The government is out to get crypto and bring the entire industry to its knees.
Part of the plan to do this is to paint all of crypto as a Legion of Doom
harboring criminals and scammers that run amok and steal from your grandmother.
Poor granny.
But is crypto really a haven for money laundering, crime and dark web activity?
Or are politicians and the media using it as a convenient scapegoat
to distract from the real culprits?
We're going to bust some FUD today on BitBoy Crypto
and find out who's really financing crime around the globe.
Let's get it!
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Now, everyone's seen the headlines claiming crypto is a haven for illegal activity.
It seems like we can't go a week without some politicians somewhere
putting out FUD about the terrible impacts of crypto
and how it's going to ruin the world.
Alright. So first things first.
Financial crime has been around way longer than cryptocurrencies.
TradFi, or traditional finance, has been laundering all that money
used for criminal activity for the past 100 years or so.
Then the monarchies before that, and so on and so forth.
And it's a big operation.
Somewhere between $800 billion and $2 trillion are laundered annually.
Investigators don't even know the exact amount because about 90% of that money,
well, it goes undetected.
So we, the people, are supposed to have government agencies
that specialize in preventing money laundering.
Some governments have even banded together to supposedly crack down harder.
$3.9 billion worth of money laundering fines were issued worldwide in 2020.
But if 90% of money laundering is going undetected,
these bureaucracies, well, they're not doing the best job.
Who would have thunk it?
So if crypto is such a big part of the money laundering problem,
it's probably a huge percentage of the trillions laundered each year, right?
Am I right?
Well, no.
Criminals only laundered about $8.6 billion using crypto last year.
Crypto only makes up for a measly 0.4% to maybe, worst case scenario, 1%
of all the money laundered every single year.
Because so much information on crypto can be easily accessed by the public on-chain,
it just doesn't make sense as the go-to place to launder money.
It's much harder to hide transactions than it is with physical currency.
We do have crime in the crypto space, of course,
but the majority comes from scams, rug pulls, or stealing the occasional Bored Ape.
But sometimes you've just got to find a way to laugh at the hypocrisy of the FUD
that the media puts out.
Russia recently blocked a particular crypto news site
for supposedly promoting money laundering.
Russia is known for its love of laundered money.
Money laundering used to be legal in Russia for a period of time.
There's this whole section of London real estate
that's notorious as a haven for Russian laundered money,
and the UK government has conveniently turned a blind eye.
So when you hear someone tell you crypto is bad because it's used by a bunch of naughty criminals,
just remember it's FUD and go ahead and tell them they're big fat liars.
So, who's facilitating all this money laundering?
It's not like the vast webs of criminal enterprises are putting it in their own washing machines.
Well, the answer probably is something you never thought possible.
That's right. It's banks.
Traditional finance, brick-and-mortar banks.
But when banks launder money, they call it "disguising the flow of funds,"
aka just another day at the office.
So let's take a little trip around the world
and spotlight some of the biggest culprits of recent times.
In June of this year, Credit Suisse, one of the jewels of the Swiss crown,
was found guilty in a Bulgarian cocaine money laundering case.
Supposedly, the bank knew all about all the murders and cocaine going on.
And I guess there was even stacks of cash dumped into suitcases
just to underline the fact that that money was sketchy AF.
And yet Credit Suisse, well, they continue to manage the money.
I mean, who cares if you have to wash some blood off some cash
if millions are at stake? Right?
This is the first time in history that Switzerland has prosecuted one of its own banks.
The country has long had a reputation for shady financial dealings,
and they're working harder than Johnny Depp's PR team to rebrand,
demanding Credit Suisse pay almost $46 million in fines.
So let's stay in Switzerland for the moment.
Enjoy some nice mountain air,
a bit of Swiss chocolate and talk about UBS,
not to be confused with IBS, although both are equally crappy.
In 2019, a French court fined Swiss bank UBS $5.1 billion for helping French clients evade taxes.
I guess even a socialist country like France, well, you can get away with not paying your taxes
if you have enough money.
For years, UBS laundered money by providing wealthy French citizens with accounts
to hide their assets from tax authorities.
But finally, the French government made a play of cracking down on this type of behavior
by slapping UBS with the largest penalty in Europe's history.
UBS was also accused of deploying tactics
worthy of James Bond when they sent bankers across the French border
to seek out new clients.
They used encrypted computers, had business cards without the lender's logo
and were told to switch hotels regularly to avoid authority detection.
Absolutely wild!
