10 ms·

Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

237 points by DrNuke 5y ago

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
covid ends. russia war begins. putin to discuss ceasfire. credit suisse expose. is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.
- math-dev 5y ago
  Inflation is too high currently (no surprise), so they need something to distract the masses with
  - sschueller 5y ago
    So they can spend a warping 770 Billion a year on defense. How do you even sell that with so many people struggling in the US?
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      because the bulk of that 770 Billion is payroll, military spending is a jobs program.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      Being a cynic I would say you don't sell it (except maybe with the Russian situation) but just do it. Who should stop the US government from going forward with this? I know, I am a cynic. But I once was (young and naive) a member of the German social democrat party. I visited the state convention for their youth members. It was a perfect politics simulacrum. With decisions being made, backroom deals (because we don't like the other people - even if their proposal was factually good). And so on. The perfect training ground for young party "soldiers" streamlined to not show any sigh of a consciousness towards real problems. Just play the power game. Show how scrupulous you are without being obvious. I left this rotten club behind (politics) and never looked back. Nowadays 20 years later the people back thrn being good at this game and aiming for the top posts in this youth org of the SPD sit at the center of power in Berlin in relevant positions.
      - sschueller 5y ago
        Yes it's discusting how modern politics operate not in the interest of the population but in their own and their enablers (donors and powerful). The most obsurd is when soldiers are sent to fire weapons where each bullet costs more than they make in a year at another group of people that have even less for political reasons.
        sdoering 5y ago
        My SO always quotes (we both don't know the origin of the quote): "In war people who don't know each other kill each other on command of people who know each other but don't kill each other."
    - nceqs3 5y ago
      We spend triple that on the social programs.
      - trasz 5y ago
        If you’re paying so much, why does it work so poorly, compared to Europe?
        nceqs3 5y ago
        It works better than Europe.
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Because US political structures are designed in a way that discourages competence. We spend an insane amount on social services but nobody cares if they work, spend wisely or have an impact.
- sinyug 5y ago
  > is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously. While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18. Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs. It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Putin is smart as hell, most probably sociopath on top. You don't get to be long term successful KGB apparatchik for nothing. The problem is, nobody who wants all that juicy freedom, democracy and other perks of good western life wants strong Russia, these things are exact opposites. Its by far the biggest actual threat to European democracy. I come from country who was invaded by them in 1968 when we showed we may head towards democracy, and the Russian mentality remained the same since then. Its sad germans as a nation are still heavily traumatized by what their ancestors did during WWII, and probably hell will freeze sooner than german army fighting, well anything. This leaves Europe severely weakened in eyes of nearby machos like Putin or Erdogan. He could have built a fine prosperous empire that people are actually happy to live in. Instead, everything is worse and he just siphons tens of billions to same banks as discussed here via his buddies (UBS cough cough). It may be the Wag the Dog situation, but all above is still valid.
seanhunter 5y ago
This whistleblower is taking substantial personal risk. The Swiss banking secrecy laws provide for 5 year prison terms for people leaking client-sensitive information and when I worked on sensitive things in Switzerland I had to sign a document setting out the penalties and saying that I understood that I was personally liable and could (and probably would) receive jail time for disclosing anything.
- kragen 5y ago
  The whistleblower could just as easily be an employee of the Russian ФСБ or the US NSA as an employee of Credit Suisse, in which case they wouldn't be at much personal risk.
- leroman 5y ago
  Considering the profile of the people exposed, shouldn't they be more concerned for their lives than prison?
  - _the_inflator 5y ago
    Yes. It the reversal of this scene here from Morgan Freeman in Batman: https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE?t=50 https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE?t=50
- sschueller 5y ago
  I hope we soon can get proper whistleblower law because right now companies get away with way too much crap. At least the state can use anything leaked no matter how it was obtained against the banks and companies.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    My feeling is Switzerland shouldn't be allowed to do that much banking.
leroman 5y ago
I understand the need for privacy and exclusive access, but would love some kind of anonymized stats per country, year etc..
umvi 5y ago
People on HN often dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument as invalid when it comes to strong privacy rights, but... the fact remains that those who very much want to hide their illegal activities and ill-gotten gains are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc). It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.
- lokalfarm 5y ago
