They might have to follow up with a “why we are never using <hosting> again”
replies(4):
They moved offices, informed wise of a change of address. Wise asked for proof of address. They sent a phone bill. Wise rejected it because the terminology of bills in New Zealand is different to the US (i.e. here bills are usually labelled Tax invoice rather than Bill). Wise support agent also made a barmey suggestion on how to get around it that they didn't follow. Another Wise agent called them back agreeing that the document should be accepted and resubmitted on their behalf. Later the document was rejected again and then their account was closed without any further communication from Wise. Later the author's personal wise account was closed just for being associated with the company.
Edit: Someone posted a copy of the article below, and it seems to be a similar issue with no satisfactory resolution.
I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies
Until it isn’t.
This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.
And all we did? We updated our address.
A Routine Change Turned Nightmare Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.
Fair enough – we had no problem with that.
Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:
Correct entity name Correct physical street address Even detailed our fibre connection at the new premises So we uploaded it – and assumed that would be the end of it.
We were so wrong.
The Call That Made No Sense Days later, we received an email: our document was rejected.
No clear reason. So, I called Wise and explained the situation to the customer service representative.
Her response left me stunned.
“The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill.”
Wait… what?
I paused, trying to process this. I politely explained that in New Zealand, a “tax invoice” is a legal form of a bill – even down to the name “tax invoice” being a legal requirement by IRD, and that’s how telecommunications companies issue invoices here. But she refused to accept it.
“It needs to say Telecommunications Bill at the top,” she insisted.
“A tax invoice isn’t acceptable.”
This is simply not true, and completely out of touch with New Zealand’s business documentation standards. The rep wouldn’t budge.
The “Solution” That Was Beyond Belief Still trying to find a solution, I asked: what do you recommend I do then?
Her answer?
“You should find a local shared workspace, lease a desk under your company name, change your registered office to that address, and use that lease document to verify your address with us.”
Yes, you read that right.
Wise’s advice was to artificially lease a desk we didn’t need, change our registered address, and use that document – just to verify an address we actually operate from.
I asked to speak to a manager. That request was refused. She told me, flatly:
“I am providing you with the correct information.”
A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
A Glimmer of Hope – Then The Hammer Falls Later that day, I received a call back from Wise – not from a manager (because apparently, Wise doesn’t have managers), but from a more “senior” representative.
This rep was more empathetic and agreed the document should have been acceptable. She escalated the issue, resubmitted the document herself, and said she’d personally follow up if it was rejected again.
Progress, I thought.
Until the next morning.
“We’ve Restricted Your Account” I woke to an email with a stunning subject line:
“We’ve restricted your account”
Just like that, our entire business account was locked. No warning. No reason. No discussion.
We could no longer send or receive money, use our Wise cards, or even contact support. The email stated:
“Due to our current risk policies, your account will be closed in a few months. You will not be able to use support channels.”
Even worse? My personal Wise account was locked too. The same personal account which did have its address fully verified, by a rates invoice for my personal address.
Both had funds inside.
It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YS8FLnSz2eP-nXp7FJR7Gsef...
And does this seem like AI automation gone mad?
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.
Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.
It seems as though Wise had noticed payment patterns that seemed outside of what Wise is comfortable facilitating. I hope the author can get their funds, but this behaviour is consistent with all banking services.
In my case, it was totally my fault because I foolishly used Wise on my work email. Why would I even do that? It did start this half-Kafkaesque nightmare but I managed to eventually get the account back. I'd compounded the problems by also trying to make a new account so I could get customer support and promptly ended up being banned for trying a duplicate account. Fantastic.
But at least you know there is some flow that can get you out of this temporarily restricted state - which seems far less severe than the flow they got stuck in. Being unable to actually get their money out seems crazy. I would have rented the damned WeWork and been done with it to be honest.
I have an archived copy here if you want to see https://archive.roshangeorge.dev/archive/1761866967.0412/ind... (hopefully the Cloudflare cache isn't misconfigured)
EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy as well, so you don't need mine https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...
As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.
NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.
I have and never will forgive them for this.
