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Re:Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered by notahacker on Sunday May 26, 2013 @01:01PM (#5771615)
Unless there's some esoteric Swedish law that gives banks special privileges that I'm missing, the bank doesn't have any right to refuse you your money except according to published limits on the timing of withdrawals (and its obligation to freeze accounts under criminal investigation). These limits always can and have existed, and in fact were much worse when the bank genuinely was worried about having to redeem everyone's assets in physically limited gold or currency, instead of being able to pay your money into another account electronically and balance their reserve shortfall with electronic interbank lending and automatically approved loans from the central bank. They've got a lot less motivation to deny access to your funds and little chance of getting away with it, unlike an anonymous overseas intermediary in the trade of some digital asset which is intangible unregulated and not legally recognised as having any monetary value.
Re:Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered by belorn on Sunday May 26, 2013 @01:23PM (#5771699)
It is a relative new law (5-10ish years) called something like "anti-terrorism funding and money laundering law". It require the bank teller to inquire the nature of any withdraw or transaction, and the power/requirement to stop any money withdraw or transaction in case the teller aren't satisfied with the answers the customer gave.

All to the discretion of the bank. No criminal investigation is needed to stop transactions/withdraws. They might not be able to close the account, but they can prevent any money from being removed from it as long they like.

It's also the same law that are currently is preventing unregistered phones from using sms-purchase for tickets to buses and trains. The law directly forbids any kind of money transfers if one of the participants are not directly identified.

Re:Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered by mortenjorck on Sunday May 26, 2013 @03:31PM (#5772139)
That's surprisingly draconian. That sort of thing would probably be met with some sort of popular backlash in the US, though I've little doubt it would pass.
Re:Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered by rodgerd on Sunday May 26, 2013 @09:35PM (#5773053)
AML legislation is already in place across the OECD; the US was a major sponsor for the multinational agreement that most OECD nations signed up for.
Re:Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered by Ihmahr on Sunday May 26, 2013 @01:44PM (#5771780)
You know better than this, right?