HK$6 billion "discreet wealth transfer" ...

[shri]

HK authorities prosecuting money laundering! What have this city turned into

We are diff from Singapore…..

[sarsi]

AML now under customs? .. sigh :x

That's a lot of accts.. and I thought not that easy as before to open a corporate/biz acct.. some of the corpsec firms probably in on it too or closing one eye..

[Plutark]

It's pretty simple, HK gov needs money after spending it on useless stuff to fake the economy during Covid. I think they targeted a lot of mainlanders trying to move money outside of China due to CCP restrictions. Which is problematic in a way because money laundering is basically the bread and butter of HK.

[aquaman]

imagine how much fees the banks generated
and all the banks will get fined and continues to open ficticious accounts.

[CWB Bay]

I tried in vain to open a bank account with four different banks for a small business. Duh.

[RobRoy]

Something is really strange with HK banks. Next to impossible for a honest small business to open a bank account, but the bank has no procedures to detect these type of money flows from hundreds of accounts. It should be quite easy big data analysis to just find patterns like this, but no interest to catch it I guess until regulator forces the bank to have a control on it?

[Trebor]

AML now under customs? .. sigh :x

That's a lot of accts.. and I thought not that easy as before to open a corporate/biz acct.. some of the corpsec firms probably in on it too or closing one eye..

With them being hk residents they wouldn’t have needed to go through a corporate secretarial firm. It would just add unnecessary time, cost and layers to the whole process. I suspect they had some bank employees on their payroll for them to be able to get this many accounts open assuming they aren’t legacy accounts from years ago and only just started using them for the proceeds of crime

Customs were involved because there is mention of fraudulent import business being one source of these funds. My guess is the bank finally clocked on to the scheme reported it to the HKMA who then probably got the police and customs involved in a joint operation

[shri]

like this, but no interest to catch it I guess until regulator forces the bank to have a control on it?

The third tier banks are antiquated and it is not in their interest to do all of this ... The HKMA is also well aware of this...

May be I am cynical, but this operation was closed down because someone did not get their paycheck or these guys got too greedy and overdid it to a point the bank(s) had to act.. not because of any investigative actions.

[sarsi]

Everyone on same page then.. don't get my hopes up, cuz if I see news tmr abt police inspector getting caught in massage parlour sting, I'm really gonna start thinking we are getting back to HK business as usual

I think there are officially no more seats left in the jaded section. It's either new naive prey or standards will be falling v soon for major recalibrate..