Jonathan Agnew has a similar story about the late, great Australian cricket commentator Richie Benaud, although filling ~52 seconds rather than 5 minutes.
This is where the article is insufficiently clear. Lists of people who are under investigation for fraud is definitely something banks keep quiet, for the reason you mentioned. But as a sibling comment says, sanctions lists are public, as are records of people convicted of relevant crimes in most (all?) jusrisdictions. So what kind of lists are these? Because the article's line about "individuals who were sanctioned as recently as this year" is hardly exciting - the UK sanctions list has people sanctioned today, 18 April.
Fairly sure that anything super sensitive like that won’t make it into the World-Check datafile. The records in there are mostly already public information if you know where to look
These are hundreds of lists from all over the world updated a few times a day. They are very diverse ranging from known terrorist fronts to things as benign as a locally elected politician. Assuming everyone mentioned in the DB was somehow involved in fraud or criminal activity would be a gross misrepresentation. Financial institutions and other businesses use them in KYC/AML, but also for flagging accounts that might need some white glove /red carpet treatment as mistakes made on those could lead to bad press.
It isn’t, but I don’t think the parent comment is trying to use it like that - they’re going for “how many banks are needed to support an economy”. Otherwise deposits per bank or perhaps assets (loans etc) per bank would be much better choices.
> the Met’s director of intelligence Lindsey Chiswick said that if there is not a match the image is not only immediately deleted, but is also pixelated
Yes - and the 1/8 of a cow is needed to make milk to make butter. This might be possible if you were very selective about which eighth of a cow you procured, but you’d need some additional kit which the recipe doesn’t account for.