[stickfigure]

It's worse than that. You can't engage in financial transactions with another person without probing into the details of their life (and reporting everything upstream to the state), or you're a criminal too. The Stasi worked this way.

[mrtksn]

You don’t report upstream, you don’t probe into their lives and you are not a criminal if you miss something.

What you do is to create a process for KYC where you check against lists of threats like known terrorists or sanctioned persons, companies and governments.

For example you check if your client lives in Crimea or Cuba, if so the dealings with them need to be limited in accordance of the jurisdiction trade in.

You also need to look out for suspicious transactions and block or maybe report those, for example if a local barbershop business is moving a lot of gold, you are supposed to catch that.

There are a lot of companies and startups in the area who make tools to streamline this process. Since there’s no standardization across the globe, you need to build systems that can catch names that went through multiple transliterations or create statistical models to detects unusual activity and so on.

Source: I know people in the business.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but the governmental organisations don't have the thigh grip on citizens that Facebook or Google have on their users.

This citizen control business is made of thousands of organisations that often work against each other. Significantly more vibrant space than the internet of 2021, a lot of userbase shifts are happening all the time. Lock-ins are softer than those of Google, visas and migration agreements give space to a lot of user flow between those.

There's no monopoly or central organisation to stream peoples lives to.

[CryptoPunk]

I've been subject to KYC checks, and the bank very much probed into intimate financial details for weeks, with its employees gaining proprietary knowledge of things like investment strategies. If I hadn't complied, I would have not received banking services, and would have been unable to do things like pay taxes.

Anti-money laundering laws 100% turn the presumption of innocence on its head. You are presumed guilty, and forced to surrender your privacy, until you prove yourself innocent.

[mrtksn]

Yes, if you are into cash intensive business or from a country with a lot of mafia/armed conflicts you might be put through some checks if you want to do business in a place that is actively hostile to the stuff going on in that region.

The western world is a bureaucratic hell for people from Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Irak etc.

If you are from country A that doesn't share data with country B and you want to live/work/do business in country B, the bureaucracy can also be heavier since it's going to be harder asses your situation. You might be asked to explain what you do, why do you want to use their services and even prove your claims if you want to be accepted as a customer.

That's something that no one likes. Banks like making money and yo don't make money by refusing work, so they will do the bare minimum to cover their asses but sometimes the cover needed can be quite large.

[angus-prune]

Before even checking the username, I had guessed that this would be as a result of cryptocurrency speculation.

From reports from other crypto investors, I would also suspect that the investment also wasn't limited to buying on a mainstream exchange, but buying crypto from people directly with cash transfers or trading back and forth directly between less mainstream currencies.

Crypto trading is high-suspicion for two reasons - its very easy to claim a windfall has come from off-book crypto-trading when its actually profits from crime.

It is also very easy to be caught up with illegal transfers of money from other countries or to proscribed organisations when transfering money directly.

Clearly OP isn't involved in either of these illegal activities, otherwise they wouldn't have passed KYC, but it seems reasonable that they would have had to jump through some hoops to demonstrate that their activities were indeed legitimate and above board.

I would suggest that their personal experience is not representative of the thoroughness of the KYC process most people would go experience.

[CryptoPunk]

>>Crypto trading is high-suspicion for two reasons

Unacceptable in a free society. Probable cause is not reasonably construed based on these types of crude generalizations.

Due process means only a court can judge there to be probable cause, and that a search can only be done after it issues a warrant. A court would never rule probable to exist based on the type of formulaic rationale you're using.

The kind of KYC scrutiny innocent people are subjected to, based on much flimsier bases than even you have speculated existed in my case, is obscene.

When the private financial interactions and investment strategies of every one become privy en masse to a self-appointed class of surveillance agents, it creates information asymmetries between the general citizenry and those close to the state/regulated-industries. And information asymmetries lead to wealth and power disparities.

The surveillance state you are championing will inevitably lead to wealth and power concentrating into the hands of a tiny cadre of privileged insiders and that will lead to massive economic waste from rent-seeking and social instability.

There is no future for a liberal democratic society if the trend toward unchecked surveillance powers for the state is not arrested and reversed.

[giantg2]

"Due process means only a court can judge there to be probable cause, and that a search can only be done after it issues a warrant. A court would never rule probable to exist based on the type of formulaic rationale you're using."

Except they can (in practice and in contradiction to rules), and have done similar things in the past. The system really doesn't care about people's rights, mistakes are endemic and ignored, and it is more interested punishing people or collecting money than actual justice. At least that has been my experience.

[adaml_623]

You chose to use societal infrastructure to make money through the finance system (backed up by the legal system) and then complain because you hadn't researched that it came at the cost of your privacy.

[EricE]

Yes, guilty until proven innocent is such an efficient way to run a society - so easy to ask "why are you complaining?" if that's all you care about.

[mrtksn]

I’m not the one who implemented those and I did actually suffered quite a bit but calling it “guilty until proven innocent scheme” is a misrepresentation of the situation.

[CryptoPunk]

You shouldn't have to give any rights up to use "societal infrastructure". By your logic, whatever group of people come to govern over society can demand any one's rights by virtue of every one using "societal infrastructure". The authoritarian ruling party of China could make exactly your argument to the Uighurs who complain about their treatment.

[adaml_623]

I'm not sure why this comment has been downvoted. It seems like an accurate description of KYC requirements in western countries.

The benefits that society provides (roads, money, safety) come at the cost of not being anonymous (car registration, passports, KYC).

[FredPret]

The point is that the incentive is for companies to sidestep this regulatory burden by totally excluding citizens from Crimea and Cuba etc.