Worse than the Tinder Swindler.
And speaking of famous Brits, the British bank HSBC is next on our hit list.
In 2020, HSBC was on probation for serving murderers, drug cartels and other criminal entities,
for which it paid a $1.9 billion settlement, by the way,
but that wasn't enough for HSBC
because it continued to provide banking services to criminals,
Ponzi schemers and shell companies tied to looted government funds.
They're the preferred financial home for drug traffickers, including the Sinaloa cartel.
Put that on an HSBC commercial, why don't you?
Their branch in Hong Kong is the most infamous,
processing almost $1.5 billion for shell companies that lack a ton of important customer information
that would ensure the companies were legit.
HSBC processed $31 billion that were stolen from the Brazil government
and $292 million for an organization based in Panama
that we know laundered money for drug cartels.
And it's not like they just started doing this.
Whistleblowers have been accusing the bank of illegal activity for years.
In 2008,
Swiss leaks published evidence they were doing business with tax dodgers and criminals.
In 2012, the US Justice Department almost indicted HSBC in the Sinaloa cartel case,
but for some reason, they decided to let it go.
That's 175 criminal charges against HSBC that the government ignored.
And on top of that, in 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against HSBC Hong Kong
for being instrumental in a Ponzi scheme.
Shocker.
Even the compliance officers HSBC hired to investigate suspicious activity
have said no one listened to them and they were basically shunned within the bank.
So forget about any kind of internal oversight.
Long story short,
HSBC continues to promise to fix its money laundering problems,
then turns around and launders more money for Mexican drug cartels and terrorists.
HSBC was fined $85 million for failing to stop its money laundering in 2021.
And now onto some financial crimes committed by good old American companies.
You didn't think we were going to point the finger at foreigners, did you?
We're the greatest country in the world,
so we've got to have our hands in the money laundering pie.
Yummy.
In April, a Goldman Sachs banker was convicted in a massive bribery and money laundering scheme
which ransacked $4.5 billion from a Malaysian state investment fund.
The scheme was allegedly orchestrated by fugitive socialist and financier Jho Low,
who walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
Not a bad payday.
Goldman helped raise $6.5 billion for the Malaysian investment fund
but then diverted the majority of that back to themselves through bribes and kickbacks.
Funnily enough, the embezzlement funded the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
You can't make this stuff up.
As well as super yachts, jewels and other lavish spending.
And now onto our final big bad of this video,
Wells Fargo.
Henry Wells will be disgusted.
As of May of this year,
Wells Fargo was involved in a $7 million settlement
because it failed to implement a new version of its internal anti-money laundering system.
They basically ignored 30 suspicious activity reports over the past five years.
And this is after 2016
when the bank opened more than 1.5 million checking and savings accounts
and 500,000 credit card accounts without customers' consent.
They paid $185 million dollars in a fine,
but obviously didn't exactly learn the error of their ways.
Nearly every one of its business lines is under investigation by a government agency,
including the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That was what The Wall Street Journal lovingly said about Wells Fargo in 2019.
So, with all this global corruption,
why aren't the anti-money laundering agencies doing anything to stop it?
Obviously, these fines aren't really deterring banks.
They probably think of them as an added cost,
a cost of doing business, a tax, if you will, in a trillion dollar criminal industry.
Like I keep saying on this channel,
the politicians who create these agencies and regulate this kind of thing
are in league with the banks.
Why would they stop something that's helping their friends and themselves to evade taxes?
Plus the vines are very significant.
It's a little boost to government budgets.
And politicians get to go home and say to their constituents
that they really, really tried to stop corruption.
"Like, really!"
"We swear! We really tried."
Don't believe the FUD about crypto being the currency of criminals.
You're smarter than that, guys.
Per usual, the banks where we're holding our fiat are the true villains.
The only difference is when they mess up and get caught with their pants down,
well, they're bailed out by the taxpayers.
Versus in crypto, where we allow a truly free market to trim the fat
as hard as that can sometimes be.
So, what can you do?
Speak with your cash, guys.
Before you open a bank account,
take a look at what that bank has been up to.
If they've been caught money laundering,
heck, even if they're investing in companies or causes you don't believe in,
well, it might be best to store your fiat somewhere else.
The only way the banks will listen is if enough of us little guys stand up
and refuse to participate in their schemes.
Do you hold your fiat with any of the banks I talked about today?
Are you riled up enough to move it elsewhere?
Leave a comment down below and tell us what you think.
And as always, make sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.