Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators’ reach

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 769 points – Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators’ reach
cnbc.com

Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators’ reach::Wells Fargo, a relatively small player on Wall Street, racked up the most fines Tuesday, with a total of $200 million in penalties.

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Private speech is never the problem and should absolutely be encouraged as a human right. The problem here is them avoiding regulators and should get fucked for that alone, that's the crime here. Signal and Whatsapp should not be mentioned at all and this is an attempt to push "encryption bad" narrative.

Yeah, the issue is evading records keeping requirements. The issue is not encrypted communications.

These articles make me pucker my asshole. Like it could be that thing that sends us down that slippery slope.

I work for a large American bank working under a consent order from the SEC to address this exact problem, and it's my job to find and implement the solutions. I can say with absolute confidence that weakening platform integrity is absolutely not a solution being pushed for any of this - not least because the platform owners will 100% not cooperate with any attempt to do so.

I worked at a firm that was regulated and audited by the SEC. The standard lesson from the compliance department was always to have potentially problematic conversations out loud instead of in email or Slack. They never needed encryption to avoid regulators.

I see this as a "yes, Signal is secure, look, they used it and are getting away with it too" narrative.

I thought about that already. It's absolutely intentional, because you already know that they'll keep using those apps, and even if they were illegal, they would keep using them and just get another fine, which is obviously not something that bothers them. It's to prevent normal people from having any privacy.

I break the law, I go to jail. A corporation breaks the law they get a fine the equivalent of a parking ticket.

If corporations want to be people it’s time we start treating them like people. CEOs and Execs in prison. Actual fines that hurt the bottom line. And for the really egregious: shut them down, or if they’re “too big to fail” we can let the government take over or break them up into dozens of small companies ex: Baby Bells

Wells Fargo is worth 163 billion. That $200 million fine is literally 0.12% of their Net worth.

In comparison

The average US salary is $59,428. A parketing ticket on average is about $80

That parketing ticket is 0.13% of that Salary.

So this "fine" is in fact cheaper than a parking ticket.

You can’t compare worth with income. A better comparison might be profits, which were $15B for past 12 months. So Wells Fargo’s penalty is 1.3% of their “salary.” Even if you go by revenue, it’s greater than your parking ticket example. I get that they are an evil corporation, but accuracy matters.

Yup. The fines should be 10-20% of profits for the time period, per charge, depending on the severity.

That would got their gd attention.

Never profits, always revenue. Profits can be gobbled up by some internal bonus or "future investment in a project", thus making it $0. Revenue is all the money generated before allocations and expenses come out. Much harder to weasle out of.

That would got their gd attention.

it always gets their attention and then they pay people to lobby our government to get a lowered; which also always happens.

Sometimes I don't feed the meter if I don't think a meter maid will get to my car before the parking hours end. I just fuckin risk it.

Some countries have speeding fines set to a percentage of your pre-tax income. A student is hurt as much as a CEO. This should be the same.

Agreed. They harm people all day with defective products and the solution is "lol here have this fine that barely hurts you"

I believe the federal government has the power of the corporate death penalty, they just never use it.

At this point I'd rather we be like Asian countries and start jailing the CEOs.

The whole point of a limited company is that its owners are protected against failures of the company. A lot of things will go sideways if this protection gets removed.

I'm genuinely ignorant, but is the owner's protection against the company failing due to standard bad luck/mismanagement/cursed frogurt, the company doing blatantly illegal things under their direction, or both?

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Companies in prison. Unable to operate for whatever length their sentence is. When they come out, they will forever be considered a felon and will not be able to do business with most other companies.

Of you put CEOs and Execs in prison then you are not treating corporations like people. If you do something illegal then they put you in prison. Not your CEO or Execs.

Nobody's sending you to jail for using WhatsApp.

They evaded scrutiny of regulators. That is what they're being charged with.

What about the people who working there.

They should get UBI, just like everybody else.

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It's cost if doing business for them though, the "fines" are a farce, just protection money paid to a gang.

they really need to start with forfeiting all profits. and then maybe a percentage-based fine on top of that.

make it really painful, in the only place these people can be hurt.

How about sending the people responsible to prison?

it's more complicated when it's an entire corporation. Corporations only care about the bottom line so they'll let their minions take the blame. The only real solution is to hurt them in the wallet enough that they have to play by the rules to make a profit.

Not really. Put the C suite in prison and I'm sure the next crew will think twice. They can try and throw underlings under the bus but we don't have to accept that. The buck stops at the top.

Can't put people into prison for things they didn't do, and demonstrating RICO is a lot harder than it sounds. I guarantee you, you start going after their profits and making them take losses, the behavior stops immediately, and across the board.

they'd just get another C-Suite.

But they did do something? They ran a company in an illegal fashion. If they didn't act directly they were negligent. Either way, lock them up.

They always defend their ridiculous income by saying that it's proportional to their level of responsibility? Then the board is responsible for everything that happens in the company unless they can pin point exactly who did what under whose guidance.

Send the whole corporation to prison since they have legal rights same as I do (but I can't afford to enforce mine).

hey, I'd be down for that. just one question..... ... how?

They'll just pass it along to the customers though, that would have to be made very illegal first.. and even then they'd probably do it anyway and blame it on the tellers. In the sea of illegal things Wells Fargo has already done that wouldn't even make a ripple.

Can't pass anything to the customer if your business got closed by the authorities.

