Organised crime launders cash through UK post offices
Hahaha fucking helllllllll just read this. So many thoughts. Like “this is how you actually do money laundering, not on Oxford Street” and “British deference to small businesses being honest and taxpaying is the problem”. (Writes a small business owner.) www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
John Bull24love the bot where the senior officer just sends an emoji to the reporter every time the post office confirm deposit numbers are up.
sianushka.bsky.social18So occasionally when I do a reporting trip I have to take large amounts of $USD out of the post office and I’m always so nervous that they think I’m money laundering and not, you know, just heading to a warzone
Taffy Osborne5This is great reporting. Why do we simply not require an ID to deposit cash? If you are depositing for multiple accounts, each one has a record of the person that made the deposit? Surely legitimate small business owners can't object to that?
Ben Darlow3When I worked as a software developer at a large bank I was required to take compliance training about KYC (know your customer) highlighting patterns of fraud, even though in my role I never went near any customer-facing systems or data. It’s absurd that there’s no similar requirement for POs.
CW3In other news, I notice the Guardian decided to do the story you had already done about the rise of tipping - London Centric still one step ahead: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
ziw52.bsky.social1That’s nothing to do with the Post Office arrangement. That’s a bank’s KYB controls- what level of cash should be going through a business based on their business model and account opening declaration and then having checks in place to confirm what is. Post Office don’t know any of that info.
⤵️22This is a great but also somewhat confusing story. Money launderers use post office counters to deposit cash in mule bank accounts: fine. Banks receive large deposits from post office counters to personal accounts that are immediately transferred out to crypto exchanges: very obvious thing to 🚨🚩
ironeconomist.bsky.social20This looks like another massive problem that could easily be solved by the simple expedient of trying a little bit. Don’t even need the post office to do something, cash payments into accounts with this regularity and volume are intrinsically suspicious and should be flagged for review.
James Ball19"Unlike at a bank, the post office operative (often referred to as postmaster or subpostmaster) has no way to access any of the account details, and thus no way to check if the person with the card is its holder, or whether this transaction is part of a suspicious pattern"
Finn11it's wild that you will need more ID and be subject to more stringent AML checks buying 100 euros than depositing thousands of pounds into a bank account *at the same counter*
darcyswickham.bsky.social9How so much of the UK works now
Mark O’Neill 🐻4A classic example of how government policy is developed in neat silos by well meaning but deeply naive people. That and the fact that the UK black economy is huge in size. www.gov.uk/government/p...
LeithMotive4Unexpected societal cost of banks closing branches!
gabbylm.bsky.social2they should get some sort of IT system to check this. I hear the Japanese make good ones
James Tarry2Blimey. You’d think that the bank’s systems would pick up the patterns of behaviour on those accounts, even if the deposit was made in the Post Office.
Shadow Hedgie 🌻2he's just like me fr
