Calling standard KYC paperwork for international wire transfers "dangerous and unethical" is a huge stretch. Every cross-border payment requires this stuff. The fund is literally trying to give away free money and the maintainer threw a fit because they had to fill out a tax form. I get being cautious about sharing personal info but framing compliance requirements as some kind of attack is drama for drama's sake.
Whoah, everyone here who has a bank account - which I assume is pretty much everyone -- has gone through "standard KYC paperwork", and I've never been asked to send personal financial documents to an email inbox.
I've opened several bank accounts online and do online banking as well as brokerage and other accounts. Financial documents like this should be uploaded via secure portals and directly stored in encrypted databases with controlled access and network segmentation from the rest of the IT infrastructure.
I am editing this comment to say that I don't think what was being requested is malicious or unethical, but I hope you can understand why people would not feel comfortable doing this, even if they are fine with KYC processes in general.
This is false. I just did an international wire transfer a few weeks ago with no KYC.
Right, so you think.
But: your bank knows who you are and the recipient's bank knows who they are. Your transfer may have been below the increased attention threshold ($10K to $50K depending on the jurisdictions of both recipients).
Both your accounts are most likely not recent and in good standing.
And so on. I routinely make international wiretransfers as well but I'm under no illusion whatsoever that if I tried to cross an anti-money-laundering or anti-terrorism-financing threshold somewhere that the transfer would be immediately stopped and an investigation would ensue.
Right but presumably the OP had an existing bank account. You can't wire money into thin air. Assuming OP is a regular person with a regular bank account, then further KYC isn't necessary. KYC for every international wire transfer is in fact not true at all, only for the edge case where a person wants to receive money and he has no existing account to transfer it in.
You can't just transfer money to a person that has no account. That's not an 'edge case' that just isn't how it works unless you want to use WU or something similar and even they have strict KYC requirements for larger sums.
If you want to move large amounts of money outside of the regular financial networks and oversight it is possible but (1) it will cost you (2) you will be breaking the law and (3) you may cause others to be breaking the law. Bitcoin would be one way to do it but even that is not nearly as anonymous as most of its users believe.
Banking is a regulated industry for a reason. There was a period (roughly until 2001, guess why) when banks were willing and able to bend the rules depending on who the customer was and how much money was involved. Those banks that continued to do this post 2001 have - if they're located in the West at least - had their ears bent in ways that they did not like one bit and even the Swiss now play ball.
Cash is becoming harder to use and harder to get. Money will most likely go digital in the West soon, the various governments don't like the unauditable and untaxable money streams that cash provides.
The War on Terror Financing(tm) made KYC-less transfers using formal banking systems well nigh impossible. Your transaction was covered by past KYC (by your financial institution).