Software, Real Estate, Money & Fun
Mattoon, IL
Joined September 2015
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I got a ticket while making a 1 minute phone call. Someone had broken into a property I owned. I contacted the Sheriff which recommended the court house. The only help I was offered was a phone #. I contacted a business partner on the way back to call the # together. 🧵
Josh Overholt retweeted
🚨 UPDATE: A "MAJOR INDICTMENT" is coming tomorrow from DOJ, AAG Harmeet Dhillon says
"Tune in tomorrow for a major indictment."
LFG 👀🔥
🤖 Made with AI
Help us Dennis Rodman.
🚨#BREAKING: Unconfirmed reports claim Kim Jong Un may have "secretly died" in China.
Josh Overholt retweeted
This is not over. Share far and wide.
Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,
On October 14th I wrote to you about Bank of America @BankofAmerica.
You did not answer. 3.6 million Americans did.
I want to tell you what that looked like from where I sit, because I do not think Washington understands it yet. The messages did not come from one side. They came from Republicans and Democrats, from veterans and nurses and small business owners, from people who have not agreed with each other about anything in a decade. They all said a version of the same sentence. We have had enough.
That is what a national security issue looks like when it finally breaks through. It does not pick a party. It belongs to everyone who has a kid, a bank account, or a flag on the porch.
So let me be plain about my concern. I am worried that nothing is going to happen. The fine has been announced. The press cycle is already turning. In a few weeks the number will be forgotten and the bank will be back to business. I have watched this exact sequence play out before, and I am writing to you now, while there is still a window, because once that window closes it does not reopen.
I am also widening this letter, because Treasury does not act alone.
To the Department of Justice @TheJusticeDept and to FBI Director Kash Patel @FBIDirectorKash:
Director Patel, you were not in the chair when this happened, so I want you to hear it from me directly. In 2011 I walked into the FBI with everything I had on HSBC. Not a tip. Boxes. Names, account numbers, transaction records, internal emails. Agents worked that evidence for over a year. I trusted them, and I still believe they wanted to do their jobs.
Then the settlement was announced. $1.9 billion. I called the agents and asked the only question that mattered. When do you raid the building and when are the arrests?
Their answer was four words. Our hands are tied.
I have thought about those four words every day since. Not because the agents failed me. Because somebody above them decided that a bank was too important to treat like a defendant. That decision was made quietly, by people whose names I will never know, and it has been made again every time since. Director Patel, you now have the authority to make a different one.
I remember the words carved into the stone outside the federal building in Philadelphia the day I walked in to report @HSBC: justice is the defense of our liberty. I believed that. I still want to. But a justice system that handcuffs a dealer on the corner and sends a bank a bill is not defending anyone’s liberty. It is choosing whose liberty counts.
To Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer of Bank of America @BankofAmerica:
Mr. Moynihan, your bank just agreed to pay $1.2 billion for failures that regulators called willful. I have a few questions, and the 3.6 million people reading this would like the answers too.
Who was fired?
Not reassigned. Not retired early with a package. Fired, by name, for the conduct the government described.
What has actually changed in your anti money laundering program? Not the budget line. Not the consultant’s slide deck. What is different today about how an alert gets cleared and who is allowed to say stop?
Were there any consequences inside the building at all? Or did this land the way it landed at HSBC bank, as a line item?
And how much is your bonus this year?
I ask because I know what it costs a compliance officer to raise his hand inside a bank like yours. I would like to know what it cost anyone at the top. Do you even care? I am asking sincerely. I would like to be wrong.
Here is what I did about all of this, and why it matters to this letter. After the government declined to help me or any of the whistleblowers I have met since, I built the thing I wished had existed. Tactical Rabbit is a private intelligence agency. We find the truth, we prove it, and we put it in the hands of people who will act on it. I made a decision a long time ago that if the government would not stop the next HSBC, I would.
So to anyone inside a bank reading this who is looking at something they know is wrong: if your bank will not act, and the government will not act, come to me. I will get the truth to the public. That is not a threat. It is a promise I have already kept once.
Mr. Secretary, Director Patel, the Department of Justice, and Mr. Moynihan: four addresses, one question. Will anyone be held accountable?
Not fined. Not suspended. Not asked to attend training. Accountable.
Please end the cycle of too big to jail. I will not stop until there is change, and neither will the millions of Americans standing behind this letter. Answer them.
We need a banker in jail.
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder, Tactical Rabbit
I want to use @xmoney, but I don't want to have a screen lock on my android phone.
Josh Overholt retweeted
Dear @Microsoft, regarding your @LinkedIn social media website.. Ah, yea, well.. ok - so, I have questions..
This is the same kind of junk science the Government uses to explain why listening to FCC licensed radio on your car system is safe, but streaming a Joe Rogan podcast on your headphones is dangerous.
A neuroscientist just proved multitasking is a myth and makes you 60% slower — Live experiment, on camera.
He writes “I’m a great multitasker” + 1–20.
Straight through: 31 seconds.
Then she makes him switch.
Letter. Number. Letter. Number.
He falls apart.
Forgets where he is.
Restarts every switch.
By 30 seconds he’s only at 40%.
60% slower.
Same task.
Same person.
Only difference was switching.
She calls it switch cost.
Attentional residue.
The baggage you drag from one thing into the next.
Average knowledge worker does this all day.
2+ hours lost.
Every single day.
I respect this person more than anyone in Government.
Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,
My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.
The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.
I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.
I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.
Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.
Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.
A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.
This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.
There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.
Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.
I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.
This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.
Three things would change the math overnight.
Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.
End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.
Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.
I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.
Respectfully,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit
All of the people asking questions in this Pritzker v. Bailey debate sound like gnomes or something.
Literally what the hell is happening?
