Imagine a world where every transaction you make—whether it’s paying rent or donating to a charity—could potentially land you under a microscope. Welcome to the shadowy realm of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), where banks act as the surveillance arm of the financial industry and “suspicious” becomes a catch-all term for anything remotely unusual. It’s a system designed to catch financial criminals, but it often ends up looking like a bureaucratic witch hunt.
SARs are the Swiss Army knife of financial crime-fighting, theoretically capable of exposing everything from money laundering schemes to terrorist financing. The concept is straightforward: if a financial institution notices something fishy—say, an unusually large deposit or a transfer to a country on some government watchlist—they flag it. These reports are sent to financial intelligence agencies like the US’s FinCEN, creating a treasure trove of data to sift through for evidence of wrongdoing.
