Re: Re: Knowing your customer
At 12:47 PM 12/6/00 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: You're thinking of something else, but you're close enough. For instance, there are laws in most jurisdictions about requiring a social security number to open a bank account, for any of a number of reasons including credit checks, and checks on how many, um, negative-funded, bank accounts you might have hanging out there before you opened this one. More to the point, since interest is taxable income for individuals, and a tax deductible expense for corporations, social security numbers are required in order to pay you interest. Ah the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (which outlawed bank secrecy). http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/SupManual/bsa/bsa_p2.pdf http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/SupManual/bsa/bsa_p1.pdf The Feds do require SS numbers on bank accounts in most cases but the requirement has major loopholes. [And, yes, Duncan may be right, you might be able to spoof an SSN at them somehow, but I don't know anyone who's actually done it, admitted it in any public detail, and not been somehow razzed legally for it.] It's actually not too hard because bank officers can't verify SS numbers save by using the well-known methods to check facial validity. As long as you precheck your numbers with a program like ssn.exe which checks for non-existent number ranges and state of issue, you should be OK. The SS Admin refused to allow the credit reporting agencies to verify their records agains the Feds database (because of the privacy implications). As always, if you get turned down someplace, go someplace else. Likewise, SSNs are not required to open accounts in other countries and these accounts are accessible these days by Internet Banking and credit/debit cards. One can also set up entities such as: sole proprietorship, partnership, trust, estate, corporation, etc. and apply for a taxpayer ID number (TIN) and have the entity open an account. The advantage of this is that you can have an infinite number of unconnected entities thus defeating the linking problem involved in the use of a single identifier such as the SSN. In addition, the new online payment services don't always require an SS# to open an account: Do not require SSN to open account PayPal -- http://www.paypal.com (Now international as well which creates a further loophole.) BillPoint (Wells Fargo eBay) -- http://www.billpoint.com/ (Requires Ebay registration which requires a credit card to sell but not to buy.) dotBank (Yahoo) -- (http://www.dotbank.com/) Now http://paydirect.yahoo.com/ PayMe -- https://www.payme.com/ Ecount -- http://www.ecount.com/ MoneyZap (Western Union) -- http://www.moneyzap.com/ Require SSN to open account eMoneyMail (BankOne) -- http://www.emoneymail.com/ ProPay -- http://www.propay.com/ c2it -- (Citigroup AOL) http://www.c2it.com/ Most of these accounts can be opened with throwaway email address and a accommodation address for your physical address. As they grow in importance, having an account with them may be more useful. It is important to note that the best way to dodge some of the paperwork is to open accounts when services are new since the requirements tend to increase over time. Prior to October 1999(?) for example, Ebay did not require a credit card to open a sales account and existing account holders were grandfathered in when they added that requirement. But there are always new account and payment systems popping up so you can continue to take advantage of this principle. Keep in mind that there are other financial account privacy techniques not mentioned here. Use your imagination. [The answer to this lie to the government, don't get a bank account Usually, you're not lying to the government but to a private party acting on behalf of the government. problem, which any persistent cypherpunk subscriber knows, is, of course, to have payment systems which don't *need* physical identity for non-repudiation of transactions and the subsequent requirement of the force of a nation-state to make settlement risk manageable: bearer certificates based on cryptographic protocols like blind signatures, which will, frankly, only *really* be possible, soup-withdrawl to nuts-deposit, when a bearer currency issue is *itself* reserved by other digital bearer assets, instead of just a book-entry account somewhere.] Definitely a good idea if someone can pull it off. DCF May the Lord enlighten ... the Swiss banks -- that they might uphold justice and preserve the integrity of their own laws and the laws of confidentiality, trust and basic decency between the banks and their clients. Imelda Marcos' Prayer for the Swiss Banks - Manila - Sunday 25 February 1996.
