Jag tyckte Patrick McKenzie’s genomgång var intressant och gav en nyanserad bild (OBS lång text, bitvis lite onödigt avancerad stilistiskt). USA-centrerat naturligtvis, men amerikanska regler har en tendens att bli hela världens angelägenhet. En bit tyckte jag var rätt rolig och värd att citera:
You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?”
Well, you’d be surprised with what people write in response to that question. Every Compliance department will explain, with substantial aggravation, that the Lizardman’s Constant means no matter how serious the situation is they will inevitably have to read a lot of Purpose of Transaction: Arms Smuggling and Prostitution. But you’d also be surprised just how dumb some criminals are.
But this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.
This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.
The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank.
You have probably heard that Al Capone was guilty of many crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering, but he was eventually sent to jail for one which was easy to prove: tax evasion. Prosecutors are like engineers who can push buttons that eventually send people to prison: they like having tools available which enable a certain amount of tactical laziness.
Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”
And congratulations, you have just eaten (accept this oversimplification for civilians) a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done. Which prosecutors will take notice of, and then say that in lieu of them prosecuting you for all of that and winning, you should probably take the plea deal. This will save them investigatory and prosecutorial effort, even though they’re pretty confident you’re factually guilty of the (far more complicated and odious) crime that happened prior to the lying.
You will see this over and over and over again in federal indictments: two pages of backstory about the crime-y part of the crime, and then ten pages of an exacting reconstruction of how the money was moved and which lies in particular were told about the money movement. Is this necessarily the best possible thing to put in prosecutors’ toolbox? Candidly, I have some concerns about how gamesmanship sometimes enters that practice. Be that as it may, prosecutors and regulators are extremely savvy about how these work mechanically, and they are an explicit goal of the KYC regime even if it doesn’t say that on the tin.
Patrick McKenzie är ofta läsvärd i allmänhet faktiskt, om man vill nörda ner sig i hur det finansiella systemet faktiskt fungerar i praktiken. Om man fortfarande vill läsa mer efter att ha tagit sig igenom KYC-biten så kan man fortsätta med AML här: Money laundering and AML compliance
