Laws that prevent financial crime are needed by any society. But there is one problem - these laws sometimes have consequences for law-abiding citizens. Regardless of your beliefs, to know and understand the facts is essential, as ignorance is no excuse.
This problem dates decades back. An article by The New York Times from 1989 estimated that $100 billion in revenues from cocaine sales in the US alone were ending up in the hands of a violent drug cartel in Colombia. The advent of electronic wire transfers was to blame, with one politician warning: “The bankers are unconsciously and haphazardly and lazily acting in complicity by failing to do enough.”
In late 2012, HSBC was in hot water and fined almost $2 billion because it had failed to prevent criminals from using its infrastructure. Its division in Mexico had inadequate money laundering controls, with a US senate committee report accusing it of being reluctant to close suspicious accounts. The report also concluded it had circumvented strict rules to do business with the likes of Iran, North Korea and Burma, which the US defines as “rogue states.” Two of HSBC’s divisions were found to be altering transaction details to remove references to one forbidden nation. On top of this, it was claimed HSBC had links to organizations that funded terrorism.
On November 28, 2017, the US Senate, Committee of the Judiciary held a hearing regarding bill S.1241: Modernizing AML Laws to Combat Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing.
Anti-money laundering laws in US were originally created to prevent cocaine barons from legalizing their money. S.1241 is intended to modernize the law, which will provide law enforcement agencies with more tools for prosecution and closing loopholes in the law. S.1241 also adds section 13 on cryptocurrencies, bill S.1241 itself would amend the definition of ‘financial institution’ in the United States Code to include to include “an issuer, redeemer, or cashier of prepaid access devices, digital currency, or any digital exchanger or tumbler of digital currency.” This could have alarming consequences for users of cryptocurrencies both in the US and abroad.
Namely, the law increases the term of punishment from 5 to 10 years for persons who smuggle more than 10 thousand dollars in the United States and abroad; clarifies the rules for moving money to and from the United States for tax evasion; changes the status of “digital currencies” and defines it as a “financial instrument” (section 13).
In Russia, interest in someone else's wealth is not as stable as in the West. But laws also exist. It is engaged in struggle by the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, which complies with the principles of the FATF Global Organization. The main law of the country: "On countering the legalization (laundering) of criminal proceeds and the financing of terrorism."
How global is the problem of money laundering?
Senators at a hearing in the US Congress provided convincing statistics on the ineffectiveness of existing anti-money laundering laws in the United States and around the world. 99.99% of illegal money laundering bypasses the investigation.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that money laundering is about 2–5% of global GDP each year, or about 1.5 to 3.7 trillion dollars in 2015: almost the size of the US federal budget. Similarly, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime conducted a study to determine the extent of trafficking in illicit funds. According to the Office, the income from criminal activities in 2009 amounted to 3.6% of global GDP, approximately 2.7 trillion US Dollars.
The World Bank and the IMF believe that each year from 2.17 to 3.61 trillion dollars is laundered. Criminals are ready to test new methods of money laundering and are among the first users of new technologies. Because of this, anti-money laundering laws should evolve.
When it comes to anti-money laundering, implementation of KYC for ICOs is critical. It aims to minimize the number of criminal acts and ensure the safety of token sales. Figuratively speaking, it’s a protective measure for ICО projects and their backers allowing them to run business in a transparent way. The stakes are high, and what everyone really need is trust.
KYCBench was created to offer an outstanding KYC platform, which increases international AML and legal compliance with the potential to speed up registration process without increasing costs or reducing transparency for any blockchain solution.
KYCBench is helping its customers with their AML and KYC compliance needs. The main aim is to cut the risk of fraud and reduce the costs of compliance by using comprehensive ID verification and AML watchlist monitoring technology with the highest security standards and integrated same automation technologies that leading financial institutions and fintech companies are using.
KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner
www.kycbench.com
GDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant
Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.com
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Whole KYC thing is crazy for me.
For example in my country it's forbidden for business to ask customer for copy of his ID, even bank's right to do so was/ is being challenged.
What's even funnier is that there are digital signature which could be used for this but I understand the cost may be the limiting factor (in my country it's over $100 per year) but I haven't seen KYC procedures accepting them.
Does your service accepts digital signatures?
