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by smoothbenny
744 days ago
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Huh? I'm not big on police over-reach but to claim that the chain of responsibility for a crime ends at some arbitrary point is silly on its face. Should either side of a hitman-for-hire arrangement not be penalized for participating in a crime? Should we eliminate laws criminalizing murder because some people are wrongfully tried and convicted? Turning off a criminal's money laundering spigot is a deterrent against committing that crime. I don't see how that's confined to a logical argument. Surely there must be data to back up this claim if it's so easily provable. How much stronger would the dollar be today? Source? Even a source for "countless small businesspeople being locked out of their bank accounts" would be interesting. |
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It's not about an arbitrary point, it's about whether you're actively participating in the crime. So for example:
> Should either side of a hitman-for-hire arrangement not be penalized for participating in a crime?
Paying someone to commit murder is conspiracy to commit murder, not money laundering. It has nothing inherently to do with banks or KYC and is just as illegal if you pay the hitman in gold bullion or Monero.
> Turning off a criminal's money laundering spigot is a deterrent against committing that crime.
But that doesn't actually happen, because the rules only trap the unwary. Innocent people who don't know that doing something will get their account locked even though they've done nothing wrong.
Criminal organizations are repeat players with their own lawyers, so they know what not to do, and then they don't get caught because money is fungible. For example, if they're selling pot brownies and it's illegal to sell pot, they just put down on the form that they're selling ordinary brownies. Or cherry pie, or car washes, or it doesn't matter what because they just put a legal product on the form and then they only get caught if the government independently comes to investigate their criminal enterprise, which is the same way they get caught without any kind of bank reporting or KYC.
> Surely there must be data to back up this claim if it's so easily provable. How much stronger would the dollar be today? Source?
How would you even propose to measure this? If there was a source it would just be a paper someone published making the same case as the message board comment. To actually measure the effect you would need to get rid of the KYC laws and then measure the result, which hasn't happened, so the only thing you're going to get either way is reasoning for what would be expected to happen under the circumstances.
But how would you expect other countries to respond to the US leveraging the dollar in this way to infringe on their sovereignty and seize the assets of their citizens?
> Even a source for "countless small businesspeople being locked out of their bank accounts" would be interesting.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...