do you think that 1.2 billion is when compared to total amount of taxes avoided? I'd be willing to bet less than 1%. The company that was center of the documents no longer exists... and ctrl+f this wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_Panama_Papers it seems only one person from Venezuela was arrested (and his mom, but she was allowed to go home due to health reasons).

So it seems what I said is still correct... almost no repercussions for white collar crime across the globe. I'd bet it still occurs rampantly.

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

#92

Post by curiousllama »

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #54
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.

The biggest story here for me is I look forward to grepping my name and seeing how many of my bank bonus chasing activities/etc have generated SARs. I guess everyone else will get to see that too. For more interesting/famous people than myself it’s a terrible breach of privacy. There could be lots of interesting stuff in this leak but like you, I very much doubt it will expose much corrupt activity.

I can tell you for certain: if credit card churning generates SARs, then the hit rate on those has to be <1%. There's a lot of consultants out there...

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

#93

Post by hypersoar »

gruez wrote: post #67
sharkweek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former bank teller let me tell you all the brilliant ways people would try to get around this. * Depositing $9,999 cash (yeah, still gonna report that) * Depositing random X,000 cash increments across multiple transactions (yeah, still going to report that) * Making cash deposits across multiple locations in the same day/week (as if the computer didn’t alert us to multiple cash deposits)

So if I want to get around it all I need to do is * make sure the deposits are under $9000, but also not some amount that's "suspicious" like $8,999 * make sure the deposits happen on a regular interval * make sure the deposits are at the same branch I also suspect banks don't share information to generate SAR (eg. a deposit of $15,000 at one bank would generate a SAR, but a deposit of $7,500 at two banks on the same…

Yeah, they've thought of this. It's called structuring, and it's a crime[0].

Side note: I see this kind of response a lot on HN. Whenever a precisely-defined law or regulation comes up, there will be the inevitable tricksy engineers pointing out a bug in the program. Except they haven't read the whole program, but only a couple of stanzas. And it's not actually a program. It's not being interpreted by a computer, but by people. At a certain point, rules-laywering will get the actual lawyers to tell you to get out of here with that.

Repeating something I've written here before: Your adversaries are people, not bash scripts.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5324

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

#94

Post by JKCalhoun »

ideals wrote: post #69
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely no doubt that this is a feature of the system. I recently read "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who stole the world" and can't recommend it highly enough. It shows that tax fraud and offshore banking is despite propaganda that "it's dead" very much alive and the US is a central player now. Hollywood still uses Switzerland and the Cayman's but a lot more convenient are setups involving Nevada, New…

Apparently North Dakota is the new hotness for hiding cash and avoiding taxes. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...

Looks like South Dakota.

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

#95

Post by Threeve303 »

curiousllama wrote: post #90

The $2T focuses on "high-risk individuals from around the world, in some cases even after they had been placed under sanctions by the US government." So this isn't new "they're not taking this seriously" allegations; it's a methods leak. As a aggressively-pro-transparency advocate, this seems like... a reasonable thing to keep secret, no? Am I missing something? JP Morgan did the right thing; HSBC was _already known_…

> what's the motivation behind the leak?

To let criminals know which banks they can trust?

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

#96

Post by mabbo »

ceejayoz wrote: post #88
mabbo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is applicable to all transactions the bank knows about. If money enters or leaves a bank account in a quantity greater than $10k within 24 hours, a report is filed with every detail they know about you and about the transactions. This has been law for more than 20 years. And it's made money laundering really, really hard.

You're mixing up different kinds of reports. CTRs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report ) are not SARs. You can have a large transaction that isn't deemed suspicious by your bank. You can have a tiny transaction that is deemed suspicious by your bank, too. CTR = "big transaction". SAR = "suspicious transaction". Often related; not identical.

Yes, that is what I'm trying to say.

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

#97

Post by cycomanic »

There seems to be a serious amount of astroturfing going on here there's no other way to explain all these "every 10k transaction generates a SAR... all these things might be harmless, maybe some startup needed some cash liquidity..."

First these are 2000 SARs over a period of 8 years, so if SARs get filled very often (I have no idea if they do), then this would be a very select few of them. Maybe someone already did a selection based on the specific activity?!

Second this is $2 Tn in 2000 transactions I leave it as an excersise to calculate how much on average that is, but you can be assured this is not some random person buying. I would wager that most nation states very rarely move that amount of money around.

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

#98

Post by kjs3 »

nelaboras wrote: post #80
ceejayoz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing says the bank can't go "hey this guy deposited $90k in cash this year". They may ask you where you're getting it; if you own a bunch of vending machines, you're probably fine. If your answers are evasive or don't make sense, you might be getting a SAR. $10k is just the automatic threshold for a CTR. A $1 transaction could cause a SAR to be filed, if there was a reason for the bank to be suspicious of it.

That's why any real criminal activity will have a front. Chinese takeaway, vending machines, flower or newspaper vendor, second hand shop, ..

Those types of businesses get additional scrutiny from the financial fraud team for precisely the reason they're useful as front businesses (as well as tax evasion).

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

#99

Post by DoctorOetker »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #37
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…

absolutely no doubt that this is a feature of the system. I recently read "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who stole the world" and can't recommend it highly enough. It shows that tax fraud and offshore banking is despite propaganda that "it's dead" very much alive and the US is a central player now. Hollywood still uses Switzerland and the Cayman's but a lot more convenient are setups involving Nevada, New…

> You don't fight a real enemy that subverts the rules of democracy with democratic tools.

I think you meant to write something like:

You don't fight a real enemy that subverts the rules of democracy with subverted democratic tools.

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

#100

Post by DoctorOetker »

Dahoon wrote: post #78
sailfast wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is just BS. Hiding a crime behind an NDA doesn't mean it should be illegal to tell about that crime.

not only shouldn't it be illegal, it probably isn't while the NDA might be illegal (and be evidence of conspiracy)
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