Offshore Banking: How to Use an Offshore Bank Account
Having an offshore bank
account is one thing, using it is quite another matter.
Corporate Account – When
you have a corporate account the money belongs to the corporation not you
personally. When the corporation is an anonymous bearer share Panama
corporation your anonymity is further protected since establishing
ownership of the corporation is about impossible so you would have to see
who is recorded at the bank as the beneficial owner of the bank account
and this requires you to convince a court in Panama to open up the bank
records (something that is very rarely done) to reveal who the beneficial
owner is. Even in the unlikely event a court did this this it would be of
little value since the money still belongs to the corporation. So if you
had a financial enemy pursuing you personally they would not be able to
transfer a personal debt to the corporation very easily. They would need
to show that you transferred funds to the corporation to make sure debtors
could not recover the funds; it is called a fraudulent conveyance. The
court cases pertaining to this are far from simple, they are expensive and
time consuming and can take years to get heard in court. When wires are
sent to an anonymous bearer share Panama Corporation no one knows who the
owners of the corporation are, thus they do not know what natural persons
are actually receiving the funds. When wiring funds into your Panama
corporate bank account it is not revealing in terms of what the wire is
for versus wiring money into a personal account. The Anonymous Panama
Corporation adds in a nice thick layer of privacy protection.
ATM Cards - When you open a
Panama bank account one can usually obtain an ATM card good for cash
withdraws from ATM machines worldwide. These ATM cards will have your name
on them and can be associated with the bank you are using. Some people
obtain an ATM card from another unrelated financial institution. These
cards typically have no name imprinted on them which right away adds to
your privacy protection. These cards also do not leave a trail to your
real bank. Money can be transferred to the ATM card by wire from your
Panama or other bank account and then withdrawn as needed. Some people are
fond of using these cards to cover corporate expenses like travel,
entertainment and other business expenses. Usually the ATM card purchase
requires a copy of a passport.
Visa and MasterCard Debit
Cards – Watch it here. This can be a real privacy violator. The USA
recently got a lot of MasterCard records by a court order served on
MasterCard in Miami. This could happen again. The more private way of
doing this is to get a Visa or MasterCard debit card from another bank,
not your Panama bank. You load the card by wiring funds onto the card from
your Panama bank. This eliminates any ties the card has to your real bank
account. The card should come from an issuing bank in a bank secrecy
country. The way these programs work is Visa and MasterCard do not know
who the actual card holder is – no date of birth, no address, no tax id
numbers etc. only the issuing bank has this information since they require
a passport copy and a physical address to send the card to. So a subpoena
to MasterCard or Visa would produce very little and since the bank is in a
country with bank secrecy this avenue is going to be a long burdensome
process that would be unlikely to be pursued and could only be pursued by
a government in a criminal matter. You want to use a country where address
verification is not set up on the debit cards or else use a
mailing/billing address for the card in another country where you have a
reliable mail drop box. This further protects your privacy and of course
is a convenient way to guard against any potential identity theft
associated with using the debit card in a restaurant, store, online etc.
Telephone Records – If you
need to telephone your offshore bank consider using an anonymous prepaid
cell phone so there is no record of any calls to the bank on your phone
bill. Private detectives in USA can readily get copies of phone bills. A
sharp divorce or collection attorney will look for international calls to
isolate an offshore bank.
Online Banking – This is a
great feature. Eliminate having statements sent to the house or office.
Who knows who logs these statements being sent in the mail or even worse
reads them, remember you could be a terrorist. Remember your ISP is a
privacy nightmare. They are unregulated in general, unlicensed, and could
be owned by felons, child molesters or whatever. These people can collect
your entire internet transactions read them and save them forever. Rest
assured all of the big ISP's like MSN, AOL, ATT, COMCAST will save your
log files for ever showing every website you ever went to, every file
downloaded, every email sent and to whom, etc. Don't assume they would
require a court order to distribute this data, read your terms of service
agreement and be prepared to be shocked. Now why should they know what
online offshore bank you log into? So how do you stop it? You use an
anonymous internet service provider. You log onto the internet then log
onto their VPN which encrypts all your internet traffic going from your
computer to their server and now your log files are basically encrypted
and your ISP only has gibberish log files on you except he knows you
connected to the anonymous internet provider but has no idea what you did
or where you went.
Make sure the anonymous
internet provider does not save log files or only does so for a few days
to track down hackers, spammers etc. Never bookmark your online bank. Save
your passwords in an encrypted password folder. Use a hard drive cleaner
like evidence eliminator to erase tracks, places visited, image files,
cookies, downloads logs etc that windows saves. To protect from Trojans,
attacks etc. use an anti-spy ware program like spyware doctor and Norton
anti-virus. Do not trust one of them alone. If you get a keystroke logger
or Trojan it can capture your passwords and they can rob your bank account
online. Extra measures are an application based firewall so if a Trojan
got in it would not be able to phone home without you giving the new
application manual permission to connect to the internet and a wireless
router that uses encryption. All of these steps should keep you safe if
you keep them updated and turned on – beats having someone get your
passwords.
