Slashdot Mirror

So if no banks will loan Trump money, why would Russia or China take those loans? Surely they know its bad business.

Money laundering. Russia is a kleptocracy, all of those oligarchs need a way to get their money out of the country so they can spend it on stuff you can't buy in Russia. But the west has a range of anti-money laundering mechanisms that, while imperfect, are still a major obstacle. Turns out real-estate is so loosey-goosey that its a pretty good way to launder money.

There has been a ton of reporting on his association with money laundering. But it gets lost in the metric fuckton of other scandal and corruption stories. Here are just a couple of reports, from before and after the election:

FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations

Dirty money: Trump and the Kazakh connection
          — FT probe finds evidence a Trump venture has links to alleged laundering network

Donald Trump’s Worst Deal
          — The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

US election: Trump’s Russian riddle
          — The Republican nominee became the face of Bayrock, a developer with roots in the Soviet Union

Or she could have obeyed the law and filled out the one page form.

De-facto money, yes. But money for the purposes of FINCEN and IRS regulations?

Money and 'property' are subject to different federal regulations. So if Bitcoin is considered money, then a whole bunch of addtional reporting requirements and controls apply to it.

unusual mixed deposits of money orders, third party checks, payroll checks, etc., into a business account;

Yea that might seem like they only look at business accounts, but bots residential looks for anything that isn't a regular payroll deposit. My co-worker, against my explicit advice to avoid using his personal account for bitcoin trades, got his account forcible closed and had a week to find a new bank.

This is the horses mouth:
http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html

The TL;DR
Users of Bitcoin are not subject to MSB regulations.
Exchangers of Bitcoin for USD are subject to MSB regulations.

The WSJ is a poor lens to view math through ;)

This is called hawala, and is very much legal,

Not the way most hawala operators operate. The money transfer agency must be registered as well as following guidelines and reporting requirements.
See here for some more details, including hawala operators who have been arrested and convicted.

When traveling into the US from a foreign country (this obviously does NOT apply to domestic travel, but good to know) 10. How much cash may I bring with me for my trip? There is no limit on the total amount of money or monetary instruments that may be brought into or taken out of the United States. However, if you transport or cause to be transported, more than $10,000 in monetary instruments on any occasion into or out of the United States, or if you receive more than that amount, in behalf of someone else and then transport it, you must file a Customs Form 4790 with U.S. Customs. Failure to comply can result in civil and criminal penalties, including seizure of the currency or monetary instruments. Monetary instruments include U.S. or foreign coins, currency, traveler's checks, money orders, and negotiable instruments or investment securities in bearer form are all considered when determining the total $10,000 reporting requirement.

That'll get you on the Treasury department's watch list in record time...

http://www.fincen.gov/

I believe that this applies to single cash transactions of > $10k, or multiple smaller transaction that equal or exceed 10k over a specified period of time. Also, only the following companies are required to report these transaction:

  - banks
  - securities companies
  - money services companies
  - casinos
  - gem/precious metal dealers
  - insurance companies

Notably, car dealers are not on this list...

See the federal Bank Secrecy Act - http://www.fincen.gov/

What's so striking is that there are so few different spams that make it through the filters. And most of the top spammers are known; see the ROKSO list. They're all crooks; legitimate businesses haven't been able to spam through filters in years now. With slightly more law enforcement effort, most of those spammers could be put behind bars. Two or three go to jail every year now; if that could be increased to ten or twenty, the problem would drop substantially.

The way to find them is by following the money. The FBI and Treasury have the means in place to do that, developed for money laundering. That's what FinCEN does. It's tough to repeatedly collect money via credit card and hide from FinCEN. Especially when investigators can initiate tranactions themselves, which is easy enough with Viagra spammers. Maybe after Bush is out of office this can be addressed.

Actually, if some anti-spam people wanted to deal with the Viagra spammers, it would be easy enough. Find the order form, and start ordering using a script. Use random credit card numbers that will pass the check digit check, delivery addresses of random buildings or PO boxes, and a broad range of IP addresses via proxies. The orders will all be rejected at credit card check, but their credit card service provider will hit them with a fee for each bogus transaction. Drive them out of business that way.

