But they're mostly not self-inflicted: the cause of all these things is asinine banking regulations (under the guise of combating terrorism) that are enacted by governments all across the world.
Nope, there are very few banking regulations that exist to prevent terrorism, mostly because transactions associated with domestic terrorism look exactly like normal transactions, and are so few and far between that statically there’s basically zero chance you’re gonna correctly detect them.
Any rules that are around detecting terrorism are mostly to do with sending money to sanctioned countries and individuals. Those rules are stupidly annoying to work with, because you’re basically force to write a rule that boils down to “does transaction description include the word ‘Iran’ then flag/block transaction”. As you can probably imagine they’re not very effective, but you look like a fucking idiot if your customer gets caught up in a terrorism investigation, and you didn’t flag/block those transactions.
Most regulation deals with something far more mundane, money laundering. It’s mostly to prevent organised crime groups being able to launder their cash, that either cash generated from the “traditional” crimes, but more often it’s cash generated from socially engineering normal people into handing over bank details, or simply convincing them to send their life savings to a fraudster. Something that’s far more common than people expect, and far more effective than people expect.
