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?

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?

Hmm. Maybe?

Wouldn't it make more sense to allow these transactions to proceed but report them for investigation?

Aiding terrorist organizations is a crime. Wouldn't it be better to know who's doing it?

It feels like it would make more sense than automated block lists and account closures.

It's sort of similar to how bone-headed the shutdown of Backpage was. Backpage actively and willingly worked with the police to investigate human trafficking etc... It was basically a giant honeypot. From what I've read, when they were shut down the government lost a valuable tool and ally in the fight against sex slavery.

Yes, because the cost of pretending to “do something” is far too high (unbanking unprivileged people and a huge % of the world just because they aren’t born in the ‘right’ country or with the right name) for absolutely no result!

By analogy, would members of the KYC/AML cult have the opinion that terrorists should be free to use roads for their terrorists needs? The solution is police roadblocks and checks every kilometer or so?

That might be less harmful than being overzealous and banning every innocent person.

What's wrong with going through the courts?