Paypal & American Express Implicated in Bank Fraud

HSBC has great checking accounts for small business with no fee checking, online and mobile accounts, worldwide MasterCard and ATM access, and 5 free wire transfers a month; which is excellent for seamless international banking.

If you're international, you can also establish a Delaware LLC with an HSBC business account. This can be a good work-around for country or credit issues in establishing U.S. based accounts with many online and affiliate programs. The free wire transfer saves up to $45 a shot to transfer to your home country bank account.

In working with IM'ers wanting to establish a U.S. presence, I have usually recommended HSBC for these reasons as well their 8,500 branches worldwide.

One hurdle I've run into is HSBC's requirement that a branch employee must visit your place of business. If you're not near a branch, this makes it more challenging.

Recently, I sent a warrior client to his local HSBC branch in a region of Australia. After waiting over an hour to meet with someone, they finally called him back two weeks later.

Then they told him he had to have been in business two years and be cash-flowing over a million dollars a year before they would open an account. That's not HSBC's requirement, but some regions may vary. Banking in some countries is just plain ludicrous.

In some locations, bank officers (no matter what bank), are just plain idiots and only understand plain-vanilla brick and mortar operations.

I had similar issues with stubborn local branch officers with Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in a region outside Toronto. They told my client he wasn't allowed to own a company in the U.S., but the corporate office resolved the issue.

Uninformed personnel are very common in any endeavor. Just continue to work your way through these until you find the right officials who really know the rules and can help you.

I often find the corporate headquarter's executive departments helpful for leverage in solving local issues.

Unfortunately, situations like this money laundering through HSBC accounts will only make all our lives more difficult. It's ironic this would happen at HSBC. It appears branch officials may have been covering up the fact that stolen and closed account ID's were used to open shell accounts.

Anytime PayPal gets busted we're all happy, but it's only going to make dealing with them more stringent.

As always, please consult a competent tax or professional adviser for assistance.

Hell yes! In fact, I stopped using ALL Banks about two years ago!
I don't trust any of them. They fail to protect your money, especially against a greedy government who can easily reach into your bank account, and they try any way possible to charge you overdraft fees.

Yeah, who on god's green earth is teaparty.org?