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Banks do a massive amount of tracking and flagging. Even putting a joke “for drugs” in a Venmo field can cause issues. Plus reporting large transactions. There was a massive post on HN yesterday about how often banks close startup accounts due to false positives.

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All this flagging seems to be more for "cover your *ss" reasons, because the real criminals continue doing their business everyday.

> the real criminals continue doing their business everyday

Any source for that? Media loves to blame banks for everything, but when you go into the details it always seems pretty marginal (e.g. the HSBC Mexico stuff).

It cannot be marginal because drug traffic, just as an example, moves billions of dollars every year. They certainly have schemes and someone in the banking system must be complying with these schemes. Every time the officials uncover one of these schemes, banks are miraculously not charged of anything and they don't even give back the profits of the illegal operation.

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