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Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

nytimes.com

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Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#32

Post by slg »

This is a little different because Deutsche Bank is already under scrutiny in this area and therefore this is one piece of a larger story. It is similar to when Facebook has bugs that expose private user information. It raises questions like whether the "bug" is truly a bug or whether it is intended behavior, whether no bug exists and this is simply an easy excuse for inappropriate actions, whether the company actually cares about fixing the issue, and so on.

EDIT: I am sure what happened in this thread. Several comments, including this one, were decoupled from the comment they were responding to even though the original wasn't deleted or flagged. Removing that context makes some of these comments harder to follow.

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#33

Post by skywhopper »

spikels wrote: post #16

This is news?! All software has bugs. NYTimes is taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of this fact to imply something sinister. Without additional information - such as it specifically targeted certain transactions - that is misleading. Remember this when you read articles about subjects you are not knowledgeable about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

It's a bad headline and low-content article, but that's not really the point. The bug presumably made some filter for suspicious transactions ineffective, and this was detected by some sort of manual process audit. The headline should have been "Deutsche Bank fails to properly audit its money laundering detection for 10 years".

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#34

Post by outside1234 »

blattimwind wrote: post #23
lawrenceg wrote: post #14

I see some similarities here between VW Dieselgate and DB. Must be a German thing :)

Germany is already kinda the money laundering capital of the EU.

But only because Switzerland isn't in the EU.

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#35

Post by sametmax »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #2

Bug or feature? Also, wonder how they're verifying "The bank maintained that no suspicious transactions had slipped through as a result."

Giving that I've already been approached by gov officials to create an accounting software that helps with creative book keeping, I say don't assume incompetence on this one.

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#36

Post by Consultant32452 »

smn1234 wrote: post #19
bla3 wrote: post #17

Subjectively it feels like NYT publishes a lot more negative articles about Deutsche Bank than about any other bank, or at least those articles get upvoted much more frequently here. Does anyone know what's up with that? I would've assumed that most banks are equally terrible.

Trump did a majority of his deals with them and both entities grew with each other. A lot of the deals had override approvals without a lot of review. A link I posted earlier in this thread - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-b... provides more on this.

I wish there was more clarity here. It's my understanding that every large transaction requires some amount of manual approval at banks and this happens all the time every day. I have no issue believing Trump has shady banking/real estate deals, I think that's ultimately what might undo his Presidency, but transactions needing/receiving low level approvals doesn't read like a scandal to me.

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#37

Post by chasingthewind »

The Base Rate Fallacy [0] suggests there's often a lot more true negatives than true positives. In this case a true negative is ignoring a non-fraudulent transaction and a true-positive is catching a fraudulent transaction.

As someone who never engages in fraudulent transactions, if I were a DB customer I'd be much more concerned about the false-negative rate of such software.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#38

Post by outside1234 »

neves wrote: post #29
bla3 wrote: post #17

Subjectively it feels like NYT publishes a lot more negative articles about Deutsche Bank than about any other bank, or at least those articles get upvoted much more frequently here. Does anyone know what's up with that? I would've assumed that most banks are equally terrible.

American newspapers are blatantly nationalist. It is very hard to point to problems in their companies. Obesity problems? Nestle is is the villain: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil... Environment accident with an American oil company? They are victims from a foreign gov: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/business/energy-environme... Antivirus malicious companies? It's always Kaspersky pro…

What???? There has been ton of bad press for Google, Facebook, Exxon Mobile, ...

Re: Deutsche Bank Says Software to Detect Money Laundering Had a Bug

#40

Post by ceejayoz »

spikels wrote: post #26
SrslyJosh wrote: post #9

How incredibly convenient.

[deleted mean comment]

"Banks are sometimes complicit or looking the other way WRT money laundering" is hardly a conspiracy theory.

HSBC: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-...

UBS: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/switzerla...

Unicredit: https://nypost.com/2019/04/15/italian-bank-will-pay-1-3b-fin...

Standard Chartered: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/09/standard-ch...

ING: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ing-groep-settlement-mone...

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