European banks’ tax fraud damage revised to €140Bn

While many traditional finance players and regulators still oppose the “lawful” image of centralized organizations to the “criminal” one of the blockchain-based projects, the quantity and the scale of bank frauds continue increasing ?

In 2018 a collective of journalists reported a huge tax scam across several European countries known as “CumEx files”. The scam, which involved such notorious bank groups as Santander, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, consisted in using complicated transactions to get tax offices to refund a tax paid once several times.

It was a perfect crime in a sense that there weren’t immediate victims: the money was taken from the state, i.e. all the taxpayers at once. In fact, it was so perfect, that the CumEx files were published 6 years after the CumEx fraud was supposed to become impossible (at least that’s what the regulators assured of).

Moreover, in 2018 the journalist collective estimated the total tax loss due to this scam at €55Bn, and in the update released this week – €140Bn, mentioning that the CumEx and the related CumCum and the newest CumFake scams can be still going on today ?

These are complex scams that are often too abstract to be understood by the general public, which is being robbed without noticing it. The actual financial system is centralized, and therefore opaque ?, but serious people is suits seem to somehow gain people’s trust, while the “shadowy super-coders” who create open decentralized algorithms that could make such frauds impossible – well, they are painted as criminals.

What we need the most is not the free money, but financial and crypto education.