Those guys shouldn't be that hard to find with enough law enforcement effort. Get a credit card from a cooperating bank. Put a trace on it. Buy some Viagra from a spam. Watch where the money goes, which is probably some bank in a high-crime country. Visit the bank and talk to them. Threaten to have their abilty to process credit cards cut off. Pry the actual payee out of them. Discover that it's another intermediary and start over.

This is what we pay the FBI for. This is why the FBI has field offices outside the US. This is why the Financial Crimes Information Network exists.

The FBI's Internet-related criminal enforcement unit has gotten soft. They sit up in Baltimore and send out child pornography, then go after the people they've entrapped. The process is even mostly automated now. That's an easy way to get their stats up, and fits the Bush administration's "regulate sex, not business" mindset, but doesn't solve crimes that have victims. Something to push on after Jan. 20, when the Democrats take Congress and can start asking hard questions of the executive branch.

Exactly. Somewhere in the list of people who traded the stock in the week or two before the spam run are the ones responsible. They can be found; that's what the U.S. Government's Financial Crimes Information Network is for. If we have to have all this Big Brother stuff, we should get some benefit from it.

Send those stock spams to SEC Enforcement.

This should be reported, in very clear terms, to "enforcement@sec.gov". Or on the SEC's online form. Or to the SEC Division of Enforcement, 100 F Street, N.E. Washington, D.C. 20549. Because it's a felony being committed in support of a pump-and-dump stock scam.

The stock being hyped is "TTEN", which has very low volume. The SEC can find out who was trading it just before the spam run started. That's how to find the people behind this. They can follow the money.

So put together a comprehensive package listing all known stocks being hyped by this thing and the dates the spam began, and ship it off to the SEC. The SEC and FinCen (the U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) have the data mining tools to look at the stock transactions and find the people behind this. The SEC has gone after pump-and-dump spammers many times before, and they usually get them.

The OFAC lists have been around since the 1970's, I believe, with the Bank Secrecy Act.

Transactions of at least $5,000 that the institution knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect have no business or apparent lawful purpose or are not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage and for which the institution knows of no reasonable explanation after due investigation.
http://www.epic.org/privacy/rfpa/
http://www.fincen.gov/sars/sars_by_numb_issue5.pdf

These would initially go to the fed who would pass them on to DHS, IRS or whoever. The whole thing makes the financial institution err on the side of over-reporting. Not raising an SAR on something that turns out to be an issue (i.e., that Egyptian's down payment for flying lessons) will dump the FI in deep trouble with the regulators.

In most cases the problem can be sorted with a quick call for a reason and a source of funds. In this case it should have been clear that the people had other funds and they were looking to pay of their debt. With a reasonable explanation, all should have been quickly settled.

Oh, I do AML/KYC systems for a largeish bank so this is why I can comment.

And if you want to know more, it's called a Suspicious Activity Report. Also see the US Code it falls under.... Don't forget the user manual!!

Well, it's required by law; specifically it's a provison in the USA PATRIOT Act. Any financial institution doing business in the United States is required to collect your SSN if you are a US Citizen (living in the US or abroad). Your SSN is bounced against fincen.gov and can be placed by the bank into the SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) http://www.fincen.gov/reg_sar.html This was all created because of the terroist bull3hit but now it's used for any 'suspicious' activity. And, just like those people who can't fly anymore without a cavity search due to their name matching a 'person of interest', this can really screw your finances up...

Now, none of your posts have acknowledged that the Patriot Act is being abused to prosecute other kinds of crime than terrorism, despite your assertion that one has.

You did mention the "Bank Secrets Act", but so what? What are you driving at here? When you troll, you're "just kidding"?

I've answered your specious question in all candor -

I've answered your specious question in all candor - so come clean: why are you satisfied with these criminal investigations being undermined by easily challengable Patriot Act overreaching for inadmissible evidence? Or are you so deeply perverse that you're laundering money, and can't help cackling as these keystone kops work overtime to keep you in business?

My computer crime teacher, who worked for the feds and is in the know, told us all about FinCEN. Apparently, any financial transaction of $10,000 or over is reported to the feds and kept on record. FinCEN has the most powerful unclassified information gathering computers there are. With just the name of a person they can find out just about anything they need to by just looking at financial ties and transactions. All this new law means is that FinCEN will be working directly with the FBI and such instead of waiting for the courts to approve each and every thing. It's not best thing that can happen, but at least its not as bad as it could be. One day everything will be all fixed. One day.