Prior HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476
Also, any suggestions on reasonably secure bank accounts one can hold without citizenship / residency? Swiss?
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".
So this is my word of warning:
Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.
The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.
If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.
I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).
But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.
IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.
It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.
If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.
I agree in the sense of FDIC insurance and being nominally operating under the banking regulatory system - but those typically offer exactly zero protection to a whole category of not-crimes.
A bank can decide you are suspicious and simply freeze your accounts indefinitely - and stonewall you at the customer service level. It’s not like they are required by any law to respond to you or anything like that.
There is likely more recourse if you have enough funds worth perusing legal action to its final conclusion - if you win then you can be more assured the bank will exist six years later when your judgement finally hits. Enjoy paying those legal bills though.
Having witnessed this happen and seen six figure losses due to absolutely zero crime being committed, I basically operate under the mental model that any money within a bank or financial institution is their money and not yours.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there)
>This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable.
meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost
However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.
Unfortunately, this is still a good thing. As recently as a few months ago, I was in Las Vegas. The cabbie didn't know where to go, I had to direct them using Google maps from my phone, their credit card machine mysteriously wasn't working, and they didn't have change for cash because they "just got on shift". Seriously, all three in one ride?
Don't blame me that it was Uber/Lyft for the rest of my visif. I'll take an eventual possibility of getting burned somehow over a repeat of negative taxi experiences.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
It's a shame because I really love using the Wise website, app, payment system, and even the physical card (esp. in Japan).
Happy to work with anyone over there if they read this and want to dig in.
After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.
Wise still has something to learn about banking business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report
in most western countries it is illegal to disclose the nature of the SAR. they will simply end your account with no recourse.
For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?
It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.
At some point enforcement died. It used to be that locking someone out of their money would wind up with people in jail.
Now, it's not just a cost of doing business but also viewed as a positive by state actors.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
> Many regular people who get the [bank's] offboarding letter are confused and upset. Most people who get this letter are insufficiently expert in the financial system to understand what is going on. Many of them are (perhaps sensibly) enraged that the bank seems reluctant to offer answers. If they successfully pry answers out of the bank, the answers sound like nonsense or change constantly.
> Here, advocates often say that banks lack fundamental humanity, regard for their customers, or simple competence. I’d tell them that is neither here nor there, but the challenges described in Seeing like a Bank drive far more of this than malice, apathy, or incompetence as such. It is a systems issue.
[...]
> Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.
> This strikes many people as Kafkaesque. (Me, too!) It is the long-standing practice of banking in the U.S. and allied countries. It is downstream of laws passed by duly elected representatives. It was not capriciously developed as a political tool in the last few years. (We’ll get to those.)
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.
In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
The guy isn't arguing that the outcome is sane or deserved, but rather than most victims mis-identify the motives and causes.
I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.
So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?
This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.
From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?
There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.
Business networking, local ISP, card payment solutions, basically. Given the blog posts about cPanel and Outlook, it tracks.
I note that the blogger lives in a small town in the South Island, so likely is focused on the local market.
I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers
OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.
Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?
1.2.3 Other restricted activities c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services. Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
I'm not sure if using Wise actually saves money otherwise - but it mostly works fine.
The one technical issue I've hit in the US was a bowser asking for my ZIP code which it couldn't verify so I couldn't use that gas station.
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
In Australia you can get a Company Extract from ASIC for $10. Apparently it's free in NZ [1].
I believe they haven't actually updated their registered company address for some reason, and that triggered Wise's systems.
[1] https://companies-register.companiesoffice.govt.nz/help-cent...
I once had to do terrible things to make a WordPress blog work under massive load. Actually not that terrible, I just did some manual caching; grabbed the html, saved it as index.html and made sure the webserver served that (if present) rather than WordPress for the front page, and approximately nobody clicked past the front page (I could have cached some of the article links too)
Thankfully, a little while later, I had a good reason to write a rage fueled just barely dynamic replacement of WordPress that met our exact needs with data stored as files. Not as fast as static files, but page generation in < 10 ms (IIRC) is good enough most days. Sadly, I think that blog moved to something slow again, but I no longer support it.
