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Comment by seesomesense | Hacker News Reader

I have a professional acquaintance ( my profession, not his) in the anti-moneylaundering division of a large national, non-US bank. He mentioned that their default assumption is that if an account or a transaction involves bitcoin, it is connected to criminals. They log the details and pass it on to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

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The same thing happens where I work (a restaurant). One of my professional acquaintances assumes that if meal preparation involves a knife, it is connected to a murder. He writes down the wielder, date, and time, and sends the information to the police each day.

:D if I could upvote twice I would

Was it a very niche brand of knife that is the nearly exclusive choice of criminals?

Yes, it was.

And don't confuse "nearly exclusive choice of criminals" with "only criminals choose it".

After all, cars are the nearly exclusive choice of bank robbers for getaways. But I don't think you are suggesting that every person driving in a car away from a bank should be documented and reported to the authorities.

No I'm not meaning to imply that anyone should assume someone using BTC is a criminal. However it's not irrational to pay closer attention to them.

I do think reporting every single BTC user to a three letter agency is pushing it though. I would understand doing that for accounts that raise red flags beyond simply using BTC, but doing that for every single one seems a bit paranoid and ineffective anyways.

Many banks will give you a generic error when you make a transaction using an account number that is associated with a business models around bitcoin (e.g. companies that exchange bitcoins for cash after you make a wire-transfer to them are all tracked by the banks and the transaction fails with an unknown error. This is a fact in Unicredit, HVB, (possibly others?) The issue is usually "logged" ;-)).

I'd be interested to find out more about how banks implement possible black/white lists on their users. How far does it affect risk mgmt? Will users get negative points when applying for a loan? And how are customers punished who dare to bet on alternative banking like BTC or god forbid send cash to a bitcoin wallet.

Who knows more? (asking for a friend :))

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