Yeah, this is almost certainly some AML provision that has gone amuck, but they'd rather inconvenience you in a silly way to prove that they were "doing their job" than to get themselves shut down due to sanctions.
My friend had an account with Isis in the username because she learnt about the Egyptian god in video games. She was panic about that a few years later
That was the original name for what eventually became Google Wallet. It was launched as Isis, then promptly rebranded to Softcard before eventually being bought by Google.
Surely Aleppo. Financial institutions are responsible for making sure their customers don't circumvent sanctions, don't launder money etc. If PayPal would not stopped this transaction, it could be a huge liability for them in regards to financial regulators.
Unfortunately, I do not know of a better solution than "match transaction data on this list of regexes" that would scale for the millions of daily payments that banks are processing.
The real bank that I use in the UK cares about what you put in the reference field. Putting something like "AK47" as the reference quickly results in a phone call from them telling you to not do that.
Yes, but transaction screening should rely on information about the accounts involved, and not the descriptions on the payments. Because those mean nothing.
Come again? Just to make sure we’re on the same page, your opinion is that terrorists should be free to use existing financial instruments (bank accounts, PayPal etc.) to transfer funds for their terrorist needs? Or am I misunderstanding?
Wouldn't it make more sense to allow these transactions to proceed but report them for investigation?
Aiding terrorist organizations is a crime. Wouldn't it be better to know who's doing it?
It feels like it would make more sense than automated block lists and account closures.
It's sort of similar to how bone-headed the shutdown of Backpage was. Backpage actively and willingly worked with the police to investigate human trafficking etc... It was basically a giant honeypot. From what I've read, when they were shut down the government lost a valuable tool and ally in the fight against sex slavery.
Yes, because the cost of pretending to “do something” is far too high (unbanking unprivileged people and a huge % of the world just because they aren’t born in the ‘right’ country or with the right name) for absolutely no result!
By analogy, would members of the KYC/AML cult have the opinion that terrorists should be free to use roads for their terrorists needs?
The solution is police roadblocks and checks every kilometer or so?
> Unfortunately, I do not know of a better solution than "match transaction data on this list of regexes" that would scale for the millions of daily payments that banks are processing.
I think it would be reasonable to ask you, and other supporters of this, to provide emperical data of the positive law-enforcement impact that grepping transactions for "ALEP" has had, so we can weight it against the human cost (capital and time spent across all sides, including legal departments in financial institutions, Google Docs written, impact on affected customers).
Because the default assumption of a normal person is, of course, that this is ridiculous.
