Bank fined for being hilariously sloppy about its money laundering.

Angilion

Angilion

Angilion

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I got some amusement from this. Not from the money laundering per se, which is far from unusual for banks. Lots of profit in money laundering. What amused me was the "we don't even pretend to care" sloppiness in how they did the money laundering, which is presumably what they were being fined for. People were carrying binbags full of cash into the bank for laundering. Not even a vaguely plausible attempt at concealing the laundering.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59629711

A gold trading business suspected of money-laundering deposited £700,000 in cash into one NatWest branch in black bin bags, a court heard on Monday.
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But the bank was only fined because they were so sloppy about their money laundering procedures, not for money laundering itself:

The state-backed bank was "in no way complicit in the money-laundering which took place", the judge said at Southwark Crown Court on Monday.
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Not complicit in the money laundering at all - all they did was the actual money laundering.
 
Par for the course as they say. What's rich is people still associate crypto as the tool for this type of activity yet it still happens in plain sight for fiat and even blatantly bad press like this gets forgot about instantly.
 
Most impressive part of this story is that the criminals actually found branches that haven't been closed down.
 
OMG I can see why, like WTF:

The FCA's lawyer Clare Montgomery said there "was a rapid escalation in the amount of cash" being deposited from November 2013, with figures reaching up to £1.8m a day. By 2014, Fowler Oldfield was NatWest's "single most lucrative" client in the Bradford area.
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£1.8 million a day, in Bradford! I know some of the locals are fond of gold but still... it's literally a high street shop FFS! :D

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^^^ Owner looks pretty dodgy.
 
gpuerrilla said:
Par for the course as they say. What's rich is people still associate crypto as the tool for this type of activity yet it still happens in plain sight for fiat and even blatantly bad press like this gets forgot about instantly.
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Laundering a few hundred million is small time for a big bank. HSBC has laundered who knows how many billions. They got caught ~10 years ago laundering vast amounts of money for drug cartels in the Americas ($881M was proven, but the figure was probably much higher)...and just carried on laundering. A fine they didn't care much about (even if they paid it) and an independent monitoring team they didn't give information to. Hardly a problem. Their share price dropped for a little while immediately after their drug money laundering was publicised, but that was only temporary.

Crypto is a far better tool for money laundering, but banks don't need to use it. They don't need money laundering to be any easier than it already is for them. They probably don't want it to be, either. Why would a bank want the competition?
 
Angilion said:
Laundering a few hundred million is small time for a big bank. HSBC has laundered who knows how many billions. They got caught ~10 years ago laundering vast amounts of money for drug cartels in the Americas ($881M was proven, but the figure was probably much higher)...and just carried on laundering. A fine they didn't care much about (even if they paid it) and an independent monitoring team they didn't give information to. Hardly a problem. Their share price dropped for a little while immediately after their drug money laundering was publicised, but that was only temporary.
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Yep and after that HSBC treated their customers like dirt and locked up a load of genuine business customers accounts and left them in limbo without access to their money because their monitoring software they put in place wrongly assumed they were money laundering.
 
Can someone explain to me why cleaning the money is so important? Does it contain some kind of special scent or markings that means washing it is key? :confused:
 
dLockers said:
Can someone explain to me why cleaning the money is so important? Does it contain some kind of special scent or markings that means washing it is key? :confused:
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It might have traces on it from being handled by peasants and no "top earner" wants that!

Just in case you're not joking, the cleaning in money laundering is metaphorical - it's "cleaning the crime off the money" by constructing a fake legal explanation for the source of the money.
 
Angilion said:
It might have traces on it from being handled by peasants and no "top earner" wants that!

Just in case you're not joking, the cleaning in money laundering is metaphorical - it's "cleaning the crime off the money" by constructing a fake legal explanation for the source of the money.
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Not entirely accurate.
 
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Richie said:
Rather than just posting a slight at what the previous poster wrote, you could have posted your explanation on it... That would have been far more helpful.
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Sensitivitie type eh. Is he your girlfriend?

It wasn't a slight and feel free to look at the first hit on Google.
 
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