Credit Suisse data breach reveals decades of suspicious clients and activity

Leaked data shows that, until recently, Swiss bank Credit Suisse held accounts worth more than $100 billion for sanctioned individuals and heads of state accused of money laundering.

The New York Times reported on February 20 that the data breach included more than 18,000 bank accounts. The data goes back to accounts opened from the 1940s to the 2010s, but none of these accounts are currently being manipulated.

Account holders holding "millions of dollars" at Credit Suisse include Jordan's King Abdullah II and Venezuela's former deputy energy minister Nervis Villalobos.

King Abdullah II was accused of misappropriating financial aid for personal gain, while Villalobos pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2018. Other sanctioned individuals also have accounts at Credit Suisse, as The New York Times wrote:

"Other account holders include the son of a Pakistani intelligence chief who helped move billions of dollars from the U.S. and other countries to the (Mujahideen) in Afghanistan in the 1980s."

“Credit Suisse AML happily hosts human traffickers, murderers and corrupt officials,” Banteg, lead developer at Yearn Finance (YFI), a leading decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, tweeted today. Another large international bank, HSBC, has paid huge fines for helping international criminals.

While there are laws against Swiss banks accepting deposits from known criminals, the country's famous bank secrecy laws, if enforced, are easy to evade. As The New York Times writes, this appears to make Switzerland an attractive place for criminals to conduct international banking:

"The leaks show that Credit Suisse is not only serving the ultra-wealthy, but also those with questionable backgrounds, whose backgrounds are clear just by searching their names on a search engine."

The cryptocurrency community has also suffered from the irony of large traditional financial institutions helping criminals, and the community has battled accusations of abetting criminals for years. The $100 billion in deposits outlined by the data breach dwarfs the $25 billion estimated by Chainalysis to be held by criminal crypto whales in 2021.

Credit Suisse denies any wrongdoing, but Credit Suisse's centralized, secretive ways of working stand in stark contrast to the fully transparent blockchain technology. Such transparency could also mean investigators and law enforcement can monitor in real time individuals and governments trying to evade economic sanctions.