ttj - Tom Jones

Let's say, for the sake of the illustration, that the most unpleasant part of the visit to the dentist is the drilling into one's teeth.  Imagine, then, if, just before the drilling was about to start, your dentist put on some clown music, and went out for a cigarette break.  In comes a complete stranger, wielding a drill, wearing a tee-shirt saying "outsourced-drillingz-R-US", with the rest of their outfit being a clown costume.  They then set about clumsily trying to drill into your face, while your dentist, with whom you thought you had the relationship, is nowhere to be seen. Some time in the current compliance era, during which no real economic growth has taken place in the West, estate agents in various jurisdictions (including Guernsey and the UK apparently) had to start compliancing buyers of real estate objects.  Although there are several very unpleasant parts of the buying procedure, getting complianced is arguably the most unpleasant part.  How does ...

I am currently liquidating some bitcoin, and about to liquidate a load more. I have to capture records for compliance. I quite like having decent records anyway. Bitstamp does not provide statements, and the records that one can extract from their service are not fit for purpose. I placed an order to sell a tranche of Bitcoin for over 1M fiats(2024). The order filled. Now to capture the record of the order. There is no orders view. The best i could find was an entry in a sort of log screen, showing everything from logins to order placements. It doesn’t show the order being filled, just placed, but it’s something. The CSV file is much too verbose, not showing useful totals (aggregates), and is not in a compliance-friendly visual format with logos etc. It also doesn’t have balances, at all. No, I’m not shitting you. To check balances, you have to capture them from the web screen, and then calculate them from a CSV of your entire account history. Bankers have told me that they have failed...

Last year, Kraken's incompetent compliance team asked for documents supporting source of funds.  Since apparently the buyin logs were not enough, it was really more like source of wealth documentation that they wanted.  I duly spent several days assembling the required audit trail documentation. Kraken's web interface, which is generally appalling, could not accept multiple documents in one category (this one being "source of funds").  Kraken repeatedly asked me to email them the documents in the clear -- a clear case of criminal negligence in handling customer data.  Their other suggestion was to (really) append all the documents into one big PDF.  This, in the interest of pragmatism, I eventually did. Five months later, and Kraken's very bad "Account Documents" section for my account shows my submission as "Unprocessed".  Yes, you have to interact with the document (hovering) to get it to say the status "Unprocessed".  Otherwise, yo...

My name's Tom and I'm a full-time compliance officer. I have now encountered, with at least four firms, the following pattern: a firm asks for source-of-funds documents.  They may say you can send them via their web site -- but you can't.  They ask you to send them by plain-text email, apparently not caring about the systematic leakage thus performed.  They may, hilariously, declare their receiving address "secure", as tho this makes it so. The best case is that the firm simply accepts the documents on paper to their normal post address.  This was the case with Nidwaldner Kantonalbank.  Sadly, firms are dropping the ability to handle paper post properly, but without developing any competence in handling of electronic documents to compensate. An extreme example, with which I'm currently struggling, is Kraken, the digital currency exchange.  Despite its warts, it somewhat works, and they have so far put out the money, which is an important part of the service...

My name's Tom and I work full-time in compliance.  Not as an employment.  But banks and the like just keep giving me never-ending admin tasks, in order to have access to my own property.  I don't see how economic growth could be possible under such a regime, and suspect that it's not, but here we are. One of the tasks of this kind of compliance officer is to print out screenshots, as banks love things on paper and in PDF format, which stands for "print digital format".  On Debian, not knowing better, I use GIMP for this. A reasonable default when printing an image to an A4 sheet might be to set a margin around the sheet, and then fit the image to fit the sheet within this margin, whatever comes first, height or width, subject to orientation of the sheet and aspect ratio of the image.  Without going below some minimum resolution, maybe 100 dpi. GIMP does not do that.  My screenshots, of xterms, were coming out tiny.  I looked up how to change it.  ...