We perform Tier 1 banking KYC and the most important is an AML checks to avoid bad actors on the stage. As it is an online platform, we requesting you to send us a picture where you hold your ID beside yourself, to verify that you are an existing person instead of electronic signature. |
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PEP is an individual with a prominent public role in a government body or international organisation. A PEP generally presents a higher risk for potential involvement in bribery and corruption by virtue of their position and the influence that they may hold. Immediate family members and close associates of the PEP are also PEPs. What happens when PEPs retire? In the UK they are de-PEPped after being out of power for a year, while in Guernsey and some other places, they remain a PEP forever. And because the PEP definition includes grandchildren, strictly speaking they should be considered PEPs forever too. In theory, money stolen or accepted in bribes by a corrupt PEP remains dirty forever – even when bequeathed to his heirs. So perhaps it makes sense to consider PEPs and the next two generations to be high risk and subject to enhanced due diligence forever... ➡️ Read our article to learn more. https://www.kycbench.com/once-a-pep-remains-a-pep-forever/Join our Telegram Groups: https://t.me/kycbench (KYCBench Announcement) https://t.me/KYCBenchOFFICIAL (KYCBench Community) KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant |
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5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive was recently adopted in the European Union. Accordingly to this directive crypto currency exchange platforms and wallet providers are regulated within the EU by anti-money laundering (AML) rules, including know-your-customer (KYC) requirements and reporting obligations for suspicious transactions. 5AMLD entered into force on July 9, 2018, and all EU-member states must implement its provisions in their national law by January 10, 2020. In July 2018, Cipher Trace published a report stating that crypto currency exchange theft in the first half of 2018 was three times higher for all of 2017, with a total of $1.5 billion in crypto currencies predicted to be lost to cyber-hacks by the end of 2018. According to the report, this increase in theft tripled the amount of crypto currency money laundering. The report was released just after another major exchange hack, the $31 million theft from South Korea’s Bithumb, and right before the recent hack of $13.5 million from Switzerland’s Bancor... ➡️ Read our article to learn more. https://www.kycbench.com/5th-anti-money-laundering-directive-and-crypto-currency/Join our Telegram Groups: https://t.me/kycbench (KYCBench Announcement) https://t.me/KYCBenchOFFICIAL (KYCBench Community) KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant |
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Everyone who hunts for airdrops and bounties knows the feeling. You sign up to website newspapers, join multiple Twitter/Facebook/Telegram channels, chat with bots, write articles and then the airdrop ends. A month or two goes by and suddenly (if you noticed the telegram announcement amongst the hundreds of Telegram Groups) you are asked to perform KYC through a rushed website with a simple buggy form. You have completed already all the tasks asked of you, spent so much of your time and now you need to trust a quickly thrown together website as the ICOs owners only realized last minute it had to perform the airdrops KYC. It can be more than frustrating to be filling out further forms, submitting documents to projects you may believe in, but whether you can trust their server’s security is another point entirely. Unfortunately we know that there is a very large number of ICOs disappearing but does your information just disappear as well? Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/i-signed-up-to-an-ico-airdrop-why-do-i-now-need-to-perform-kyc/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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Yes. It has been a troublesome time for the bulls and the faithful. The memory of 10-20% daily increases continuously day after day seem like a long time ago. However, what has happened to ICOs since the beginning of the year. We have all read that over 80% of all ICOs have failed or been delayed after crowdfunding. Of course the downward turn of the market has affected the bottom line of many of these “ICO start-ups” but also government involvement has started to trickle into the industry and news about ICOs being closed down are slowly becoming more and more common. From government regulatory bodies in America to the European Union seeking recommendations from its member states, blockchain/cryptocurrency regulation seems to be ‘around the corner’. This puts many ICOs in a tough position. Sure, there are many laws already in place dictating how crowd funding and storage of personal data must follow however until there is a clear unified approach to the blockchain/cryptocurrency ‘problem’, it is still up to the ICOs to ensure that they follow the current laws in place. We often hear this term ‘unregulated’ however there are still certain laws that apply now that affect all industries and all sectors. The main law that needs to be followed by any company/enterprise/ ICO that processes or stores personal information of any EU citizen and that law is the GDPR. The GDPR is especially important because when it comes to personal data this regulation applies to all EU citizens. With recent memory of facebook immorally selling users data the EU has taken a strict approach to force companies to not allow data to be used for any other purpose accept for that in which the individual has agreed to. KYCbench has positioned itself to help the blockchain/cryptocurrency ecosystem by providing regulatory coherence and understanding through its service. Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/what-has-happened-with-icos-this-year/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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The recent increase in reported incidents of surveillance and security breaches compromising users’ privacy call into question the current model, in which third-parties collect and control massive amounts of personal data. Bitcoin has demonstrated a decentralized network, which is trusted in the financial space. KYCBench presents a decentralized personal data management system that ensures users own and control their data. We implement a Vguard protocol that turns a blockchain into an automated access-control manager. Unlike Bitcoin, transactions in our system are not strictly financial – they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying and sharing data. The amount of data in nova days is rapidly increasing. According to a recent reports, it is estimated that 20% of the world’s data has been collected in the past couple of years. Facebook, the largest online social-network, collected 300 petabytes of personal data since its inception. In the Data era, data is constantly being collected and processed, leading to innovation and rapid economic growth. Companies and organizations use the data they collect in many possible ways – to personalize services, decision-making