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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the government will like that. It'll put Barclays in a lose-lose situation. If they are not careful with flagged transactions, they get fined heavily. If they are careful and mistakes happen, they get fined heavily.

Better give them an option where they can be reckless and it has no consequences for the legal system.

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Why should this be Barclays' problem at all, though? Beyond perhaps some objective criteria for reporting certain financial transactions to the authorities that deal with things like fraud or money laundering, why should anyone other than official government departments be responsible for making any judgement or taking any other action here? Let the appropriate government departments take official legal action if they think there's a real case to be made, and let them cover the costs of that. Let banks provide banking services and banking customers use them. It's really not complicated or unfair, until someone makes it so.

It is not the banks responsibility. See my other comments.

However, this is an incredible show of incompetence. It is easy to make banks responsible of money laundering. Also easy to make them non-responsible of inappropriately holding customers funds.

Got a problem with that? You can deal in cash or bitcoins then.

>Got a problem with that? You can deal in cash or bitcoins then.

That's an incomplete solution. Cash and Bitcoin are still subject to money laundering regulations. You just reduce the number of instances where they are applied, but you can't completely avoid them

That was a rather sarcastic comment. As cash is not practical (and can be faced with suspicion) and bitcoin is very speculative.

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