IPD
02-11-2015, 06:59 AM
I was reading the news this morning about the mandatory reporting of foreign bank accounts, held by Americans, with balances over $50,000. There was also an article about a woman who is in trouble with the IRS for "structuring" her bank deposits--breaking them up so that they don't exceed the $10,000 mandatory reporting figure. And this got me thinking about another "million-dollar" idea. (And let me emphasize that I'm ONLY an idea man...figuring out how to implement something has never been my forte).
Imagine a computer program that was linked to all your finances. But instead of something that simply links your credit cards & utilities to your bank account, something that autonomously controls your cash flow. Now under existing rules, there are a lot of strings attached to high-value bank accounts. What if instead of having 1 account with $1,000,000--a person had 200 accounts with $5,000 balances? Now if this program was linked to all accounts, it could be set to make deposits. And here's where the neat part is. If you wanted to deposit $100,000 into this system, the program could choose a random number of those accounts and deposit a random dollar amount in each. For example, let's say that it picked 27 accounts at random (out of those 200) and then selected a random amount to deposit into each account. Furthermore, it could be set to stagger these deposits over the course fo 24 hours, so that they appear at random intervals and do not correspond to one another.
Now I realize that this would ipso-facto preclude higher interest rates associated with higher-balance bank accounts. But what it would also do is allow withdrawals/deposits to occur with virtually no "alarm bells" going off to those who are monitoring such transactions. And of course, if we're talking about certain types of foreign banks, there will be minimal/no tax assessments on them--so the overhead labor required to maintain said accounts would be very low. Additionally, it would make seizure of assets almost impossible...because they would be spread out over a large swath (varying banks, varying accounts, varying amounts).
The only hurdles I see to this becoming a reality are 1st, the hassle of setting up the requisite number of bank accounts required (hard for a lone individual, not hard at all for a company or a team of dedicated people). Plus, if the accounts are generated under differing names, it is yet another level of complexity that becomes difficult to "spy through". And 2nd, a reliable method of generating the initial deposits has to be developed (how do you get paper money into electronic form?) This could possibly be partially alleviated by a "throwaway account" or a "gateway account". This would be an account designed to be minimally traceable--either used for only a brief period of time (eg. a few total transactions) before being terminated, or multiple "gateway accounts" which are only linked to a handful of the total accounts. At that point, transactions between accounts would be handled by this program; so deposits could be spread out between gateway accounts...where the program takes over and spreads it to the four-winds. By cycling through gateway accounts, it would be increasingly difficult to flag someone for "structuring" payments. And layer upon layer of accounts could be added, with no static ties between any layers.
Basically, this would function somewhat like a RAID 1+0+1+0+etc--but for bank accounts. But the links would all be electronically managed and--due to variations built into the program--would be exceedingly difficult to trace or link together.
So tell me, what do you think? Is something like this truly feasible? I feel that with the right banks, and in the right circumstance--something like this could be used for great evil--or potentially for good (though I'm not entirely sure how "good" would factor in...yet). At the very least, if it works it should provide a level of anonymity that has to my knowledge never before been available.
Thoughts?
Imagine a computer program that was linked to all your finances. But instead of something that simply links your credit cards & utilities to your bank account, something that autonomously controls your cash flow. Now under existing rules, there are a lot of strings attached to high-value bank accounts. What if instead of having 1 account with $1,000,000--a person had 200 accounts with $5,000 balances? Now if this program was linked to all accounts, it could be set to make deposits. And here's where the neat part is. If you wanted to deposit $100,000 into this system, the program could choose a random number of those accounts and deposit a random dollar amount in each. For example, let's say that it picked 27 accounts at random (out of those 200) and then selected a random amount to deposit into each account. Furthermore, it could be set to stagger these deposits over the course fo 24 hours, so that they appear at random intervals and do not correspond to one another.
Now I realize that this would ipso-facto preclude higher interest rates associated with higher-balance bank accounts. But what it would also do is allow withdrawals/deposits to occur with virtually no "alarm bells" going off to those who are monitoring such transactions. And of course, if we're talking about certain types of foreign banks, there will be minimal/no tax assessments on them--so the overhead labor required to maintain said accounts would be very low. Additionally, it would make seizure of assets almost impossible...because they would be spread out over a large swath (varying banks, varying accounts, varying amounts).
The only hurdles I see to this becoming a reality are 1st, the hassle of setting up the requisite number of bank accounts required (hard for a lone individual, not hard at all for a company or a team of dedicated people). Plus, if the accounts are generated under differing names, it is yet another level of complexity that becomes difficult to "spy through". And 2nd, a reliable method of generating the initial deposits has to be developed (how do you get paper money into electronic form?) This could possibly be partially alleviated by a "throwaway account" or a "gateway account". This would be an account designed to be minimally traceable--either used for only a brief period of time (eg. a few total transactions) before being terminated, or multiple "gateway accounts" which are only linked to a handful of the total accounts. At that point, transactions between accounts would be handled by this program; so deposits could be spread out between gateway accounts...where the program takes over and spreads it to the four-winds. By cycling through gateway accounts, it would be increasingly difficult to flag someone for "structuring" payments. And layer upon layer of accounts could be added, with no static ties between any layers.
Basically, this would function somewhat like a RAID 1+0+1+0+etc--but for bank accounts. But the links would all be electronically managed and--due to variations built into the program--would be exceedingly difficult to trace or link together.
So tell me, what do you think? Is something like this truly feasible? I feel that with the right banks, and in the right circumstance--something like this could be used for great evil--or potentially for good (though I'm not entirely sure how "good" would factor in...yet). At the very least, if it works it should provide a level of anonymity that has to my knowledge never before been available.
Thoughts?