241–250 of 305 posts
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Did you guys acquire the domain or did the founders always have it ?
(Increase employee) We took the approach of starting with an intentionally bad name (in our case, bnk.dev) and using it until a good domain became available to purchase for a reasonable price. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
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I guess credit and undos smooth over most of the problems.
Yes, that certainly helps a lot, but I'm pretty sure that would crumble under certain not-terribly-difficult-to-execute attacks. The happy fact of the matter is that the vast majority of actors in the economy seem to be pretty well-behaved. The scary thing is that the system seems to depend on this.
That's mainly because, in most countries, to become a participant in a regulated financial system, you have to meet the 'fit and proper' criteria of qualification [https://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs47c4.pdf].
There are continuous audits and enforcement/disciplinary actions taken to ensure regulatory compliance. Also, digitisation has enabled tech based regulatory/supervisory tooling to reduce the burden of regulatory/supervisory activities.
And, as newer/faster tech based mechanisms/rails have gained adoption older more cumbersome rails are getting retired. This is leading to effective regulatory simplifications.
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I'm am often amazed that the entire world financial system hasn't collapsed yet, considering what I now know about how it is put together.
> considering what I now know about how it is put together As someone who doesn't, I'd love to hear more.
Any part of this process that is modernized still has to emulate the old...
I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super e…
> You know what makes money laundering super easy... a banking API so you can split the million dollars you want to launder into 1 million 1 dollar payments. That would be noticed. It's called "structuring" and is itself illegal. Banks watch for this stuff.
More likely scenario is increase will partner with some chartered bank and try to expose this api functionality. They will soon realise the constraints they need to be under to not allow crazy things like this.
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I happen to work in a bank in Scandinavia, and you're both sort of right. We did at one point provide "open banking APIs" although we only ever approved one partner to use it, and have since shuttered it. The truth of the matter is that banking is horribly entrenched. Actual business decisions are mostly driven by arbitrary considerations of which laws to follow that day. Although we provide a ton of functionality an…
Open banking is really something that needs to be mandated by regulators. That's what happened in the UK, and now you have a wide choice of financial apps that can access accounts at any bank that implements the standard UK Open Banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk
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Certainly!
So non-US actors will have access to what banking data and source code?
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It's because approximately 100-1000 times more people and resources are used to maintain it than would be needed in any other system of similar size and technical complexity.
To add to my comment: since the financial system is almost impossible to fix, the problem only keeps getting worse and worse. I predict that eventually 99% of the world population is employed in somehow managing the global financial system. After that point, it just collapses and no-one knows what comes next.
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Yes, but when your script splits money into random amounts and puts things like "pizza money", "rent" and "happy birthday" into the reference field, across thousands of accounts, most of whom also have a real user doing real transactions intermingled, suddenly it gets a lot harder for the bank to filter. The bank typically has a rather simplistic set of rules to decide to investigate transactions (because they need t…
I still don't understand how this facilitates money laundering? You send small amounts to a bunch of accounts and then what exactly? What is the source of the funds to launder and how/why is it already in the bank?
Money mules; you offer some influentiable kid some money to deposit cash into their account and send it on to someone else. Or an old lady. I'm sure part of the Nigerian prince thing is money laundering.
Second one that is very prevalent is physical stores that never seem to get any customers, e.g. in my neck of the woods there's these mobile phone companies everywhere. I'm sure they sell phones, simcards and accessories on occasion, but I can't see how it would cover the cost of rent, let alone make a profit. Unless once a month someone comes in with a few thousand in cash that then gets added to the books over time.
Oh, there actually was an article on HN about that recently, that was "american" candy shops in london: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-news-american-...
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I still don't understand how this facilitates money laundering? You send small amounts to a bunch of accounts and then what exactly? What is the source of the funds to launder and how/why is it already in the bank?
I don't think OP knows what he is talking about? You also need "thousands" of accounts, and unless you are opening these remotely, I don't know how you can get this many people to co-operate with your scheme. That also doesn't cover the first part: Laundering the money into the bank. (if the money is already in the banking system, there is nothing to launder). To be honest, I don't think money laundering is real, or…
It's just that you and I aren't big enough fish for the banks to look the other way, if we do it.
Gotta be a Mexican drug cartel, or a Russian oligarch to succeed in money laundering.