I feel like they need to apply charges like conspiracy and fraud against the individuals responsible. When I worked in national security oriented roles, the standard response when being asked to break the law (eg reveal classified info) was to say “I could do that, but I look really bad in orange.”

If the individuals being asked to commit violations and crimes were held individually responsible more often, people would be less likely to do it.

White collar crime costs the economy far more than other kinds of crime, and that’s due to a lack of enforcement caused by misaligned priorities.

The obvious first step is revocation and personal barring for life every single person who participated in the communication from holding a SEC license. The second is jail time for anyone who did it willfully. The third is revocation of their corporation or, in the interest of stockholders who are about to become personally liable, a 50 year probationary period in which revocation of corporation is automatic should any other infraction come to light.

But since the wolves are minding the hen house that'll never happen.. it'll take French tactics.

Fines as a percentage of revenue. A big percentage. That’ll stop this nonsense.

Revocation of corporate status. A corporation is a status set out in US law. No corporate status, no legal protection for officers or shareholders. All liability falls personally and directly on the owners.

Yeah, seriously, why do people forget this so easily? THE GOVERNMENT GRANTS SPECIAL PRIVILEGES TO CORPORATIONS. Any stipulations, limitations, or exceptions are absolutely fair game. Ideally, we grant corporate charters to promote commerce and benefit society. Nobody has a right to a corporate charter, so if a corporation is harming us, we should terminate it like the pregnancy of a Republican's mistress.

And made $5 billion on the deal. I imagine it’s like “oh right, now we have to pay off the regulators, I mean the fine.”

Its a shit show. Staff can't event send a text saying they are sick unless they use an approved business communication channel.

Worst still, if you receive said comms from staff on a non approved channel, eg your personal phone, you have to report it to HR.

There is no way bank's can operate like that so the regulator is going to be lining their pockets for quite some time.

These really need to be reported as percentage of revenue. It's really not that much for them.

Oh no. In other news banks keep breaking the law and using our money to pay fines.

Remove banks. Leach on society that provide nothing. Yet they are the reason we can't frolic in the meadows.

Crypto has been in existence for a while.

Crypto is currently run and maintained by the banks. Blockchain could be the answer if it wasn't under the thumb of the banking elite.

Nothing of value can happen until the old die.

I don't think that's true for the most part, care to elaborate? Which banks can stop me from sending which cryptocurrencies?

You wouldn't send crypto from a bank. I know that my banks. 3 of them refused to buy crypto. So that for a start.

Also jp Morgan and other huge conglomerates have massive holdings in and against Bitcoin. So it's not for the poor's. It's bring manipulated by the mega wealthy.

You wouldn’t send crypto from a bank.

Right, that's the point, you don't need a bank to send or receive it, banks aren't involved in that process at all.

I know that my banks. 3 of them refused to buy crypto.

They don't do this because they run crypto, they do it because they don't want you to be able to use crypto.

It’s bring manipulated by the mega wealthy.

True, but that just means if you try to play the market you're likely to get burned. That's separate from whether they're an alternative to the problems posed by banks. In this case the article is about banks having poor transparency and record keeping so they can get away with shit. Crypto has great transparency, not just to the government but to anyone who cares to look at a record of every transaction. Banks don't want that for the obvious reasons.

You need to use fiat to purchase crypto. Suppose you could mine it. Banks are though. Most sites I use require verification now and banks are involved in that process.

I'm aware of that but they are heavily invested in Bitcoin and making money from it. They don't want it to succeed but they do what monies from exploiting it.

I'm aware. Not crypto but blockchain has impeccable transparency. Every politician and business should show a paper trail of what they spend our money on.

Auz has receipts of what their tax is "spent" on. Be great to force that through but they control the laws so far chance

I would follow you into the mists of Avalon, if that's what you mean.

That isn't a fine. That's the cutest if doing business to these assholes. I keep saying it, fines need to be calculated on a logarithmic scale based on income and net assets. That goes for everything from a speeding ticket to wire fraud - literally every crime with a fine as punishment.

Don't need no logarithm :-)

Just 1% of their worldwide year's revenue for each day when the offence is/was happening.

Actually being directly in a position to see how seriously this is taken by the banks, mobilizing to address the problem of staff using non approved and recorded communications is massive and doing exactly what the fine is supposed to do - motivating the companies involved to get off their arses and fix the gaping holes that allow this to happen.

Source - I'm the guy on the tech side who has to come up with solutions to allow communications with clients/peers/other firms over whatsApp, Signal, Line, SMS etc in a way that is able to be archived in line with the law

Quantum computers accessible only to the rich and powerful can't get here soon enough..

Are you saying that quantum computers could help the rich encrypt their communications better?

Haha the only thing a quantum channel does is verifying if a message has been altered (looking at a message alters it).
Actual encryption that prevents the Shor algorithm from having a linear running time have been around for quite some time now and can be easily run on normal machines. NIST is just taking its sweet time to decide on one.

We know most banks are scummy but Wells Fargo takes the cake. That bank is always wrapped up in some BS. If WAMU can fail we should go ahead and let Wells Fargo become extinct.

Chump change for banks. Cost of doing business already sitting with the accounts team.

how do i summon the auto tldr bot?

U.S. regulators on Tuesday announced a combined $549 million in penalties against Wall Street firms that failed to maintain electronic records of employee communications.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against 11 firms for “widespread and longstanding failures” to maintain records, including by allowing employees to use unsupervised side channels such as messaging apps WhatsApp and Signal, the regulator said.

Wells Fargo was the biggest U.S. bank cited Tuesday in the sweeping actions.

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