  Do you use HTTPS? SSH? A password manager? Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I have SSH on my servers for the same reason I have locks on my house. Not because I have stuff to hide, but because having stuff stolen costs me money, and SSH and locks are an inexpensive way of preventing stuff of mine from being stolen
    - lokalfarm 5y ago
      Sounds an awful lot like privacy: 1. the state of being apart from other people or concealed from their view; solitude; seclusion 2. the state of being free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs; freedom to be let alone I don't draw a distinction between "your house" and "your data." Whatever your rational for having those barriers - that's your decision, right? Just because other people enjoy living on communes doesn't make it any less absurd for a country to outlaw locks on doors (or e2e chat apps...). Taken even further, people tend to do horrific things (sexual &/or domestic abuse) behind locked doors. But plenty of other people, like you & me, tend to sleep better behind them.
vmception 5y ago
Money, liquidity, and fungibility is a public good, it has been (and still is) a waste of public and private resources to attempt to alter that reality. Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds. So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway. Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone. Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  I believe KYC is a very good idea fundamentally, and I wish more banks took it seriously with their top customers as well (or more) as with the rest. It’s not in banks’ interests, of course. And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    Expenses are interesting and add up rapidly (as any business owner knows)... 500k over two years for 20 people is only $1000/person/month and that has to account for all living expenses plus whatever else is required (flight training, cover identities, bribes, pay-for-play etc.)
nathanaldensr 5y ago
I commend the bravery of the leaker/whistleblower and hope they can maintain their personal safety. It's time to expose the evil amongst the elite--all the elite--once and for all.
- social_quotient 5y ago
  Should it be limited to just elite or everyone all the way down? Not trolling you as it might sound but how do you draw lines between elite and not elite.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    The elite seem to be able to scale the harm they do pretty well. I wouldn't be against focusing more resources on pursuing elite bad actors, but don't think there should be a minimum bad bar that must be surpassed to get prosecuted.
    - social_quotient 5y ago
      It’s a good perspective on the multiplier aspect. I presume it goes both ways. Elite can do great things at scale but also exhibit a level of harm that is well beyond a linear comparative. Thx for the thought.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Well elite in financial sense since we talk about banks, doing unlawful financial operations. Its not a bank's role to investigate murders. Poor can't do that much impactful financial crime, can they
joseloyaio 5y ago
Switzerland is all about Neutrality What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient. There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.
- sdze 5y ago
  This country should be heavily sanctioned by the international community. They actively pull in (tax) fraudsters and criminals.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    just like: bigger half of Caribbean, City of London, all of the UK Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Singapore, Delaware (yes that's US) and many, many more. Its a dumb approach, sold by populist politicians to less-than-bright voters before elections who want binary world and simple solutions to all their problems.
  - sfrank 5y ago
    So, like Delaware?
barry-cotter 5y ago
> This article is a bit difficult to understand; there's a mixture of actual money laundering with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account". There's a difficult and IMO increasingly urgent question here, of whether the banking system is a utility or something else. There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers. Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". If a criminal hasn't had their whole wealth confiscated as proceeds of crime by the courts, is the convention now that nonetheless they should be deprived of the ability to use them? Maybe. I really don't know the answer in some hard cases. But it feels like if the banking system is going to be part of the law enforcement system, that needs to be established through actual laws passed through the parliament. As far as I can see there are some charges of actual complicity in the article, but it's hard to separate them from "this bad person was a client". https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/1495445847806705667?s=20&t=vAcMwjshy289nxCFf0y0og https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/149544584780670566...
- mrandish 5y ago
  > the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account" > Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Came here to post dsquared's comment. Compare and contrast this thread with the truckers one. We don't really want to force banks into some kind of ill-specified "account cancellation culture".
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained or unsavoury sources of funds. Eg storing money you stole from your murdered is not better than money laundering. Iirc some of the CS clients fell into this category and the bank was very keen to not ask questions. I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.
kragen 5y ago
Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for?" Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is? The article does admit this: > It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong. Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system? The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%. So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative. Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671
