Re: [PLUG] Chime

Hi Jeff et al:

Yeah, that's "know your customer" for banks. I did some reading on this topic years back...

Bank transactions in excess of $10K automatically generate a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) and repeated transactions of less than $10K (say, 3 deposits or withdrawals of $3500) can generate a SAR and also can subject you to legal action for "structuring" your transactions to avoid the $10 limit. Just enter: structuring crime into duckduckgo.com and see for yourself.

Several years ago a small grocer kept depositing his cash & check store receipts in amounts less than $10k.

This triggered an investigation for structuring and his accounts were frozen.

It turns out his insurance only covered losses of cash (via robbery for example) of less than $10K. DOH!

After legal action (on his part and with his own $) he eventually regained access to his own money.

If anybody wonders why I'm a libertarian THAT ^!^ isn't the iceberg... it's just the visible part.

To bring this back to Linux: I'm opening a Proton email account this week and selecting the parts necessary to configure my workstation to dual boot into Qubes (qubes-os.org) just to explore the options. One big (BIG) hangup for me is that I have a Love-Love relationship with KDE and I believe I have to leave that behind to use Qubes :crying: :sobbing: :depression:

I keep promising to do a PLUG presentation about Qubes but it's hard to do that without actually, you know, *using it* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, this looks cool too: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/02/213209/google-free-e-os-is-now-selling-preloaded-phones-in-the-us-starting-at-380

Eric

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:27 AM jeffv via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

Great point. Banks have all sorts of regulatory hoops, and be certain
they want to know you. One thing is they like to see how much you're
depositing and how frequently. Because if you have money, you must be
laundering and not paying taxes to yer Uncle Sam. They are forced to
report transactions of $10k or greater, via the amusingly-named Know
Your Neighbor Act.

On 3/4/21 8:56 AM, Thomas Delrue via plug wrote:
> (I am not a lawyer, do not take legal advice from me.)
>
> This explains much more... While I think it's shortsighted on Chime's
> end to say the least, it's probably the lawyer-types that told them to
> implement this.
>
> Chime's a bank and thus falls under certain requirements of reporting
> and surveillance of its customers. One of those is the ability to
> provide a strong link to a real-world identity to be able to (among
> things) trace down money laundering or "aiding and abetting terrorism in
> material ways".
> Since ProtonMail is a provider that enables you to sign up without
> providing *any* personal information (*), this would prevent chime from
> having another link to you as a real person in the real world.
> ProtonMail also makes it so that any organ of the USG will have a hard
> time to pry information from them (I think they ware Swiss-based for
> that specific reason - but I'm not 100% certain about that)
> I think that with that in the back of their mind, they could justifiably
> classify ProtonMail as an anonymous e-mail provider for their reading of
> their requirements.
>
> Chances are, they have some deny-list of providers of these mail
> services, such as ProtonMail, mailinator, and what else have you.
>
> Now, could you go ahead and set up your own 'anonymous' e-mail provider?
> Sure, but remember that you are a US entity and are subject to the US
> PATRIOT act (and all other
> 'you-have-nothing-to-fear-if-you-have-nothing-to-hide'-laws) so good
> luck with that. You may be forced, hard-handedly or not, to keep (very)
> detailed records of who uses your anonymous e-mail service and what
> for...so make sure you consult a lawyer before you attempt to do so in
> order to set accurate, reasonable, and correct expectations towards the
> users of your future system. This also applies to you if you are a US
> entity, but host the service (or even the controlling entity of the
> service) itself outside of the US
>
> On the other hand, this does tell you something about the
> ability/requirement/eagerness of other mail providers regarding coughing
> up who the 'real world person behind account X is', doesn't it?
>
> (*) If you get prompted for "gimme a phone number" when signing up for a
> ProtonMail account, just keep hitting Refresh until it goes "fine, how
> about you solve this captcha then to prove you're human".
>
> On 2/28/21 14:53, Joe Rosato via plug wrote:
>> Got this error and called them.
>> They then said they do not accept "private" email addresses.
>> You will note here it says "anonymous" email provider- which is wrong.
>> Protonmail is not an anonymous email provider. It is a private email
>> provider.
>>
>> image.png
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 2:46 PM LeRoy Cressy via plug
>> <plug@lists.phillylinux.org <mailto:plug@lists.phillylinux.org>> wrote:
>>
>> On 2/28/21 1:53 PM, Joe Rosato via plug wrote:
>>> Recently purchased a private email address to increase my
>>> security, and just found out chime.com <http://chime.com> does not
>>> allow "private" email addresses. I went with protonmail - used the
>>> free one for a while now when I wanted more privacy than my gmail
>>> account.
>>>
>>> I understand that "free" things on the internet translates to
>>> "you" are the product... but somehow this one blindsided me.
>>>
>>> Thought it would make for a good discussion.
>>>
>>> Joe
>>>
>> I personally use protonmail and also purchased from them the vpn
>> package. As a paying customer you can download their protonmail
>> bridge packagewhich enables you to use Mozilla Thunderbird to
>> directly access their IMAP server. Their VPN supports using OpenVPN
>> which is available on all Linux distributions.
>>
>> As an Arch Linux user they include a PKGBUILD file for you to
>> compile your own package.
>>
>> I have no problems with with their service. They also responded
>> very quickly when I noticed a bug in their PKGBUILD file.
>
>
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