The following story is 100% true. It amused the heck out of me that all of this just had to happen on 9/11...
I work in a bank. I'm a combination of loan assistant, teller, and general go-to girl. One of my tasks is to run ID checks on all of our new customers, both individuals and businesses, to comply with the Patriot Act.
We have bunch of bank auditors who arrived today for a two week stay. They wanted to see an example of an OFAC hit for us. We don't get OFAC hits, I think there's been one in the ten years the bank has been open, and it was before my time (some really super common Hispanic name, the guy was cleared very quickly). We use a couple different online searches and a phone check, so casting a wide net with three different services at least one of them should pick up on a problem.
Enough backstory. This afternoon, my supervisor yelled across the lobby for me this afternoon, "Becky, I need you to run an ID search on Osama bin Laden!"
"Do you have his SSN and a copy of his driver's license?" I replied. I honestly didn't think he was serious, but he truly was. So, thinking to myself that I can always tell the FBI that David made me do it and pass the polygraph, I ran "Osama B. Laden" through the works with a dummy SSN and address, adding a birthdate of 12/25 for the irony, and came up with zero hits. Scary though, eh? Then we tried "bin Ladin" as a full last name and with an i instead of the e, and brought up a whole luggage cart of red flag warnings. We printed that off for the auditors.
One of the loan officers heard what we were up to and smiled, shook his head, and said, "Somewhere in FBI headquarters, there's a red light that just started blinking..." Given the covert internet surveillance the government is capable of and very likely is conducting, it wouldn't surprise me.
Then the loan officer told us about the time one of his subordinates ran an unauthorized credit report on Bill Clinton, complete with the correct SSN since it hadn't been blacked out when his tax returns were released to the public. He said he waited all day for the Secret Service to show up (they never did) and he almost fired the guy.
Then I called back across the lobby, "Hey David, do you want me to run a corporate name search on 'Islamic Jihad'?"
Such is my life at the bank...
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