- Youden 5y ago
  > So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative. But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Transactions, yes, and dates and amounts, but not names. And many "transactions" on the blockchain are within a single wallet. It'll be interesting to see what happens when journalists start reporting on the immense data in the blockchain, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet. I don't think it'll happen as long as the "journalists" are the kind that think it's okay to publish an encryption key to a publicly available encrypted file of confidential data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak#Sequence_of_leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
jdrc 5y ago
Everybody likes defending the bank's right to bank with murderers, but god forbid they bank with a cam sex worker. https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover-wetspace/ https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover...
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Murderers don't disproportionately trigger chargebacks. We've had this discussion a lot in the past few years [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337834
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jdrc 5y ago
    is there any actual data about that or is it urban myth? Onlyfans keeps identity documents for its members so trafficking-wise they are actually safer than facebook. there are all other businesses affected by the same discrimination, e.g. sex toy shops, dating websites, nudist websites, basically anything that shows skin. I find it hard to believe that chargebacks are so much of an issue, especially since there are third parties willing to take the risk for a high fee (CCbill).
- justshowpost 5y ago
jmyeet 5y ago
It's this sort of thing that gives me (even more) confidence that pretty much every government conspiracy or at least the more incredulous claims (eg aliens and UFOs) are false. Such systems would rely on humans and humans tend to be really bad at keeping secrets or they simply have a crisis of conscience and release things they technically shouldn't as is the case here. Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway. Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives. I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem. This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.
- salawat 5y ago
  ...Never before have I expected to hear anyone calling the person who proliferated nuclear secrets "principled". Differences of opinion aside, you severely underestimate the character/circumstances/motives/number of "conscientious objectors" in society.
adamhearn 5y ago
The accounts (and who they belong to) can be explored on this site: https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en/ https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...
jokoon 5y ago
Bank secrecy and shadow banking should not exist. The worst thing about capitalism and globalism is tax dodging and bank secrecy.
WHA8m 5y ago
Once again the leaker went to Süddeutsche Zeitung [1] and left his/her/their documents there. Panama papers [2] and Paradise papers [3] started there as well. I'm really wondering why that is. [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers
- Fronzie 5y ago
  Well, by now they have a reputation: Leakers of high-profile cases can stay anonymous if they go to this newspaper.
Traster 5y ago
I'm honestly always amazed at people in these threads who say "Oh, well in general this is a public good, so we should be hands off". Sure, the default should be hands off, but if you have enough information to know what youre doing is wrong, you are responsible. It's one thing to say it's a public service, but if you know what you're doing is wrong, you know it's wrong,and in a lot of cases, a lot of effort is put into pretending that you don't know it's wrong even though you know it's wrong. At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.
rosndo 5y ago
Oof. Some incredibly problematic stuff in this article: > Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts. Is there any other way to interpret this?
amai 5y ago
Democratic Switzerland should at least force its bank to only make business with customers from democratic countries. By doing that they would avoid a huge number of highly problematic customers. So basically only make business with countries which have a score of 6.0 or higher in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Doing so would require a vote from all the Swiss (as any real democracy would require), and a successful vote would block them from doing business with customers from almost all other countries (as they wouldn’t qualify as real democracies by Swiss standards). I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
  - amai 5y ago
    I didn't say they should restrict business to countries most similar to Switzerland. There are 75 countries on the democracy index that are called democratic. I believe doing business with 75 countries should be more than enough for small Switzerland. This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships. P.S.: Actually the restriction of business to the 75 democratic countries in the world should be the rule in every democratic country, because it would show that democratic values are more important than money.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      > This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships. How is a democracy index put out by an organization legally binding? You are still asking to encode a qualitative judgement into law, which is difficult even in less democratic countries. > because it would show that democratic values are more important than money. For most people, democracy is the means to safety and security (and yes, money), not the other way around. Your plan would ironically make more sense in an autocracy where such ideology can be more easily implemented and enforced.