process, forecasting and more. Today, data is a valuable asset in the world’s economy. While we all reap the benefits of a data-driven society, there is a growing public concern about user privacy. Centralized organizations – both public and private, amass large quantities of personal and sensitive information. Individuals have little or no control over the data that is stored about them and how it is used. In recent years, public media has repeatedly covered controversial incidents related to privacy. Among the well-known examples is the story about government surveillance, and Facebook’s large-scale scientific experiment that was apparently conducted without explicitly informing participants. In August 2016, a 2014 hack of online platform Yahoo was uncovered, affecting at least 500 million users accounts. In December 2016, the company revealed another hack dating back to 2013, which affected 1 billion user records. The impact of the second reported Yahoo hack was updated in October 2017, when the company revealed that 3 billion accounts had been affected, making it the largest data breach in history. Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/kycbench-and-vguard-protocol/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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Although governments have started a dialogue on how to even approach and define cryptocurrencies and blockchain it may be some time before this is a uniformed approach. Until a time where ICOs will have a clear set of laws to follow ICOs will need to try align themselves as best as possible to existing laws currently in place especially in regards to the processing and storing of personal data of investors data. KYC/AML is becoming a typical requirement of fund raising and for the immediate future, more and more ICOs will need to follow laws such as the GDPR or risk being shut down or fined for non-compliance. For ICOs, receiving a knock on the door by an enforcement agency can have the effect of destroying their reputation and good standing in the blockchain investment world. Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/the-future-of-ico/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: https://t.me/kycbenchKYCBench Announcement https://t.me/KYCBenchOFFICIALKYCBench Community |
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Today, in many organisations, know your customer (KYC) is still a manual and time-consuming process. Things are expected to change over the next few years, as more and more organisations started to implement automatic tools to streamline the KYC process. A good example of how organisations can utilize technology to enhance their KYC process is outlined below: 1. Client is prompted to take a picture of a government-issued identification on their mobile device and submit it through the internet to the organisation. • The organisation can then automatically authenticate that identification. 2. Client is prompted to take a selfie on their mobile device and submit it through the internet to the organisation. • The organisation can then automatically validate that the selfie matches the picture on the government-issued identification initially provided. • Furthermore, when a client takes a picture from their mobile device, the organisation will also receive the client’s location, device identification number and type of device operating system. 3. Automatic screening against sanctions lists • The organisation can then screen the data against sanctions lists, PEP lists, law enforcement lists etc. Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/the-future-of-kyc/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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The number of complaints filed to the UK’s data protection regulator has doubled since the General Data Protection Regulation was implemented in May 2018. According to figures from law firm EMW which reveal the number of complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) between 25 May and 3 July this year climbed to 6,281 versus just 2,417 during the same period last year. An ICO spokesperson said: “It’s early days and we will collate, analyze and publish official statistics in due course. But generally, as anticipated, we have seen a rise in personal data breach reports from organizations. Complaints relating to data protection issues are also up and, as more people become aware of their individual rights, we are expecting the number of complaints to the ICO to increase too.” The law firm pinned the increase on individuals having more awareness of their data rights, as well as companies being forced to report their own data breaches. Accordingly, to The Guardian in Austria, more than 100 complaints have been filed in July, along with 59 breach notifications – the same number that would typically be received in eight months. A significant amount of complaints have been filed against giant companies. Facebook and Google have already been the subject of complaints filed by privacy campaigners and consumer rights group, Noyb.eu. For firms across Europe, complying with GDPR is critical. Risking fines of minimum 10 million euros or 2% of a company’s annual turnover is a significant threat and as such is forcing companies to move toward greater transparency and openness with authorities and consumers. Read more at: https://www.kycbench.com/implementation-of-gdpr-cause-data-complaints-increase/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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KYCbench Tier 1 Banking Institution KYC/AML solution Based on the in house designed Vguard Protocol, KYCbench has developed a GUI friendly and cryptographically secure KYC platform to verify sensitive KYC data for ICO whitelists and non blockchain enterprises wanting to improve on their existing regulatory compliant KYC processing procedures. KYCbench is built to fulfil the requirements of the GDPR and to comply to ISO27001 in handling and storing personal data for ICO whitelisting. For non blockchain related companies where other regulatory requirements apply, KYCbench works with each client to establish a tailored and customized solution which would allow their own KYC processing requirements to be applied with a state of the art KYC processing platform. The project was launched to solve a number of problems. The majority of ICOs currently exist in unregulated obscurity. In the past, ICOs have collected personal data in breach of regulatory requirements. ICO teams could inadvertently be exposed to legal liabilities of 20,000,000 EURO?s and potentially even criminal proceedings for processing KYC/AML data not in accordance with ALL the requirements of the GDPR. On the other hand, investors/end users, may find the process of continually being requested to submit their KYC information to prospective ICO investments bothersome, and also a risky practice. See full article here: https://www.kycbench.com/kycbench-tier-1-banking-institution-kycaml-solution/KYCbench, your reliable KYC partner www.kycbench.comGDPR & ISO/IEC 27001:2013 compliant Please contact KYCbench today, the most reliable ID verification processor at: contact@kycbench.comJoin our Telegram Groups: KYCBench Announcement KYCBench Community |
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