[hkai]

You can thank American and European governments for that. They extorted money from private companies for "due diligence violations" and now they will ban you and close your account on any smallest suspicion of financial impropriety or connections with sanctioned individuals or countries.

As an example, people lost their money to PayPal and had their accounts banned because their address contained a street named after a sanctioned location.

Corporations are panicking. They spend billions of dollars on due diligence now and this is the result you are seeing. They don't want to spend even more billions of dollars on fines.

Obviously they can't tell you "transferring over 500 USD per month to Africa looked dodgy to us, so we closed your account". They are keeping details secret, which makes sense because next time you'd just circumvent their checks.

[jstarfish]

> You can thank American and European governments for that. They extorted money from private companies for "due diligence violations" and now they will ban you and close your account on any smallest suspicion of financial impropriety or connections with sanctioned individuals or countries.

> As an example, people lost their money to PayPal and had their accounts banned because their address contained a street named after a sanctioned location.

That is ridiculous. Modern companies have no problem Hoovering up and analyzing vast amounts of intelligence on consumers for marketing purposes. PayPal almost certainly has liasons with any number of three-letter agencies that also feed them intel related to criminal or terrorist activity. Link analysis and graph database software has reached commodity status; it's affordable and available. Directing them to do something to stop transactions between accounts known to be affiliated with terrorism is a reasonable request.

If their solution to money laundering bans accounts based on something so naive as terms found in a street address, their unbounded, colossal incompetence is not the fault of any government. PayPal has never had their shit together-- run-of-the-mill fraudsters have no problem keeping accounts open, but yours will eventually be seized without notice or explanation.

[candiodari]

> That is ridiculous. Modern companies have no problem Hoovering up and analyzing vast amounts of intelligence on consumers ...

Meanwhile the EU imposed a 3 billion dollar fine on Google for, and this is sadly not a joke, depreffing incredibly annoying shopping comparison sites, specifically this one [1][2] and a few others. Go on, visit it. And then tell me how much the quality of the internet is lowered by making that site harder to find.

(the real reason: the Kelkoo CEO, and I'm not even joking, convinced a secretary of the EU competition commisioner (the previous one) that they were a viable EU-based competitor to Google. Yes, really, that's the level of intelligence the EU commission had, they believed that Kelkoo would be doing internet search engines better than Google)

What exactly makes you think that when we're talking lesser amounts they'd be more careful ? Doesn't it make more sense that when they want something, like say, imposing sanctions or find someone that may have spied on them, they don't just go "all info on these users or it's a $100 million fine" ?

Because reality is more like "Block this list of users because the police chief's wife's tennis partners' ball producer's 2-year old niece says they stole a teddy from her dog or it's a $1 billion fine. Oh never mind she found it. Did you block em yet ? BLOCK EM !"

[1] http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/

[2] https://www.politico.eu/pro/politico-pro-morning-tech-google... (non-paywalled mirror @ http://blog.digitalmedialicensing.org/?p=3823 )

[morsma]

This is the correct answer.