237 points by DrNuke 5y ago

covid ends. russia war begins. putin to discuss ceasfire. credit suisse expose. is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.

math-dev 5y ago
Inflation is too high currently (no surprise), so they need something to distract the masses with
- sschueller 5y ago
  So they can spend a warping 770 Billion a year on defense. How do you even sell that with so many people struggling in the US?
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    because the bulk of that 770 Billion is payroll, military spending is a jobs program.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    Being a cynic I would say you don't sell it (except maybe with the Russian situation) but just do it. Who should stop the US government from going forward with this? I know, I am a cynic. But I once was (young and naive) a member of the German social democrat party. I visited the state convention for their youth members. It was a perfect politics simulacrum. With decisions being made, backroom deals (because we don't like the other people - even if their proposal was factually good). And so on. The perfect training ground for young party "soldiers" streamlined to not show any sigh of a consciousness towards real problems. Just play the power game. Show how scrupulous you are without being obvious. I left this rotten club behind (politics) and never looked back. Nowadays 20 years later the people back thrn being good at this game and aiming for the top posts in this youth org of the SPD sit at the center of power in Berlin in relevant positions.
    - sschueller 5y ago
      Yes it's discusting how modern politics operate not in the interest of the population but in their own and their enablers (donors and powerful). The most obsurd is when soldiers are sent to fire weapons where each bullet costs more than they make in a year at another group of people that have even less for political reasons.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        My SO always quotes (we both don't know the origin of the quote): "In war people who don't know each other kill each other on command of people who know each other but don't kill each other."
  - nceqs3 5y ago
    We spend triple that on the social programs.
    - trasz 5y ago
      If you’re paying so much, why does it work so poorly, compared to Europe?
      - nceqs3 5y ago
        It works better than Europe.
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Because US political structures are designed in a way that discourages competence. We spend an insane amount on social services but nobody cares if they work, spend wisely or have an impact.
sinyug 5y ago
> is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously. While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18. Putin is no saint. But I think he is vastly superior to his drunkard predecessor who let the country be looted by oligarchs. It is also possible that this is a Wag the Dog situation.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Putin is smart as hell, most probably sociopath on top. You don't get to be long term successful KGB apparatchik for nothing. The problem is, nobody who wants all that juicy freedom, democracy and other perks of good western life wants strong Russia, these things are exact opposites. Its by far the biggest actual threat to European democracy. I come from country who was invaded by them in 1968 when we showed we may head towards democracy, and the Russian mentality remained the same since then. Its sad germans as a nation are still heavily traumatized by what their ancestors did during WWII, and probably hell will freeze sooner than german army fighting, well anything. This leaves Europe severely weakened in eyes of nearby machos like Putin or Erdogan. He could have built a fine prosperous empire that people are actually happy to live in. Instead, everything is worse and he just siphons tens of billions to same banks as discussed here via his buddies (UBS cough cough). It may be the Wag the Dog situation, but all above is still valid.

seanhunter 5y ago

This whistleblower is taking substantial personal risk. The Swiss banking secrecy laws provide for 5 year prison terms for people leaking client-sensitive information and when I worked on sensitive things in Switzerland I had to sign a document setting out the penalties and saying that I understood that I was personally liable and could (and probably would) receive jail time for disclosing anything.

kragen 5y ago
The whistleblower could just as easily be an employee of the Russian ФСБ or the US NSA as an employee of Credit Suisse, in which case they wouldn't be at much personal risk.
leroman 5y ago
Considering the profile of the people exposed, shouldn't they be more concerned for their lives than prison?
- _the_inflator 5y ago
  Yes. It the reversal of this scene here from Morgan Freeman in Batman: https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE?t=50 https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE?t=50
sschueller 5y ago
I hope we soon can get proper whistleblower law because right now companies get away with way too much crap. At least the state can use anything leaked no matter how it was obtained against the banks and companies.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  My feeling is Switzerland shouldn't be allowed to do that much banking.