Re: Knowing your customer
Nomen Nescio wrote: I guess an equivalent ID will do. in germany, you need your ID card to open a bank account (um, for those not in the know: we have state-issue ID cards in addition to passports. the passport is a travel document, used to visit non-EU countries. the ID card is used inside the EU and for national purposes (identification, mostly). you are NOT required to have it with you all the time or somesuch, but some activities, such as opening a bank account, require an ID card. driving license or other documents will do in many cases, but I think not for bank accounts). How often must your ID card be renewed? What information does it (or the ID database) contain that a German passport does not? it must be renewed every 10 or 5 years (there's two periods, I'm not sure which one applies in what cases). it contains: name, birthday and birth town, nationality, your signature (as you made it on the form), some string of number that contains your birth date and some other information I'm not sure about but which has most likely been published on the web somewhere. on the backside it contains addresse, height, colour of eyes and the issuing authority. there is also a field where you can have a pseudonym or religious name printed if you want to use it for any "official" activities (say, you're a rock star, actor or author and much more people know you under your pseudonmyn than under your real name). height and eye-colour are whatever you put in the form. I doubt it's ever checked. I know mine have been different on all ID cards I've had so far. the frontside also contains a picture of you, almost forgot that. I have no idea what kind of information is linked to this, i.e. what exactly a cop can pull out of his database by entering your ID number.
Re: Knowing your customer
"R. A. Hettinga" wrote: [...] I am not, of course, a banking lawyer, but I certainly hang out with enough of those folks these days, I've certainly had enough of this stuff shoved into my head over the years, and, I expect that to get a bank account without a Social Security number in most states of the US, you probably need to prove that you are indeed a foreign national, *and* provide a valid passport as proof of same, and that, frankly, the passport number would be used *somewhere* as a proxy for SSN where possible. I manage to pay some US income tax (on some share dividends) without ever having a US SSN. They seem happy not to identify you when they are taking your money. Funny that :-) [...] Modern nation-states have bound up so much of their regulatory and tax structure into book entry settlement, that it is very hard, more probably impossible, to get a bank account in this country without being completely, positively, whatever that means, identified -- biometrically identified, if it were cheap enough, and certainly with a state-issued identification number. UK domestic bank accounts usually require some proof of id, though not our equivalent of your SSN (The "national insurance number" - I suspect most people don't know theirs, but it is printed on every payslip probably hard to keep secret). There is no official government id in UK, except for passports which of course many people have not got. Banks are very keen on proof of address, they ask to see "official" letters (like the gas bill - or an account from another bank) addressed to your name at your house. In fact it is all but impossible to get a bank account without a permanent address. As these days many employers only pay wages through bank accounts... well, that's just one of the reasons the number of homeless people in London went steadily up during the 1980s early 1990s when employment and prosperity were increasing the value of welfare benefits was falling. [...] Ken
RE: Knowing your customer
R. A. Hettinga[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote You're thinking of something else, but you're close enough. For instance, there are laws in most jurisdictions about requiring a social security number to open a bank account Are you saying that a visiting foreigner can't open a bank account in the US? I'd be quite suprised if this is the case. Peter Trei
RE: Knowing your customer
At 10:20 AM -0500 on 12/7/00, Trei, Peter wrote: Are you saying that a visiting foreigner can't open a bank account in the US? I'd be quite suprised if this is the case. I would be surprised if you didn't need at least a tax ID number, myself. I'm not sure, because I don't have one, but I think that people with Green Cards have to have Social Security Numbers, right? Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: Knowing your customer
Green carders, yes. Visiting foreigners who are not working, not neccesarily. Tourists certainly not. How about if James Higginsbottom opens an account in the London branch of Citibank? Does he need a US SSN to do so? (I don't think so). Can he use the account in the US (I suspect he can). Peter -- From: R. A. Hettinga[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] At 10:20 AM -0500 on 12/7/00, Trei, Peter wrote: Are you saying that a visiting foreigner can't open a bank account in the US? I'd be quite suprised if this is the case. I would be surprised if you didn't need at least a tax ID number, myself. I'm not sure, because I don't have one, but I think that people with Green Cards have to have Social Security Numbers, right? Cheers, RAH
RE: Knowing your customer
