zlacker

>>eswat+(OP)
IANAFinancialInvestigator, but skimming through it sounds like:

1. Fraudulent applicants come to the bank with crazy stories to ask for enormous loans/mortgages toward a Toronto house, allegedly to turn hyper-suspicious big piles of cash into a more reputable-looking asset.

2. HSBC goes along with that because they want to suckle on the sweet regular payments of suspicious cash, even though they ought to damn well know that these customers are just a front for an organized crime ring.

3. As a bonus, this locally-concentrated money-laundering/speculative-investment thing screws up the property market for Torontonians. The local multimillionaire babysitter is willing to buy at almost any price because their secret financial goals are very different than yours.

While looking for other articles, I notice it's been ~16 months after the end of HSBC 10-year tangle with US regulators over their business with Mexican and Columbian drug cartels. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-fed-terminates-e...

>>Terr_+z4
A lot of it doesn’t even sound like money laundering, just fraud. You say you have a job paying you lots of money from China, verification is loose, you get the loans, and then try to make mortgage payments via Airbnb. The risk is mostly with the bank, and if it doesn’t blow up you make all the money.

>>seanmc+Y9
Banks these days often don’t hold on to those mortgages though. They can repackage them as securities like MBS and sell them to entities like pension funds. This type of thing is exactly how the GFC started