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Comment by whizzter | Hacker News Reader

The tax service here takes money laundering quite seriously so there's been a lot of regulation added for businesses handling cash, most affecting is probably the requirements of "certified tellers" that shot up the price for many smaller businesses (some even closing down or just switching to Swish).

Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.

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Especially after Swedbank and Danskebank got busted for laundering Russian money. But the banks now have numerous checkboxes to fill in when money comes from overseas, as if people receiving like 5000sek are laundering. (case in point, my dad wired me some money for my birthday, US->Sweden, Swedbank had to do a thorough check out of my dad, a University prof.) That said, I have heard of some system in place whereby people use a word-of-mouth banking system—mostly islamic communities, perhaps only that, to transfer money to and from overseas, so it's completely off the books. I don't remember what it's called, though.

The rules for laundering - know your customer - are ridiculous, governments don't need to turn banks in quasi-state actors to squash laundering if they really wanted to stop it.

Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.

That stuff can be not very good at doing what is intended. If I want to make a legit regulated transfer they now ask where the money came from and a lot was inherited forty years ago for which the records generally don't exist anymore. Meanwhile the actual criminals still manage to circumvent the system. It mostly creates hassle and expense for the law abiding.

I actually invested in a kyc business after being a bit horrified by the scam compounds in Cambodia but was disappointed when I heard a presentation of their successes which were mostly fines for legit people filling the forms wrong. Meanwhile the scam compounds got closed by raiding them and imprisoning or executing the criminals. I think the latter works much better than the former.

I sold a property earlier in August, my solicitor had to “verify my identity” this time even though she acted as my solicitor when purchasing said product.

Now tell me how intelligent the system is in that scenario.

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