At 10:29 AM -0500 on 12/7/00, Trei, Peter wrote: Green carders, yes. Visiting foreigners who are not working, not neccesarily. Tourists certainly not. How about if James Higginsbottom opens an account in the London branch of Citibank? Does he need a US SSN to do so? (I don't think so). Can he use the account in the US (I suspect he can). I think we're wandering off into the weeds a bit here. The London branch of Citibank, is, of course, a bank in the UK, subject to all banking laws there. Our friend above uses his UK account in the US almost certainly at an ATM machine, like I do from my US bank in the UK, and/or credit card, and no other way. You can certainly get a dollar-denominated bank account in London from Citibank, London is the currency capital of the world, but, and on no real data here, I doubt you could write ACH cleared and routed checks through it. NACHA is trying to do this better, but, in general, you need a correspondent relationship, and/or account, or something, at a bank here in order to write checks on that UK account. My original point, possibly taken too literally at the outset here, is that in most jurisdictions it is more or less impossible to get a US bank account without a social security number, especially if you're a US citizen. Duncan Frissell popped up here on cypherpunks with pointers to the odd bank in South Dakota or somewhere, 4 or 5 years ago, where you could get a bank account without a SSN. It was exceptional in its example, and I would doubt it possible even now. I am not, of course, a banking lawyer, but I certainly hang out with enough of those folks these days, I've certainly had enough of this stuff shoved into my head over the years, and, I expect that to get a bank account without a Social Security number in most states of the US, you probably need to prove that you are indeed a foreign national, *and* provide a valid passport as proof of same, and that, frankly, the passport number would be used *somewhere* as a proxy for SSN where possible. There ain't no free lunch as far as identity and book-entry settlement goes, anymore, folks, even in "tax-haven" jurisdictions, as we're now seeing. Modern nation-states have bound up so much of their regulatory and tax structure into book entry settlement, that it is very hard, more probably impossible, to get a bank account in this country without being completely, positively, whatever that means, identified -- biometrically identified, if it were cheap enough, and certainly with a state-issued identification number. To paraphrase Doug Barnes, "and then you go to jail" is the penultimate error-handling step in book-entry settlement. That means that the nation-state gets in your face, and gets your number, end of story. That is a central fact of financial operations won't change until something proves cheaper that book-entry settlement. Which, of course, lots of people on cypherpunks, and elsewhere, are busy working on. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: Knowing your customer
-- At 10:20 AM -0500 on 12/7/00, Trei, Peter wrote: Are you saying that a visiting foreigner can't open a bank account in the US? I'd be quite suprised if this is the case. At 10:25 AM 12/7/2000 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: I would be surprised if you didn't need at least a tax ID number, myself. Many years ago I, as a non resident of the US and non citizen of the US, opened an account in US dollars at a US branch of the bank of America without a social security number or a tax ID number. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MfEDmSJiMYlcOEQBhlqUxwBSUTHW1kq6y5nnKsOx 4kxay6Xr+ylDqWbjRvUsznWW6aIAzbaL/ZAaLQbk6
Re: Knowing your customer
"Trei, Peter" wrote: R. A. Hettinga[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote You're thinking of something else, but you're close enough. For instance, there are laws in most jurisdictions about requiring a social security number to open a bank account Are you saying that a visiting foreigner can't open a bank account in the US? I'd be quite suprised if this is the case. I guess an equivalent ID will do. in germany, you need your ID card to open a bank account (um, for those not in the know: we have state-issue ID cards in addition to passports. the passport is a travel document, used to visit non-EU countries. the ID card is used inside the EU and for national purposes (identification, mostly). you are NOT required to have it with you all the time or somesuch, but some activities, such as opening a bank account, require an ID card. driving license or other documents will do in many cases, but I think not for bank accounts).
RE: Knowing your customer
At 8:59 AM -0800 on 12/7/00, James A. Donald wrote: Many years ago Ah. :-). Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Knowing your customer
Tom Vogt wrote: I guess an equivalent ID will do. in germany, you need your ID card to open a bank account (um, for those not in the know: we have state-issue ID cards in addition to passports. the passport is a travel document, used to visit non-EU countries. the ID card is used inside the EU and for national purposes (identification, mostly). you are NOT required to have it with you all the time or somesuch, but some activities, such as opening a bank account, require an ID card. driving license or other documents will do in many cases, but I think not for bank accounts). How often must your ID card be renewed? What information does it (or the ID database) contain that a German passport does not?
RE: Knowing your customer
R. A. Hettinga wrote: Duncan Frissell popped up here on cypherpunks with pointers to the odd bank in South Dakota or somewhere, 4 or 5 years ago, where you could get a bank account without a SSN. It was exceptional in its example, and I would doubt it possible even now. ... Has anyone recently attempted to open a non-interest bearing checking account without giving out an SSAN? What possible rationale (aside from "bank policy," "identification when you lose your passbook," "it's easier for us this way," or "the computer won't let us do that") could a bank (or the fedgov) have for requiring social security account numbers on such accounts?
