In the description I put "fun times". I had a call from my bank asking me to explain the payment the next day. I've never been called before nor since that.
It certainly feels like they're a bit touchy about certain references.
I recently started using Venmo to pay a few people and the things I have wrote are awful. Recent examples include: "Human organ trafficking" "Lunch and murder for hire", "sack of shrunken heads" and so on. Let them call me.
Maybe they've gotten more permissive but don't do this with money you can't afford to lose.
I want to be as under the radar as I can be when it comes to stuff like this. My attitude is that the bank already knows too much about me, why give them more rope?
> You must meet certain day-to-day responsibilities if your business is covered by the Money Laundering Regulations. These include carrying out ‘customer due diligence’ measures to check that your customers are who they say they are, and risk assessing your business.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-you...
(That entire page, like the rest of gov.uk, is comprehensive and very accessible to read for a layman. If you have any passing interest in the area I recommend giving it a skim.)
They've otherwise been quite reliable since so jumping ship now would almost be asking for trouble.
Edit: It wasnt 15 years ago this happened, it was perhaps a decade. I'd already been a customer for some time.
I'd say they quite overstepped the boundaries. What are fun times to you and the recipient is certainly not their business. Why would they even waste time reading the RE line if they aren't doing your accounting for you at the same time?
There is even a party rental company named Fun Times. Would they interrogate every cheque written to/from them?
[0] Conditions apply: A bank isn't forced to do business with somebody who defrauded them in the last 3 years, for example. But the decision must be made timely (10 days), it must be explained and there's a well-defined path to legal review. Details at https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto...
If your friend sends you money "for sexual favors", that might be considered taxable income and you'll find yourself having some explaining to do.
The laws around things like sex work or drug consumptions, in most countries, are full of grey areas and willfully-contradictory positions (e.g. one can buy but the other can't sell, etc). So as soon as a transaction is categorised as part of a "problematic" economy, then police can get involved. If your bank lets through "hooker money" unchallenged, the police can eventually accuse the bank of facilitating activities which might be, at some level, criminal.
This seems weird, but is actually a perfectly reasonable legal regime that's all about power dynamics and enabling the authorities to approach people. Drug users and prostitutes are in much more vulnerable positions than drug dealers and johns respectively.
If you make selling drugs a crime, but not buying/owning those same drugs, now the police can approach addicts much more easily, and get them help (this is the much-lauded Portuguese model).
The same logic applies in reverse to prostitution: if selling sexual favours is legal, but buying is illegal, prostitutes are enabled to report abusive johns to the police, and authorities can approach them much more easily to try and get them off that life too.
The facts on the ground are that, dissuasion or not, these economies will never go away ("oldest profession", after all). Full legalisation would allow for complete oversight of such murky sectors, which would ensure everyone's safety better than the current arrangements, at all levels. For example, in many countries there is no way for prostitutes to legally ensure their own security, because any sort of professional relationship with a sex-worker is illegal (even if the business itself is not); at that point, whether they have recourse post-abuse or not, is basically irrelevant.
The legal situation around cannabis and prostitution is just a shitshow in most places, driven as it is by outdated sensibilities which have ossified through short-term political calculation. There is no point trying to find in it a logic that is simply not there.
Full-on legalisation is not universally desirable, though — there's always heroine, cocaine, crack, meth... — and the asymmetric legality thing is still a very useful tool in those circumstances.
There are some truly horrible substances, but with current approach heroin and weed are sold by the same guy.
Also famously you do have to pay taxes on illegal income, otherwise the income is both illegal and tax fraud.
Last year there was a news article about someone getting a phone call from the bank because the description in a money transfer contained the substring "ISIL".
Machine learning is actually a misnomer. A more accurate term is function interpolation.
Let's say I have a training set of 5000 samples.
When I kick off the training process, I'm basically telling the NN run until it simulates a function that yields the desired response in those 5000 cases.
The rub of course, is that programs aren't only defined by what they do (yielding the appropriate response for the the training cases) but also by what they don't do (excessive false positive/negative generation outside the training dataset). Performing correctly on the training, but messing up on more general tasks (the human equivalent being becoming an excellent test taker, but a lousy practitioner) is called overfishing. A more broad subclass of overfishing that van occur would be undesired/discriminatory/illegal optimizations, such as using combinations of protected classes as a significant data point in coming to a determination.
There is no guarantee for any particular training session that you'll arrive at the same weights, or that that set of weights will cover the same set of things that the previous network did. I.e. Your network can make mistakes (just like a person).
The irony in all of this, is you're basically training a machine to simulate a human doing a task in reliability/consistency (admittedly without the constraints of interacting with the world through a human body) with all the volatility between training that just being a human from day to day introduces.
I'm honestly beginning to wonder if the push for machine learning adoption isn't anything more than the market trying to replace people with models that they don't have to pay benefits for, and onto which they can pass blame trivially because, "Of course we didn't make it to discriminate! There's no way we could have known it would do that ahead of time!"
I used to get "funny" too when sending money through PayPal to friends, never again.