Global ‘terrorist’ list provides banks with names of 3 million people to be denied service

RT 23 Oct, 2019

A massive, ever-growing database used by the world’s largest banks to track terrorism financing and other crimes has compiled millions of names from unverified sources – including scandal sheets and search engine results.

The World-Check database adds 25,000 names every month to its massive risk list, used by 49 of the world’s 50 largest banks to monitor possible financial, regulatory and reputational liabilities. Over three million people are currently on the list – many not convicted of any crime, some not even aware they are suspected of one. 

Getting on the list is easy – employees scour publicly available sources, from court records to search engine results, and apparently make little effort to verify what they find. An investigation by Al Jazeera found hundreds of thousands of Muslim names, some seemingly absurd. In one example, retired Egyptian football player Mohamed Aboutrika was designated a “terrorist” after the Egyptian government added him to its domestic terrorism list for supporting the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, after he was overthrown. 

Beyond the overpopulated terrorist databases, the Qatari outlet found that World-Check scours the scandal-sheets and tabloid newspapers of Israel and other countries for names, though its own website claims “research is sourced from reputable public domain sources.” Indeed, World-Check boasts that its database includes not only convictions but “person accused, investigated, arrested, charged, indicted, detained, questioned, or on trial” for a laundry list of crimes including everything from bribery and corruption to slave labor, “cheating,” or “environmental crimes.”