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I'm really struggling to think of what "Alep" even refers to that would trigger this. Surely not Aleppo, right?

Oh look. Another incident of the Scunthorpe problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Yup Alepo & thus ISIS. What a world: where a regex match can kill your business.
More accurately, I suspect it's Aleppo and thus Syria, which is under sanctions by the US and European countries.
Yeah, this is almost certainly some AML provision that has gone amuck, but they'd rather inconvenience you in a silly way to prove that they were "doing their job" than to get themselves shut down due to sanctions.
Aren’t there towns in the US and elsewhere named for towns in other countries? This xenophobia is an albatross.
The people of Aleppo, Pennsylvania must have a lot of fun.
My friend had an account with Isis in the username because she learnt about the Egyptian god in video games. She was panic about that a few years later
It seems to be a "popular baby name" of Egyptian origin, according to this: https://adoption.com/baby-names/origin/egyptian (second page).
That was the original name for what eventually became Google Wallet. It was launched as Isis, then promptly rebranded to Softcard before eventually being bought by Google.
Also an elite spy agency
I wouldn't say “elite”.
There was a hookah bar named ISIS in Astoria, Queens. It was named after the owners first love - sweet story: https://qns.com/2016/08/isis-hookah-lounge-in-astoria-change...
It's the dream of box ticking auditors everywhere
Alep is French for Aleppo.
I remember PayPal restricting some users back in 2014, whose billing address was Simferopol blvd., Moscow, Russia.

People of Isis st., somewhere across UK, were also out of luck.

isis is commonly used to refer to the stretch of the river thames running through oxford, uk, and to several oxford institutions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isis

Its also a name of a Egyptian goddess, a moon, a Dutch DJ (Dj Isis formerly known as 100% Isis) and a whole lot more [1].

At least the word 'is' did not get corrupted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_(disambiguation)

Also a spy agency from Archer (a cartoon series)

Oh, and let's not forget the routing protocol - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/iproute_is...

Someone wanting to cause world wide disruption should start an organization called a
And this British actress is actually called Isis : https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8365231/
Surely Aleppo. Financial institutions are responsible for making sure their customers don't circumvent sanctions, don't launder money etc. If PayPal would not stopped this transaction, it could be a huge liability for them in regards to financial regulators.

Unfortunately, I do not know of a better solution than "match transaction data on this list of regexes" that would scale for the millions of daily payments that banks are processing.

Yeah because terrorist put the real subject in their transactions.
The entire country of Syria is under sanction.
So your solution is?
Actually know your customers. Like real banks do. Relying on a free text description on the payment is completely useless.
"Real banks" also will block transactions with the "wrong" keywords in them. They are literally required to do this.

For example:

Chase Bank blocks California man’s online payment over service dog’s ‘terrorist’ name

https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/chase-bank-blocks-onl...

These stories are really common. Usually a phone call fixes it.

The real bank that I use in the UK cares about what you put in the reference field. Putting something like "AK47" as the reference quickly results in a phone call from them telling you to not do that.
Would it be a problem for a US bank?
Yeah because terrorists will definitely not lie when they open a bank account!

Also…how would KYC stop a terrorist from abusing your mothers bank account to transfer money?

This is why you need KYC and also transaction screening (and also X, Y and Z).

Yes, but transaction screening should rely on information about the accounts involved, and not the descriptions on the payments. Because those mean nothing.
Have a system in place to resolve these false positives quickly and painlessly?

Of course all positives are going to be false positives, but what did you expect? Fighting international terrorism one regex at a time?

A system. You mean like sending the owner of the flagged transaction an e-mail? Like what happened exactly in this case?

Also, curious about your source that all screening positives are false positives. Can you link to that?

Not wage financial war?
Come again? Just to make sure we’re on the same page, your opinion is that terrorists should be free to use existing financial instruments (bank accounts, PayPal etc.) to transfer funds for their terrorist needs? Or am I misunderstanding?
> Unfortunately, I do not know of a better solution than "match transaction data on this list of regexes" that would scale for the millions of daily payments that banks are processing.

I think it would be reasonable to ask you, and other supporters of this, to provide emperical data of the positive law-enforcement impact that grepping transactions for "ALEP" has had, so we can weight it against the human cost (capital and time spent across all sides, including legal departments in financial institutions, Google Docs written, impact on affected customers).

Because the default assumption of a normal person is, of course, that this is ridiculous.

One data point I can provide is: $900,000,000.00 — which is the cost for a bank for NOT doing this.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ing-groep-settlement-mone...

> One data point I can provide is: $900,000,000.00 — which is the cost for a bank for NOT doing this.

(It's not at all clear that this fine is due to a lack of regexes.)

If the argument is "banks have to do this because of non-sensical and unjust regulations" - fine, that's one for the lawyers and maybe risk managers.

I understood your position as defending the regulations itself.

In the case of BNP Paribas, 10 times that.
"What is Aleppo?"
Underrated comment
I think it's a city? That's the best I can find. Don't know why saying a city name is bannable

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