Someone - an actual human person - needs to face criminal charges for these kinds of crimes.
The standard response is that it's too hard to determine exactly who is responsible since many people are involved and everyone is just doing their jobs and only sees a piece of it.
But that's not true, the police could start with whoever received bonuses for their work on the projects in question. After all, that's who the company thinks is responsible for it.
Of course that's just a starting point. Many people might have received bonuses and have had no idea what was going on. Some might have even raised concerns internally. They could share those emails and documents with the police investigators and easily clear themselves.
These corporations aren't the mafia. No one is going to spend five years in prison to protect their manager.
I think the underlying FinCEN report (https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2026-10/BoA-Consent-Orde...) illustrates well why this won't really accomplish what you want. They seem to have a pretty detailed understanding of what happened, and it wasn't that some executive you'd be excited to prosecute directed everyone to do crimes. The concrete instances of misconduct are things like:
* The developers of their transaction monitoring system designed it poorly and had inadequate testing.
* The compliance team correctly flagged "Customer A" as a money laundering risk, but the account team for Customer A slow-rolled the account closure.
Perhaps, but I'm not inclined to take their claims at face value.
Of course it is possible that all the managers and executives at BoA, and HSBC, Deutsche Bank, etc, etc are all innocent lambs and were completely shocked (shocked!) that they were making hundreds of millions of dollars facilitating money laundering.
That's exactly what the police investigation would, and should, determine.
Which specific law enforcement organization should determine this, and why do you think they'd do a better or deeper investigation than FinCEN did? Most law enforcement agencies don't employ banking experts who would be able to meaningfully evaluate claims about whether money laundering controls were or were not adequate.
I do understand why the concept of the corporate veil exists, but there's a really big flaw: there are people in corporations who are in decision making positions who can financially benefit from steering corporations to behave unethically, if not downright illegally
There's a huge incentive for those people to drive the corporation to do shady shit to maximize their personal profits from it, and it's very very difficult to hold them accountable. That's a really bad combination and anyone could predict it leads to a lot of corporations doing shady shit
Oh sure the corporation gets fined once in a while but the shareholders and the executives laugh all the way to the bank. It's such a farce
> Treasury said that Bank of America “admits that it willfully violated’’ the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act, which requires banks to help the government detect and prevent money laundering.
But then goes on to talk about Binance? Kinda side-stepping the meat of the issue here..
My opinion is that a lot of the money is being laundered because it's from activity that I don't think should be illegal. I think of it as civil disobedience.
Someone - an actual human person - needs to face criminal charges for these kinds of crimes.
The standard response is that it's too hard to determine exactly who is responsible since many people are involved and everyone is just doing their jobs and only sees a piece of it.
But that's not true, the police could start with whoever received bonuses for their work on the projects in question. After all, that's who the company thinks is responsible for it.
Of course that's just a starting point. Many people might have received bonuses and have had no idea what was going on. Some might have even raised concerns internally. They could share those emails and documents with the police investigators and easily clear themselves.
These corporations aren't the mafia. No one is going to spend five years in prison to protect their manager.
Look to Danske Bank incident [0]
CEO resigns 2018, is charged in 2019, and in 2021 all charges against Danske bankers dropped.
Nordic countries are supposedly the most strict for this type of situation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_s...
I think the underlying FinCEN report (https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2026-10/BoA-Consent-Orde...) illustrates well why this won't really accomplish what you want. They seem to have a pretty detailed understanding of what happened, and it wasn't that some executive you'd be excited to prosecute directed everyone to do crimes. The concrete instances of misconduct are things like:
* The developers of their transaction monitoring system designed it poorly and had inadequate testing.
* The compliance team correctly flagged "Customer A" as a money laundering risk, but the account team for Customer A slow-rolled the account closure.
Perhaps, but I'm not inclined to take their claims at face value.
Of course it is possible that all the managers and executives at BoA, and HSBC, Deutsche Bank, etc, etc are all innocent lambs and were completely shocked (shocked!) that they were making hundreds of millions of dollars facilitating money laundering.
That's exactly what the police investigation would, and should, determine.
Which specific law enforcement organization should determine this, and why do you think they'd do a better or deeper investigation than FinCEN did? Most law enforcement agencies don't employ banking experts who would be able to meaningfully evaluate claims about whether money laundering controls were or were not adequate.
I couldn't agree more
I do understand why the concept of the corporate veil exists, but there's a really big flaw: there are people in corporations who are in decision making positions who can financially benefit from steering corporations to behave unethically, if not downright illegally
There's a huge incentive for those people to drive the corporation to do shady shit to maximize their personal profits from it, and it's very very difficult to hold them accountable. That's a really bad combination and anyone could predict it leads to a lot of corporations doing shady shit
Oh sure the corporation gets fined once in a while but the shareholders and the executives laugh all the way to the bank. It's such a farce
> Treasury said that Bank of America “admits that it willfully violated’’ the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act, which requires banks to help the government detect and prevent money laundering.
But then goes on to talk about Binance? Kinda side-stepping the meat of the issue here..
Maybe BoA can profit from the Russian Diesel sanction changes to make up the lost $1.2B
Slap on the wrist unless someone is held criminally liable for it.
AML/KYC is oppression
Nah. KYC can go too far, but money laundering is not something we should tolerate.
My opinion is that a lot of the money is being laundered because it's from activity that I don't think should be illegal. I think of it as civil disobedience.
They didn’t pay a bribe. Tsk tsk.
Treasury release: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0657
Is someone late on their bribes?
And this wasn't on my bingo card.