leroman 5y ago

I understand the need for privacy and exclusive access, but would love some kind of anonymized stats per country, year etc..

umvi 5y ago

People on HN often dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument as invalid when it comes to strong privacy rights, but... the fact remains that those who very much want to hide their illegal activities and ill-gotten gains are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc). It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traffickers and terrorists use the service to enable their activities is just the cost of privacy rights" is going to fly any more than "oh well, having tons of criminals use guns for murder is just the cost of the second amendment" flies. The latter argument used to fly, but it's increasingly unpopular to say that these days, and I suspect the same will happen when it comes to services with strong privacy guarantees.

lokalfarm 5y ago
Do you use HTTPS? SSH? A password manager? Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I have SSH on my servers for the same reason I have locks on my house. Not because I have stuff to hide, but because having stuff stolen costs me money, and SSH and locks are an inexpensive way of preventing stuff of mine from being stolen
  - lokalfarm 5y ago
    Sounds an awful lot like privacy: 1. the state of being apart from other people or concealed from their view; solitude; seclusion 2. the state of being free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs; freedom to be let alone I don't draw a distinction between "your house" and "your data." Whatever your rational for having those barriers - that's your decision, right? Just because other people enjoy living on communes doesn't make it any less absurd for a country to outlaw locks on doors (or e2e chat apps...). Taken even further, people tend to do horrific things (sexual &/or domestic abuse) behind locked doors. But plenty of other people, like you & me, tend to sleep better behind them.

vmception 5y ago

Money, liquidity, and fungibility is a public good, it has been (and still is) a waste of public and private resources to attempt to alter that reality. Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing any flow of funds. So, there isn't any point in saying "Credit Suisse is a rouge bank", because the whole idea of pretending to whitelist transactions and clients is flawed and useless. There isn't any point in saying "privacy laws are immoral" because it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway. Even the vague idea of avoiding terrorist financing is flawed. Terrorism isn't expensive enough for this whitelisting project. People aren't flying planes into buildings because they don't want to fly planes into buildings. Its not that expensive. Let's drop the charade and reduce overhead costs for everyone. Congratulations, we've successfully stigmatized having money, except for the people that actually have it who ignored the cultural stigma and can afford better education and counsel on reality. Let's move on from this data mining and transaction whitelisting project.

strogonoff 5y ago
I believe KYC is a very good idea fundamentally, and I wish more banks took it seriously with their top customers as well (or more) as with the rest. It’s not in banks’ interests, of course. And I disagree that terrorism is cheap. Preparation for 9/11 allegedly cost up to $500K. Bojinka plot used fair amount of financing as well. Maybe those couldn’t be caught via financial controls and KYC, or maybe they could.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Expenses are interesting and add up rapidly (as any business owner knows)... 500k over two years for 20 people is only $1000/person/month and that has to account for all living expenses plus whatever else is required (flight training, cover identities, bribes, pay-for-play etc.)

nathanaldensr 5y ago

I commend the bravery of the leaker/whistleblower and hope they can maintain their personal safety. It's time to expose the evil amongst the elite--all the elite--once and for all.

social_quotient 5y ago
Should it be limited to just elite or everyone all the way down? Not trolling you as it might sound but how do you draw lines between elite and not elite.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  The elite seem to be able to scale the harm they do pretty well. I wouldn't be against focusing more resources on pursuing elite bad actors, but don't think there should be a minimum bad bar that must be surpassed to get prosecuted.
  - social_quotient 5y ago
    It’s a good perspective on the multiplier aspect. I presume it goes both ways. Elite can do great things at scale but also exhibit a level of harm that is well beyond a linear comparative. Thx for the thought.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Well elite in financial sense since we talk about banks, doing unlawful financial operations. Its not a bank's role to investigate murders. Poor can't do that much impactful financial crime, can they

joseloyaio 5y ago

Switzerland is all about Neutrality What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient. There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.

