It’s All Fast and Loose with Barclays Bank after Half a Decade of Financial Misconduct

Want to launder your drug money? No need to get an offshore account, Barclays Bank will gladly handle your dirty cash. Since 2009, the bank has paid in excess of £500 million due to financial inappropriateness on the part of the bank.

One of the types of financial misconduct the bank is entangled in reads like a scene from a mafia movie. To start with, highly suspicious individuals, aptly labeled as Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), approached Barclays bank with a boatload of money somewhere in the neighborhood of £1.9 billion. The bank knew that the individuals were PEPs, which is a fancy acronym for potential terrorists, and even documented them as such in their records.

Here’s the really suspicious part.

Secret Safes for Suspicious Funds

Barclays Bank went out of its way to accommodate these individuals in 2015. Keep note of the year because the bank seems to be up to no good each year. Perhaps they were salivating over the huge profit they stood to make after the deal. But for whatever reason, the bank kept all the documents related to the deal in a safe, which was bought specifically for that purpose. Normally, such documents are kept in the bank’s computers, but not in this case. And to complete the mafia image, only a few people inside the bank knew the location of the safe, and fewer still knew about the transaction.

Now, if you own a bank and a farmer opens an account with you stating they would be depositing £50 every week but a few weeks later he shows up with £1,000,000 weekly deposits, that would raise a red flag, wouldn’t it? To Barclays, that’s business as usual. It’s like they go, “Jolly good! We’ll gladly take your million pounds, even if you are a peasant farmer with no means of making such a humongous weekly sum.”

Barclays Schemes and Scams Yearly

But this type of behavior is expected from Barclays. They again featured in a currency rigging scam. In 2014, little over a year before the 2015 scandal you read earlier, Barclays Bank was one of the architects behind ripping off thousands of unsuspecting customers across the globe.

If you missed the Libor Scandal, it went down like this. Barclays Bank would charge you to transfer money from your overseas bank account to another bank account. Banks usually do this, business as usual then. But the overseas bank would rip you off when converting your currency to their local currency. They fixed the exchange rate such that customers always got a raw deal.

Barclays Bank and other banks involved in the scandal had an understanding. They would work together to make sure they milked every penny, even if it meant lying about the currency exchange rate.

Not the kind of bank you’d want to trust with your life savings, is it? 

If you bank with Barclays, cancel your accounts and run for the hills.  The bank is a magnet for crooks! 

I would love to hear your stories about how Barclays has Ripped you off!