credit tart concern

2obsessed

Being a new tart on the block, I have just set up my second card for 0% balance transfer and got the message from my sales advisor about money laundering... what constitutes money laundering?
Thanks

Katykat

Never had this message myself and I've got through a fair few cards in the last 5 yrs. I think it is just a self important sales advisor who knows exactly what we TARTS are doing but is powerless to do anything about it. Lets face it, if we had enough money to "launder" would we really take the time & effort to regularly change cards?

Clariman

2obsessed wrote:

Being a new tart on the block, I have just set up my second card for 0% balance transfer and got the message from my sales advisor about money laundering... what constitutes money laundering?
Thanks

I think you need to be a bit more specific about who told you what precisely and under what circumstances ? There is legislation that means all financial companies need to check for signs of money-laundering e.g. dodgy practices where the likes of drug money is hidden by moving the money between accounts - usually under the guise of false identities or fake companies etc etc. Consequently all credit card companies have to keep an eye out for this sort of activity. Being a card tart is most certainly nothing to do with money laundering so if you got the message from a sales advisor at a credit card company I would suggest that it is probably scare tactics or the creation of FUD.

Clariman

gingercordial

Money laundering is making "dirty" money into "clean" money, ie taking the proceeds of crime and turning it into money you can spend without raising suspicion. Basic steps are placement (getting the money into the system), layering (passing it through several transactions to hide where it came from, often offshore), then integration (getting it back to somewhere you can spend it).

As an accountant I can tell you the regulations around this are getting tighter and tighter - no bad thing obviously. The main point is that any financial services firm has to check the identity of clients/customers in great detail to stay within the law itself, and issue plenty of warnings along the way that it's doing this. Whereas before CC companies only wanted to verify identity to check you weren't a bad credit risk to them, now they legally have to check you are who you say you are, and document this.

The warning won't be anything specific to the OP (assuming you're not a criminal trying to hide ill-gotten gains) and I'm sure this is only going to get more common.