sdze 5y ago
This country should be heavily sanctioned by the international community. They actively pull in (tax) fraudsters and criminals.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  just like: bigger half of Caribbean, City of London, all of the UK Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Singapore, Delaware (yes that's US) and many, many more. Its a dumb approach, sold by populist politicians to less-than-bright voters before elections who want binary world and simple solutions to all their problems.
- sfrank 5y ago
  So, like Delaware?

barry-cotter 5y ago

> This article is a bit difficult to understand; there's a mixture of actual money laundering with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account". There's a difficult and IMO increasingly urgent question here, of whether the banking system is a utility or something else. There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers. Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". If a criminal hasn't had their whole wealth confiscated as proceeds of crime by the courts, is the convention now that nonetheless they should be deprived of the ability to use them? Maybe. I really don't know the answer in some hard cases. But it feels like if the banking system is going to be part of the law enforcement system, that needs to be established through actual laws passed through the parliament. As far as I can see there are some charges of actual complicity in the article, but it's hard to separate them from "this bad person was a client". https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/1495445847806705667?s=20&t=vAcMwjshy289nxCFf0y0og https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/149544584780670566...

mrandish 5y ago
> the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account" > Nobody gets sentenced to "and you are not allowed a bank account for the rest of your life". You make some thought-provoking points. Over the past decade I've noticed a creeping erosion of the fundamental liberal tenet "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" in the courts of public opinion and media assumption.
pjc50 5y ago
Came here to post dsquared's comment. Compare and contrast this thread with the truckers one. We don't really want to force banks into some kind of ill-specified "account cancellation culture".
rich_sasha 5y ago
Whilst I agree with everything you say (quote?), you’re not meant to bank with unexplained or unsavoury sources of funds. Eg storing money you stole from your murdered is not better than money laundering. Iirc some of the CS clients fell into this category and the bank was very keen to not ask questions. I’m pretty sure there is a bank somewhere in the Alps where Kim Jong Un has a little bank account under an appropriately obfuscated identity. Probably more than one. Whoever opened it from the bank’s side probably knew something is up but chose not to ask questions. And they are providing banking access to North Korea’s dictator.

kragen 5y ago

Another day, another answer to "what is Bitcoin good for?" Earlier today we were discussing the false-positive rate of Google Drive's copyright-scanning approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404587. What do you suppose the leaker's false-positive rate on "fraudsters and corrupt politicians" is? The article does admit this: > It is not illegal to have a Swiss account and the leak also contained data of legitimate clients who had done nothing wrong. Moreover, almost all of the examples in the article seem to be cases of "ex-con nevertheless is able to open bank account". Isn't that a good thing? Do we want a criminal conviction to implicitly include a lifetime of exclusion from the financial system? The sole exception seems to be "an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal," which is to say, the accountholder may turn out to be innocent. This suggests that the whistleblower's false-positive rate was upwards of 99%. So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative. Not a hosted wallet like Coinbase or Binance, though. They're probably almost as vulnerable as Credit Suisse. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375671

Youden 5y ago
> So, if you've done nothing wrong but you don't want your banking details to be leaked for journalists in hostile countries to comb through looking for something they can pin on you, maybe Bitcoin would be a better alternative. But with Bitcoin all transactions are public, journalists don't need a leak.
- kragen 5y ago
  Transactions, yes, and dates and amounts, but not names. And many "transactions" on the blockchain are within a single wallet. It'll be interesting to see what happens when journalists start reporting on the immense data in the blockchain, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet. I don't think it'll happen as long as the "journalists" are the kind that think it's okay to publish an encryption key to a publicly available encrypted file of confidential data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak#Sequence_of_leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...

jdrc 5y ago

Everybody likes defending the bank's right to bank with murderers, but god forbid they bank with a cam sex worker. https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover-wetspace/ https://bitcoinist.com/allie-rae-onlyfans-x-crypto-crossover...