Re: Knowing your customer
A minor clarification: The formal proposal known as "Know Your Customer" was withdrawn (see my back articles on that topic). But other regulations in the same vein require banks to require ID. -Declan On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 11:18:53AM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote: On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 06:40:08PM -, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote: Payee traceability had nothing to do with it. Every customer of MTB, whether an end user or a merchant, had to fully identify himself to the bank, including SSN and for merchants, type of business, etc. This is SOP for other payment systems like credit cards. It was on this basis that MTB was able to screen their merchants. No payee tracing was necessary. A fully untraceable cash system would have been equally amenable to merchant screening. Any vendor has the right to control whom it does business with, and MTB chose to exercise its discretion in this way. I don't know if MTB had a lot of discretion - banks are subject to the federal "know your customer" regulations. You can't get depositor anonymity from a bank chartered in the US, at least not without at least one level of corporate indirection (e.g., the bank "knows its customer" who is a domestic or foreign closely-held corp, who does the bidding of its unidentified-to-the-bank-and-FINCEN shareholders). The Texas couple in the news recently made a different choice and decided to provide payment services for child pornographers, as James Donald recommends. Now MTB is still in business (after merging with MTL and then FSR) and the Texans are in jail. Which made a better choice? Sounds like the Texans knew too much about their customers - if they operated a content-neutral service which had many, many customers, one of whom happened to be a child-porn service, they'd be doing fine, especially if they shut off the child porn people if/when notified by law enforcement of the activity. Does the FBI shut down AOL and Earthlink when their subscribers traffic in child porn? -- Greg Broiles [EMAIL PROTECTED] PO Box 897 Oakland CA 94604
Re: Knowing your customer
On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 12:07:57PM -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: A minor clarification: The formal proposal known as "Know Your Customer" was withdrawn (see my back articles on that topic). But other regulations in the same vein require banks to require ID. I'm not a banking law geek, but I believe that there are federal regs in place known as "know your customer" rules which apply to depository institutions like banks, credit unions, etc - the regs which were withdrawn would have required NBFI's (non-bank financial institutions) to comply with similar rules, as they're sometimes used instead of banks to avoid the KYC rules. Or am I thinking of something else? -- Greg Broiles [EMAIL PROTECTED] PO Box 897 Oakland CA 94604
Re: Knowing your customer
At 9:04 AM -0800 on 12/6/00, Greg Broiles wrote: Or am I thinking of something else? You're thinking of something else, but you're close enough. For instance, there are laws in most jurisdictions about requiring a social security number to open a bank account, for any of a number of reasons including credit checks, and checks on how many, um, negative-funded, bank accounts you might have hanging out there before you opened this one. More to the point, since interest is taxable income for individuals, and a tax deductible expense for corporations, social security numbers are required in order to pay you interest. [And, yes, Duncan may be right, you might be able to spoof an SSN at them somehow, but I don't know anyone who's actually done it, admitted it in any public detail, and not been somehow razzed legally for it.] Kind of reminds me of TEFRA, in 1993 or so, which outlawed bearer bonds by making interest payable on them "non-tax-deductible" (taxable, for those in Palm Beach County). [The answer to this "lie to the government, don't get a bank account" problem, which any persistent cypherpunk subscriber knows, is, of course, to have payment systems which don't *need* physical identity for non-repudiation of transactions and the subsequent requirement of the force of a nation-state to make settlement risk manageable: bearer certificates based on cryptographic protocols like blind signatures, which will, frankly, only *really* be possible, soup-withdrawl to nuts-deposit, when a bearer currency issue is *itself* reserved by other digital bearer assets, instead of just a book-entry account somewhere.] Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Knowing your customer
Oh, and the proposed KYC rules would have required banks to go further than requiring ID (other current rules, as you say, require that) and try to determine source of funds, etc. -Declan You're thinking of something slightly different. The Fed-Treasury-FDIC action that caused so much fuss would have made "suggested" KYC rules that apply to banks mandatory. Here's the federal register notice abandoning the propsed KYC regs: http://www.politechbot.com/p-00315.html -Declan
