The Grandest Banking Whistleblower in History Embraces Crypto to Reduce Crime

Former HSBC systems engineer, Herve Falciani from France, has recently proposed a new blockchain & cryptocurrency-based solution to fight money-laundering and other criminal activities associated with financial transactions.

One of the banking industry’s most disliked whistleblowers, Herve Falciani is known for the biggest banking leak in history that appropriately has been dubbed ‘Falciani List,’ and in which he disclosed the list of 130,000 HSBC clients who were allegedly using Swiss bank accounts (specifically those with accounts in HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank) to evade taxes and launder money. The Falciani List has triggered the series of high-profile tax investigations across Europe.

The same Herve Falciani is now working with mathematicians and FinTech experts in Spain to create a blockchain framework which is more transparent.

Falciani is proposing a clean crypto-token called “Tabu” – an ethical cryptocurrency that can be traced easily. According to Falciani, Hackers, shady businesses, tax-dodgers, and other cyber criminals are relying on cryptocurrencies to hide their transactions. However, a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that verifies encrypted transaction records and shares them across a network can be used to add transparency to any electronic transaction to prevent illegal activities.

“What happens with any innovation or any technology is that it can be used in a bad way or may be used in a friendly way with a social impact, positive social impact,” Falciani, who is part of a witness protection program, told Reuters in an interview in a neutral location in Madrid.

Currently, he has 5 million ‘Tabu’ tokens valued at $2.3 million. These tokens will soon be distributed to investors after receiving the go-ahead from the Spanish market regulator. Falciani has already raised 1.3 million Euros and is planning to raise the remaining 2 million Euro by launching a new blockchai- powered initiative called Aletheia.

The project is a joint venture of various academics, mainly mathematicians, from Valencia Polytechnic University in eastern Spain and Herve Falciani- Monaco-born IT engineer. Aletheia is designed to monitor and cross-check electronic procurement contracts for public administrations which are known to be plagued by overbilling and other fraudulent schemes in many countries.

Revealing more about Aletheia, Falciani said:

“Technically and financially this opens the doors to improve the procurement systems. Because in public procurement we have a huge opportunity to spare money.”

It will be very interesting to see if Falciani’s vision will bring about a better, more transparent economic ecosystem.