Most people don't realise what these accounts are used for, or just don't care because they're paid enough to look the other way. Then stolen funds are quickly moved across dozens of banks, with the money being split and re-combined with potentially legitimate money. Eventually the administrative overhead of tracking the money gets so great that no one bank can be bothered to do anything about, and the police aren't interested in actually investigating. The end result is that once the stolen money if a dozen or so bank accounts away from the victim, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is actually going to trace the money to that account, effectively making the money clean.
These ads are deliberately designed to prey on the desperate, unfortunate or the technically illiterate.
Some of them probably know exactly what they're doing and I have no sympathy, but some of them probably fall into the same category as people falling for Authorised Push Payment fraud.
In the worst cases the accepted practice can be as severe as locking them up and throw the key away, even if it was totally unintentional.
Like a drunk driver plowing into a group of school children, or a ship captain that sinks a cruise ship while distracted.
Having extra scrutiny imposed on future banking activity is a minor punishment for a minor crime.
It is in the article:
The fraudsters had told her to shift her "at risk" cash to an account on a cryptocurrency platform that they emptied - while isolating her from family by stressing secrecy and coaching her on how to respond to sceptical bank officials. "They knew the name of my financial adviser, they were utterly convincing as FCA staff," she said. "And they told me I could not tell anyone about the investigation as it would damage their efforts to catch the crooks."
It's not really like this. Banks (and Western) governments are extremely meticulous about recording financial transactions, but have relatively few systems for actually retrieving that information for proactive law enforcement. There are large historical and technical barriers that prevent meaningful advances in the government's ability to surveil bank accounts in real time.
As just one example: interbank settlement over ACH is measured in days, not seconds or even hours. During settlement, anything can happen: the ODFI might try to claw the transaction back, either institution can go bankrupt, the destination account might close, etc. A human frequently intervenes to handle these cases. Banking is eventually consistent, but the fraudster is frequently long gone by that point.
Edit: it's also worth noting that "anonymous" (read: numbered) banking is also really only good for Doing Crime (and Having Crime Done to You). But plenty of countries, including the US, allow you to open bank accounts (and do debit transactions) without an official government ID.
In the past, the same mules were sending Western money transfers or similar, but nowadays cryptos are so handy most criminals have migrated to it.
After a few months the cops usually come knocking, and depending on the jurisdiction, the poor mule is hit with fine/jailtime and/or the debt
Unless the destination country, the destination Western Union office and the person who picked up the money are all willing and able to co-operate, law enforcement in the source country is pretty much stuck.
Whoah. Do you mean there are people that think cryptocurrency is "inoccuous"? I mean, I know there are inoccuous uses; but if someone "official" tells you to use a cryptocurrency account, that is very definitely occuous.
TIL: I have been spelling "innocuous" wrong since forever. It's apparently the negating prefix "in-", and the Latin word "nocere" (to harm).
So I should have quipped "that is very definitely nocuous". Or not quipped at all.
You're so far away from the truth. Basically, they have flashlight and they are in dark forest. You can theoretically find what you want, but it's fairly unlikely and very time consuming.
> and made it impossible to have anonymous bank accounts,
These are not the same things, as anyone who works in logging and tracking will tell you. Just because there is some tracking of you, or an ability to track you does not mean that all activity could be noted or flagged. If I purchase from a new online vendor, how would my bank know if it was me or not?
Catching the people opening the accounts leads you to nowhere, they rarely even know their bosses.
Every scenario I can think of seems like it should be either traceable or actionable.
Scenario 1: The crooks cashed out the victim's $270,000 at ATMs. That means they set up 270 fraudulent bank accounts, each tied to a separate ATM card, and each with a withdrawal limit of $1000. There should be a cornucopia of leads to follow. It's a major hassle to set up a bank account. You need an address at which to receive each one of those 270 ATM cards. Did the bank(s) send 270 cards to one single mailing address? Were these online accounts or did the crooks visit each bank with fake IDs? What did the surveillance cameras at the ATMs show? If they hired duped people to cash out at the ATMs, can't the police catch at least one of those persons and continue following the money?
Scenario 2: The crooks create one master British bank account into which the stolen money is funneled (say $1,000,000) and then they transfer the money to overseas to Third World Bank. Why doesn't the British bank (or the British government) demand that the $1,000,000 be returned by Third World Bank? It's now the Third World country's job to track down the crooks if they want to. If they won't return the funds, they get blacklisted by the British banking system.
Perhaps there are very good answers about why and how the crooks can get away with it but it seems so implausible when money has been so traceable for the last 20 or 30 years (except for certain cryptocurrencies but that's recent).