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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

#61

Post by otakucode »

Financial software is special. It has to be. The value of our currency is literally directly dependent upon it. Imagine what would happen if tomorrow we woke up and it was revealed that there had been a persistent manipulation of the financial systems. When Walmart or some other large company goes to another country and says "we have $5 million, we need good and services" they would be met with "we don't believe those numbers in your bank software MEAN anything. PROVE they represent money and aren't just a bug." At that point, everything stops.

Well, everything that has no built-in means of proving legitimacy. I've read multiple times that the only real thing Bitcoin offers is protection against counterfeiting and no one gives a damn about that because faith in the system backs our money so counterfeiting isn't a big problem. In the hypothetical scenario, though, it becomes the primary problem, and overnight only cryptocurrency can be proven to mean anything at all. Everything else would just be unreliable nonsense numbers based on rotted code.

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

#64

Post by wavefunction »

TACIXAT wrote: post #21
smn1234 wrote: post #8

how convenient, with this in context https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-b...

Large loans and real estate deals are not the type of money laundering this software detects. It is looking for unusual transaction flows between accounts. For example, if an account receives large amounts money for inconsistent purposes (e.g. computer services and farm equipment), or has large amounts of money flow through it while maintaining a relatively low average balance (e.g. 10 million received and sent when…

[flagged]

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

#66

Post by voronoff »

candiodari wrote: post #49
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #27

As someone who works at a financial institution, it's news generally because money laundering activity tends to be highly profitable for banks, since they get to collect fees on those transactions. There are almost no incentives for us to flag transactions on our own (unless we're being super humanitarian) without legislation/regulation, because as long as they get their money there's no downside except for victims o…

As an ex-consultant in the financial services sector I strongly disagree with your assessment: "there's no downside except for victims of the crimes that the money originally originated from." Why don't you detail what happens to people who get flagged by this software. Ie either send or receive suspected laundered money and what the odds are of such a flag actually resulting in a conviction. If you get "flagged", AL…

I don't think you read their comment correctly.

They are saying that their is no downside, outside of running foul of laws and regulators, for banks to take money without review instead of flagging transactions as suspicious.

Your response is about additional benefits for them taking the money without questions.

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

#67

Post by jjtheblunt »

[deleted] wrote: post #60
maxencecornet wrote: post #45

Paul Jorion, a french writer and ex-"the Bank of the European Union" employee, said that he was pushed out of the company when he revealed a bug in risk-calculation software I'm pretty sure this bug was known for some time as well

[deleted]

no kidding

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

#68

Post by tide_ad »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #27

As someone who works at a financial institution, it's news generally because money laundering activity tends to be highly profitable for banks, since they get to collect fees on those transactions. There are almost no incentives for us to flag transactions on our own (unless we're being super humanitarian) without legislation/regulation, because as long as they get their money there's no downside except for victims o…

so 10 years huh

Count all the terrorist attacks that didn't happen with all those billions reintegrated in the financial system, all the dark money private armies that aren't taking over cities, all the organized violent crime that didn't increase

and then consider that maybe trying to flag every transaction and vilify privacy is only harming the productivity of the economy

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

#69

Post by sjg007 »

fareesh wrote: post #53
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 seems to me as an outsider that everyone's standard for honesty has been reduced because it's an acceptable sacrifice if it means sliming the opposing political party. This has undertones of conveying that the President "got away" with this activity, which is the intended takeaway from the article. The quality of journalism seems to have been hit hardest by this philosophy. For over a year all of us around the wor…

The Mueller Report that totally exonerates the President and yet the President won't release it in full to Congress. The only one sliming the President is Trump himself.

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

#70

Post by notfromhere »

eigenvector wrote: post #28

If you read the original article cited by the NYT (it's in German), it is using 'bug' not in the sense that all software has bugs, but in the sense of 'basic functionality was not working'. And that should be alarming, for critical software. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...

I'm sure they knew, kept the problem around so that whenever they inevitably got caught they could point to the software glitch.

Deutsche Bank has been revealed to be systematically laundering Russian cash for years, to the point where you see a headline about "bank gets caught laundering Russian money" its almost always DB.

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