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How EU anti-money laundering rules threaten financial privacy (edri.org)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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EU rules regarding anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing and sanctions law (AML/CFT) have increasingly shifted responsibilities to detect crime from public entities to companies . AML/CFT law requires “obliged entities”, like banks, to collect large amounts of financial and other personal data about their customers.

The way banks implement these rules in the EU has led to a systemic negative impact on human rights, often because of over-compliance, risk-aversion and weak accountability. This has been the case in the Netherlands where, among large number of human rights breaches by banks, Dutch ING Bank has even publicly apologised for discriminating against its customers based on profiling.

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[–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

I very recently opened an account with a cryptocurrency broker and was surprised at the hoops I had to jump through. They made me show my driver's license, show my face, read out numbers... all because I wanted to invest a few thousand euros in a cryptocurrency. I realize that this is because of the kinds of legal requirements described in the article, but it makes me worry, if they do that for banks today, are they going to do it for online platforms tomorrow...?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    It's also pretty ridiculous how poorly it actually works. Recently I wanted to cash out some crypto, and the platform I was using was telling about their "peer-to-peer (P2P) rules to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and Travel Rule standards".

    I could only transfer funds to the exchange if I verified I own the account on another platform.

    So all you have to do to verify it, is make a screenshot of having an account on a different (non-KYC) platform. When you verified you also own that other random wallet, everything is fine...

    Soo, sending crypto "peer-to-peer" directly to the exchange is a big problem - but if you add an extra wallet in between as an extra hop, that you've verified to own but is off-platform - it doesn't matter anymore how that crypto got there

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