Are the terms Swiss Bank accts and Off Shore accounts interchangeable or do they have specific differences?
I know I’ve heard of these types of bank accounts in movies and true crime podcasts, but I don’t know what they mean or why someone would move their money to a bank in a country where the person does not live. How does that benefit the person? Can anyone just get a Swiss bank acct?
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A “swiss bank account” is an example of an offshore bank account, an offshore bank account is essentially any bank account that is in another country that you don’t live in that has favorable tax/privacy laws (usually to hide money).
Can anyone get a swiss bank account? yea kinda.
Why would they?
Because swiss banks operate under swiss laws which are incredibly protective for privacy. For example, a swiss bank can not tell anyone, including the authorities, if a person even HAS a bank account at that bank, much less any other details, unless the authorities have solid proof of criminal activity tied to that person.
So for example, say a detective in the USA thinks someone is hiding money (for whatever reason, taxes, criminal activity) in a Chase bank account. They could just walk into Chase and ask if XYZ has a bank account there, or if any of their accounts are tied to a certain address, and Chase can just give them that information.
In Switzerland, the banks are legally required to respond with “we can’t tell you any of that” unless they have proof of criminal activity already.
So, some countries just have better laws when it comes to keeping your finances a more tightly held secret.
Search for “Suisse Secrets”. There is a leak coming from the second biggest bank in Switzerland (Credit Suisse) which is handling trillions of dollars and investigations exposed that a lot of money from corrupt third world countries is or has been parked at Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse has Stores in a lot of countries but you can even come to Zurich airport and go into their store to hide your money without having to leave the airport.
There are even reports from people singning contracts to hide their money in some off shore constructs with the help of credit suisse and those people went into an elevator that didn’t have any buttons inside but was instead remote controlled.
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