$1m barber among several suspicious transactions

In the last three days, sev­er­al sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions by du­bi­ous pro­fes­sion­als have been un­earthed in the bank­ing sec­tor as thou­sands of cus­tomers con­tin­ue to rush fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to ex­change their ex­ist­ing $100 bill for the new $100 poly­mer notes.

One sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ty in­volved a bar­ber who walked in­to a bank with $1mil­lion in pa­per-based $100 bills to be swapped for the new $100 notes which the pub­lic be­gan ac­cess­ing at banks on Tues­day.

The old $100 notes will be­come in­valid on De­cem­ber 31.

The changeover from pa­per to poly­mer is the ba­sis of Gov­ern­ment’s lat­est an­ti-crime plan to flush out crim­i­nal el­e­ments, cut off fund­ing of gangs and take the prof­it out of crime.

The rev­e­la­tion came from Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert at yes­ter­day’s post Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s.

Im­bert was first to talk about the sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ties, stat­ing that he re­ceived re­ports yes­ter­day that some cus­tomers had been vis­it­ing banks with “large quan­ti­ties of cash.”

Im­bert said some of these in­di­vid­u­als are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to fill out a source of funds de­c­la­ra­tion form “to in­di­cate where they got the mon­ey from.”

If some­one walked in­to a bank with a $1 mil­lion in cash and claimed it was their sav­ings over the years, Im­bert said: “It can prove to be a chal­lenge.”

In cas­es like that, Im­bert said that cus­tomer would be ad­vised to go to the Cen­tral Bank to have the mon­ey ex­changed or to get some con­sid­er­a­tion for the notes.