jimbob45 5y ago
Murderers don't disproportionately trigger chargebacks. We've had this discussion a lot in the past few years [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337834
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jdrc 5y ago
  is there any actual data about that or is it urban myth? Onlyfans keeps identity documents for its members so trafficking-wise they are actually safer than facebook. there are all other businesses affected by the same discrimination, e.g. sex toy shops, dating websites, nudist websites, basically anything that shows skin. I find it hard to believe that chargebacks are so much of an issue, especially since there are third parties willing to take the risk for a high fee (CCbill).
justshowpost 5y ago

jmyeet 5y ago

It's this sort of thing that gives me (even more) confidence that pretty much every government conspiracy or at least the more incredulous claims (eg aliens and UFOs) are false. Such systems would rely on humans and humans tend to be really bad at keeping secrets or they simply have a crisis of conscience and release things they technically shouldn't as is the case here. Look at the Manhattan project. utmost secrecy. Attempts to segregate the workers in towns to limit contact with potential spies. Yet people felt ideologically the US should not have a monopoly on such a weapon so leaked it to th Soviets anyway. Go back to antiquity and you have Julius Caesar who held ultimate power in Rome and had loyal legions and immense wealth. And he was undone by a handful of principled people with knives. I actually think this is why things are never as bad as they seem and conversely never as good as they seem. This leak, the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and so on. I applaud whoever is in a position to leak this information and does so at great personal risk.

salawat 5y ago
...Never before have I expected to hear anyone calling the person who proliferated nuclear secrets "principled". Differences of opinion aside, you severely underestimate the character/circumstances/motives/number of "conscientious objectors" in society.

adamhearn 5y ago

The accounts (and who they belong to) can be explored on this site: https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en/ https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/en...

jokoon 5y ago

Bank secrecy and shadow banking should not exist. The worst thing about capitalism and globalism is tax dodging and bank secrecy.

WHA8m 5y ago

Once again the leaker went to Süddeutsche Zeitung [1] and left his/her/their documents there. Panama papers [2] and Paradise papers [3] started there as well. I'm really wondering why that is. [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers

Fronzie 5y ago
Well, by now they have a reputation: Leakers of high-profile cases can stay anonymous if they go to this newspaper.

Traster 5y ago

I'm honestly always amazed at people in these threads who say "Oh, well in general this is a public good, so we should be hands off". Sure, the default should be hands off, but if you have enough information to know what youre doing is wrong, you are responsible. It's one thing to say it's a public service, but if you know what you're doing is wrong, you know it's wrong,and in a lot of cases, a lot of effort is put into pretending that you don't know it's wrong even though you know it's wrong. At the point where your own employees are risking their careers because they know it's wrong. Well... maybe only poor people have moral compasses.

rosndo 5y ago

Oof. Some incredibly problematic stuff in this article: > Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The Guardian seems to be proposing that people with (certain?) criminal convictions should not be allowed to have bank accounts. Is there any other way to interpret this?

amai 5y ago

Democratic Switzerland should at least force its bank to only make business with customers from democratic countries. By doing that they would avoid a huge number of highly problematic customers. So basically only make business with countries which have a score of 6.0 or higher in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Components

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Doing so would require a vote from all the Swiss (as any real democracy would require), and a successful vote would block them from doing business with customers from almost all other countries (as they wouldn’t qualify as real democracies by Swiss standards). I’m not sure how such a referendum would be written, but surely it wouldn’t pass (Swiss are fairly conservative in regards to money and business).
- amai 5y ago
  I didn't say they should restrict business to countries most similar to Switzerland. There are 75 countries on the democracy index that are called democratic. I believe doing business with 75 countries should be more than enough for small Switzerland. This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships. P.S.: Actually the restriction of business to the 75 democratic countries in the world should be the rule in every democratic country, because it would show that democratic values are more important than money.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > This would free Switzerland from the accusation of hypocrisy, because at the moment it is democratic itself, but profiting a lot from money coming from authoritarian, corrupt regimes and even outright dictatorships. How is a democracy index put out by an organization legally binding? You are still asking to encode a qualitative judgement into law, which is difficult even in less democratic countries. > because it would show that democratic values are more important than money. For most people, democracy is the means to safety and security (and yes, money), not the other way around. Your plan would ironically make more sense in an autocracy where such ideology can be more easily implemented and enforced.