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
I checked the DNS records, then the Companies Office register of all companies the blogger is a director and/or shareholder of.
And it's his personal blog considering it's on the domain name of <first-name>.<country-code>.
Not sure why you're so certain that it must be a dubious company.
Most branch offices have been closed. The bigger part of the remaining ones are appointment only and getting an appointment can take weeks.
Very few offer cash and similar day to day services without appointment, but only very short hours. People who cannot use cards or the internet will queue in the street.
So like the modern challengers, traditional banks just offer no customer service deserving the name.
In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
It's fair to question, and it is addressed in the article. They're a subsidiary, and the utilities and rent are in the parent company's name. Other relevant documents are in this company's name, but have a PO Box address because their street address does not have a mail service.
> There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.
I think the "we don't want to service you" angle can be addressed by using alternative bank. However, "we've restricted all your abilities to contact us" is an unreasonable step, and prevents actually refunding the former customer the money they're owed. So that latter action is still an unreasonable step on Wise's part.
Bitcoin doesn't have a blacklist functionality and you can use lightning for full anonymity.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?
Wonder if the same logic can be applicable to Wise.
Huh that's a pretty interesting idea. I guess the downside is you need enough margin to cover the short.
I am currently employing a consultant for something. It's something I don't want to do myself and they are doing what I need, but it's so painfully obvious they are just vanilla ChatGPTing everything it's almost funny at this point.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
Justice is more than just following laws.
Transfers to other accounts were still possible.
I've been on calls where it was 30 minute waiting to get answered, you ask for what you need, they put you on hold (or 'transfer' you), then the call drops. They don't ring back.
Telecoms companies in UK seem to have the worst communications, terrible line quality on support calls. I just assume people then don't complain because it's so hard to. The ombudsman is next to useless - you have to be without service for something like 6 weeks before they'll get out of bed.
In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.
ChatGPT must have trained on something. Only things I can think of are the many teen angst TV series with spoken "inner monologue" voice over, and narratives from people who are their own main character.
A lot of banks are now fintechs - no branches, everything in an app, with a website if you are lucky. The rest would like to be like them to cut costs.
Wise is straightforward in the UK, where it is regulated by the same regulator as banks but subject to different rules (the big difference being customer fund ringfencing rather than a deposit guarantee). It varies in other countries but is locally regulated in a good many.
Reputable financial businesses follow regulations in countries in which they do not operate (e.g. by not opening accounts in countries where they are not authorised).
There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".
Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.
It is cheaper than British banks for international transfers. Its business accounts are both easier to open and cheaper to run than those of the banks.
You are right that transfers from personal bank accounts in the UK are usually free and rapid (usually immediate, guaranteed to be within two hours), and similar or better in many other places, but Wise still has an offering beyond that.
So, from an ML perspective you want to maximize recall, precision be damned.
Can you provide any sources for this?
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
Wise was very helpful in getting it resolved, and made it clear that if anything else came up, just reply to the e-mail anytime.
For personal foreign currency transactions, usually whilst travelling, I've used Revolut for years without issue.
Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.
I wish we could as a society move on from rituals paying tribute to what used to be an authentication method, towards one that actually constitutes one today.
They can figure out pretty quickly that A) it's going to be hard to help you, and B) you're going to suck a lot of their time, and C) their poor luck of getting your call is going to make them look worse to their management.
I had a sequence of this happening three times with a utility. Unfortunately, it's the fourth agent who actually helped me that got yelled at, at no fault of her own. But I was pretty pissed at that point.
No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.
I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.
I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.
Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:
"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."
When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.
There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.
Yeah, if the banks could provide a service similar to Wise I'd happily use a bank.
My bank wanted ~$800/mo in foreign exchange fees for what I'm doing. Wise charges me ~$100/mo. That's, what, 700% more fees? I'm saving $8.5k/yr.
Even if Wise imploded tomorrow and I lost the cash I have in there I'm pretty sure after this long I'm still ahead versus having used my bank all along.
