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Subject: NY Times: terrorists have switched to cash
Thomas    10/14/2003 3:22:10 AM
NYT annonces about a week ago, that terrorist have been found with large amounts of cash, and as such is surmised not to use the banking system as much any more. This is good news - if it is true. Conducting and finansing terrorism passing large sums of folding money around is immensely more difficult and cumbersome than bank tranfers: They have to rely on courriers, that are at constant risk of being intercepted - and you have to rely on their integrity. It involves a lot more people in the process - which give our hero (the flatfooted cop) that many more chances of making a color. A resonable next move would be for the Federal Bank to recall the larger denominations of USD bills (They can always reissue them when the situation changes) and mint coins for smaller denominations. Who cares? Everybody legitimate charges! A possible next move for the terrorists will be to change to gold - let them. Wait untill they have changed the money - and then start dumping gold prices from the stock at Fort Knox - who cares? Civilised countries have gone from the gold standard years ago!
 
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Ashley-the-man    RE:NY Times: terrorists have switched to cash   10/14/2003 6:17:07 PM
"A resonable next move would be for the Federal Bank to recall the larger denominations of USD bills" Why not let them go ahead and use cash in high denominations. It is a dead give away. Anyone knows that when you try to pay for an airline ticket in cash, buy a car for cash, pay large sums of cash for anything, they will immediately be under suspicion.
 
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Thomas    RE:NY Times: terrorists have switched to cash   10/15/2003 2:36:13 AM
That's probably why kidnappers and terrorist demand small, old notes out of sequence. There is some point to your statement, the swedish 10.000 krone note is next to useless, as you can't get it out of the country. So why issue it? As an alternative: why not make the notes heavier? Here Sweden with their extensive experience in crime is another inspiration: They issued copper "coins" in large denominations (as far as I recall: It weighed 5 kiloes!)
 
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appleciderus    Have they switched or...   10/15/2003 6:36:00 AM
..have their "money laundering" opportunities been diminished?
 
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Thomas    RE:Have they switched or...   10/15/2003 7:58:00 AM
It is my guess. When you don't use the systems made for the purpose of transferring money - the banking system - and use a far more cumbersome way - then it must mean Big Brother is watching your computer, as I guess somebody is waching this. For money laundrering purposes the stockbrokers - which are by far the best mashine for that purpose - are relatively few and easily targetted by intelligence. What you got to realise is that in any transaction there are at least 2 parties and their book have to match for the transaction - and all transactions have to have a sender and a reciever - or the army of banking clerks start piling up overtime! Secondly. In any accounting system you have to have the accounts trail (or your accountant won't sign the annual report). This accounts trail contains all sorts of funny information on the internal money trail in a business. 3. It is far easier to get money into your account, than withdrawing them - banks are funny that way - so impounding money in a banking system is not difficult. Furthermore the federal reserve has very nasty ways of making foreign bank roll over - a massive baissing of their stocks comes to mind - with the right amount of money ANY stock can be removed from the exchange due to violent drop. As I've said before: Those that will destroy the Al Qaida will be penpushers and accountants!
 
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appleciderus    Thomas   10/15/2003 9:40:14 AM
That was exactly my point. With little or no publicity, with little or no politics, there seems to have been progress made on this front in the War on Terror. Never underestimate the power of the CFO's.(bean counters)
 
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capitalist72    how do you stop 'hawala?'   10/15/2003 12:48:45 PM
I'd wager that the majority of terrorist money transfers happen through the highly informal hawala network - it's nearly impossible to stop, and is quite efficient and cost effective, and there needn't be a paper trail. It happens right in front of your eyes all over the US - 99.99% of it quite harmless, but difficult to know about it unless you belong to certain ethnic groups. The only way to stop hawala will be when there are more market oriented currency regulations across the world - something which is happening, but slowly. Al-Qaeda have been known in the past to have aggressive credit card fraud and identity theft operations - something they share in common with organised crime.
 
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American Kafir    RE:how do you stop 'hawala?'   10/15/2003 3:25:08 PM
 
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Phoenix Rising    RE:how do you stop 'hawala?'   10/15/2003 5:01:56 PM
There's this, and the fact that it's possible for terrorism operations to work on fairly low budgets. The monitoring of CFO's, international monetary organs, and our heroic flatfooted friends together will probably be able to monitor massive transactions (estimated $20 billion for a North Korean nuke, for example, if I remember the public estimate of what the bidding would start at), but the 9/11 attacks actually took comparatively little money to pull off. Nonetheless, it's certainly better than nothing. --Phoenix Rising
 
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Thomas    RE:how do you stop 'hawala?' Phoenix Rising   10/16/2003 3:16:36 AM
Agreed: You stop what you can, as there is certainly no need to help them. I see in the Danish Daily "Politiken", that the bank notes of Irak are being changed. Good move! Take counterfeit out of circulation, and give some people that want to swap large sums some explaining to do. We did that in Denmark after WW2 - People found fortunes in trash cans! The hawala: Well thats my point in making heavier bank notes - if you can stop them, make them suffer!
 
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American Kafir    RE:how do you stop 'hawala?' Phoenix Rising   10/16/2003 2:14:45 PM
I wonder if the hideous new $20 bill design in the US (which oddly looks like an 1980's era food stamp) has anything to do with the efforts to stop terrorist money laundering.
 
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