Comment by OutOfHere
3 days ago
Money laundering is an absurd concept made up by a lazy government that fails to go after the actual underlying crime or criminals. They don't really have evidence of actual crime, so instead they target anyone they don't like. The ultimate effect it will have is of people exiting the government controlled financial system altogether.
One thing that consumers can do right now is to petition their favorite online vendors to start accepting cryptocurrency, at least a stablecoin that you can swap to.
I agree. We already see instances of debanking (logical evolution of money laundering "control") being used to pressure political opponents and dissenters even in the "free" West. Even worse, governments silently share this power with private entities to pressure stuff they do not like as was recently demonstrated by the MasterCard/Visa debacle.
Ideally, access to the financial system and secrecy of financial transactions should be protected by constitutions in the same way as secrecy of correspondence and right to privacy. Unfortunately, most constitutions were written in the age when it was a given, since most people relied on physical cash and were was no need to explicitly protect this right.
I've worked in a regulatory agency, albeit for a brief time. I worked with analyzing data, usually in cooperation with law enforcement, as part of some case or operation.
I don't know what to tell you - but my experience was that it is the most careless and obvious criminals that get caught. Some even being very rich, rich enough to afford solid defense teams, and rich enough to stay in court for a long time. These were also the very same type of people that would cry to the media about unfair treatment, witch hunts, etc.
But, as for why these agencies go after the money: It is much easier to prove money laundering, rather than the actual crime itself. Many of cases I worked on focused on companies that illegally harvested regulated natural resources, used unreported employees, and did not report their sales / trades. Off the market, under the table.
We co-operated with other regulatory agencies around the world, and I can tell you - in the more corrupt parts of the world, the effects can be devastating on the community: No honest companies can compete against the ones that operate illegally, dire working conditions, less tax funding to the local community. What happens is that these actors eventually become local monopolies, and start operate semi-legally, but that's what the community is stuck with. If you report those companies, you end up losing your own job - should the company go down. And since these players don't care about regulations anyway, whatever natural resources they harvest, can risk being wiped out.
And to re-iterate: It is easier to follow the money. Usually in these cases, where there's smoke, there's fire.
It sounds like an utterly lazy government that cannot go after actual crime. I would never vote for such a government.
Meanwhile, the same corrupt government gives a free pass to its buddies devastating the planet with digging for oil and gas, destroying sea life with major leaks, and stops renewables from succeeding. See the current administration. The government permanently destroys farmland by using PFAS mulch as fertilizer, making the soil poison.
The difference between this country and others is only that corruption is legalized here.
Thr problem with people at such regulatory agencies is they drink their own koolaid a bit much.
This 100%.
It's strange to see otherwise smart people correctly identify the "think of the children" fallacy in E2E encryption or net neutrality issues, but fail to identify the same exact fallacy when network traffic is measured in dollars and not bits.
They falsely assume the major burden of KYC/AML lies on the rich/criminals when in fact, as implemented in the USA, the burden falls largely on the innocent (and most of all on homeless / people with no address to pass KYC) with pretty vague data on whether there is much payback.
I agree with you as well. I am sick and tired of being put in position where governments are turning the tables and ask people to justify their innocence without any recourse as if everyone is de facto a criminal.