+972 52-548-6969
International money transfers, sanctions and utter stupidity
I have a consultant that did some work for me. While the majority of our people are working in Israel and Poland, we actually have people working for us all over the map.
The consultant submitted their invoice at the end of the month and we sent a wire transfer to the provided account. So far, pretty normal and business as usual. We do double verification of account details, to avoid common scams, by the way, so we know that the details we sent were correct. Except… the money never arrived.
When we inquired, it turned out that the money transfer was reversed. The reason why? This is the address that the consultant provided (not the actual address, mind, but has the same issue). Note that the
Mr. Great Consultant
1234 Cuba Avenue
Alta Vista, Ottawa, K1G 1L7
Canada
The wire transfer was flagged as potential international sanctions violation and refused.
That was… very strange.
It appears that someone saw Cuba in the address, decided that this is a problem and refuse the transfer. I’m not sure if I would rather that this is the case of an over active Regex or a human not applying critical thinking.
We are now on week two of trying to resolve that with the bank and it is quite annoying.
Next port of call, buying Monero on the dark web… 
.
Comments
That is very annoying! It could easily be either of those two things. Too hard they didn't apply the idea of flagging the transaction for review rather than trying rejecting it.
In the US, per AML laws, our brokerage scrubs every wire/ach against various lists, using vendors such as Lexis Nexis or RDC. However false positives outnumber actual positives by far, so any positive match is always manually reviewed. Looks like someone is saving time by not bothering to do manual reviews.
Per AML laws in the US our company scrubs every outgoing Wire/ACH using third-party vendors such as LexisNexis or RDC. But the vast majority of flagged items are false positives so each one is manually reviewed and allowed to go out with a note explaining the false positive.
Here is RDC's API page for checking entities.
https://service.rdc.com/api/grid-service/v2.html
Apart from sanction lists, these companies apparently have all info about everyone. If you subscribe to it, they can return things like all court cases, liens, and suits filed against an entity etc etc
I've never had any problems after I've switched to Revolut. I've decided to give them a shot in their early days to see what the fuss is about. Now I use them for both myself and my company. I've convinced all my friends to use the app, it has a very convenient split bill feature, highly useful when going out for lunc (Well that was pre-Pandemic but still usefull) and 0 commission conversion. I've used it in USA, Japan, Spain, Greece, France, England, and more without issues.
Banks really don't need any buildings at all anymore, they can be 100% digital in this age.
We use TransferWise for all international payments to staff, it's worked well for years.
We use Transfer Wise and it works flawlessly. The biggest advantage is that we also pay with TransferWise in local currency of the contractor
That's strange - I thought the IBAN was enough to find out what the destination country is..
Todur, It does. And the "offending" value was in the Street name!
Comment preview