Numbered Bank Accounts

Getting a private numbered bank account

Everyone who’s ever watched a spy movie knows about swiss offshore bank accounts and numbered bank accounts. Many will vividly imagine a spy handing his swiss banker a number written on a note, just like in the movies – to receive a briefcase full of dollars in return?

Is It Possible To Get A Numbered Bank Account?

Once upon a time, it could work that way. Undoubtedly there still are some numbered bank accounts, probably some that have been in existence since the 19th century. But, by and large, numbered accounts are no longer available to 99% of the people who would like to have them.

Thirty years ago the world is very different. Swiss banks offered bank secrecy, numbered bank accounts, anonymous bank accounts, and, even the famous bearer passbook savings account known as the Sparbuch. Each tax haven used to provide exlusive private bank accounts with unshakeable financial privacy. Company formation agents could sign you up for an offshore bank account at the same time they sold you an offshore company or offshore trust. Asset protection specialists could set up simple offshore asset protection structures with bearer shares, nominee directors, and offshore bank accounts in various offshore jurisdictions.

But in those days governments were smaller and certainly less aggressive in collecting taxes. Today, every government in the world is hungry for more and more taxes. In the United States you could spend more time in prison for tax evasion then you could for murder.

Offshore Financial Centres

The problem for the high tax countries was that the offshore centres wanted income too, and they made their money by selling offshore companies, offshore trusts, opening an offshore bank account, and all the other elements of various successful asset protection strategies. Smaller offshore tax havens benefited more from a flat-rate company tax of a couple of hundred dollars a year than the alternative – zero. Because of that imperative, offshore centres refused to recognize tax offences in other countries as crimes. In fact, most of the less developed countries in the world did not rate tax offences as criminal, but rather as civil matters.

This offshore strategy was tremendously successful. Several of these offshore centres have grown to be major offshore financial centres today, such as Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Isle of Man; to name just a few. Everyone of them was built on some combination of offshore banking, bank secrecy, offshore asset protection, nominee directors, bearer shares, and private banking.

Because of this, today the offshore industry is valued at more than $14 trillion.

In light of this, high tax countries have had to find a way to fight back. A standard methodology is to further criminalize tax evasion by banding to together with other offences universally recognized as ”felonies”.

Money Laundering

They began with narcotics: offshore centres were attacked as havens for narco cash. From this sprang the very new concept of money laundering. Money laundering encompasses the idea that “somehow” anytime funds are used for anything illegal, they remain illegal. And, in fact, so does every other bit of money it “co-mingles” with. Conveniently, for the tax collectors, the money stays unclean until it is “cleansed” by passing into the possession of the government.

9/11 and what happened afterwards only served to consolidate the notion of ”money laundering”.

Of course, money-laundering legislation in the United States and Western Europe represents the epitome a legal hypocrisy. More illegal money is laundered in New York, Miami, London, Frankfurt, and Milan, than in the rest of the world. At one anti-money laundering seminar on the island of Grenada, a US official was forced to admit that the Caribbean basin only accounted for 1.between 60-70% of money laundered worldwide, but the US instead focus on attacking tiny Caribbean countries.

The truth, of course, is that it is illegal to send funds of criminal origin by wire transfer. The emissary bank is the one in the wrong, not the receiving bank. The point is, because the states and the European Union are scared of slapping fines on their own banks, they make it criminal for banks that receive money in other countries. They do this by freezing or placing court orders on correspondent banking accounts.

The Numbered Bank Account is Endangered or Extinct

For all these reasons, the numbered bank account is a financial dinosaur. And, similar to dinosaurs only “lives” in books and movies. Rather than having to always deal with the standard channels (i.e. blacklisted offshore banks and tax havens), those in the know are finding much more succesful ways to get an offshore account with privacy.

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