And there are a lot of value-adds on top.
I can get a Visa card that lets me pay directly in the foreign currency instead of paying the exchange fee twice. This was a whole separate expensive/specialty product from my bank.
I can send electronic transfers (through Canada's Interac e-Transfer service) that exceed what a local bank will provide even to my business account and completely avoid the need for additional services/hacks/fees/etc. This is, apparently, "impossible and not supported by Interac" according to multiple banks I've talked to, the business rep, etc.
Long story short... I agree. Wise only exists because banks are kinda terrible at this. If the banks sucked less, few people would bother with the friction of the additional account.
Wise needed beneficial ownership documentation for my business account. Presumably this was part of the whole KYC/AML/etc dance.
There's no standard form I could find for this, document to get out of the government service portal, or anything else. I finally just fired up a word processor and put together a single page document:
To whom in may concern,
Below is an accounting of all individuals who, directly or indirectly,
through any contract, arrangement, understanding or otherwise own equity
interests in 12341234 CANADA LTD.
NAME DOB Ownership
nucleardog 1970-01-01 100%
I hereby certify that the above information is correct as of Dec 31, 2037.
Nucleardog
President
12341234 CANADA LTD
(I have since written myself many things things like this, e.g., salary verification letters. Always gives me a chuckle and feels like a weird superpower I've gained by paying the $250 or whatever to incorporate.)
If I were someone that set up forged accounts and stuff professionally this would've been absolutely _nothing_ to bypass. As someone legit doing this _once_ for _a_ business, it definitely took a lot more research and thought that it really should have.
- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff
- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances
There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward
Thats common knowledge for everyone even tangentially related to finance industry and likely for anyone who ever did international business with cross border payments . Not sure what kind of "sources" you expect to see here.
> Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade
Perhaps for it's own populace, but not for it's rulers and those who they work with.
Justice also isn't what you feel justice is.
The whole point of laws is to have a set of definitions and do judgements upon.
> buys western banks to do it's money laundering through
Western banks do enough money laundering even without changing owners to beneficiaries from Russia.
Realistically it is way more nuanced than that. Its a juvenile worldview to think in black and white.
Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side. After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all (albeit as any force causing many to suffer, it's hard to justify it).
The bottomline is - reality is way more nuanced than just black and white.
See, for example, Section 37.002(c) of the Texas finance code: "An office or operation may not remain closed for more than three consecutive days, excluding days on which the bank is customarily closed, without the banking commissioner’s approval."
Laws like these were put in place because failing to disburse someone's money could cause a bank run.
This is a Russian narrative.
> After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all
This also is a Russian narrative.
It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.
Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.
It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.
Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.
There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".
Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.
Because for me, as a person who did international business from Ukraine it makes absolutely zero sense to launder through Ukraine as it is:
1) no part of any union, so you will be unable to spend or move money outside.
2) it has extreme bank regulation, and you cannot just send money outside without cause. Receiving and sending money for fake “services” will not work (compared to a lot of other places I know)
3) it has a lot of independent anti-corruption institutions. You can be sure that any government official fears the consequences of doing something illegal.
4) it is in a state of war and any suspicious money operation will trigger investigation from SBU as well, since Russia tries to pay for its agents.
If there is corruption and money laundering happening, it is well outside of any path available for regular people.
The fact is that there are no proofs that any money donated by EU, US or other donors for Ukraine was misused.
I’ll leave your imagination to judge why the most powerful propaganda machine in the world tries to claim otherwise to stop such aid.
Revolut might be a bit better but again, you don't owe your money, they may ask for random stuff (a selfie, a scan of your passport, a PoA) randomly at any time, they may arbitrarily block you from accessing your money when your passport expired and you haven't received a new one yet, or when you landed in a new country and their heuristic thinks it's not you, so you cant't even buy some food or get a taxi. Even if you pay their Ultra subscription (which I do) it's hard to speak with someone who may make decisions and I've experienced some comical situations like "we can't figure out which one of your cards was used for this attempted transaction, we can't find it in our database, we will reissue all your cards"