When AI goes haywire and commercial banks drive their customers fully automatically into the arms of law enforcement.
Munich, February 11, 2025
In recent weeks, several colleagues from the field of “online gambling law” have contacted the law firm www.ra-cocron.de and described the following case:
The lawyers concerned received letters from the police informing them that criminal proceedings had been initiated against them for participating in illegal online gambling.
The letters from the respective police authorities contained the following statement, in essence:
” Your bank has sent an automated notification based on the available bank statements. Participation in the gambling took place online with providers that are not on the so-called “whitelist” and therefore do not have a license for Germany .”
None of the colleagues had ever participated in online gambling.
The lawyers represented clients who had suffered losses with various online gambling providers. These lawyers successfully recovered these losses for their clients, receiving payments from the online gambling providers. The payment obligations of the online gambling companies arose either from legally binding judgments of German civil courts or from court settlements.
Apparently, commercial banks are using artificial intelligence (AI) that automatically scans bank statements from law firms and, in the case of correspondingly “suspicious” incoming payments, forwards the bank statements and the confidential data contained therein from the client relationships as well as other personal information about the lawyers to the investigating authorities fully automatically and without further human review.
This results in numerous pointless investigations being initiated, unnecessarily burdening not only the affected colleagues but also the already overburdened judiciary and other authorities. Unlike AI, a human case worker would have immediately recognized that the payments on the bank statements of the lawyers in question were not related to participation in illegal online gambling, but rather to the practice of law.
As a first step, complaint proceedings are being initiated with the relevant state data protection authorities against the commercial banks that are automatically generating false suspicions. Following the conclusion of these data protection proceedings, the affected parties are likely to file claims for damages against the users of this unsupervised AI.
For those affected, there is also the problem that every investigation is stored by both the police and the public prosecutor’s office, and deleting the data is often tedious and takes a long time.
In some cases, the fully automated suspicious activity reports, which apparently have their basis in the GWG (Law on Tracing Profits from Serious Crimes), are never brought to the attention of those affected.
Against this background, those affected and those presumably affected should submit free information requests to the respective state criminal investigation offices in accordance with Art. 65 PAG to find out what data the police authorities have stored about them.
The question also arises as to who should bear the costs of defending against these mass false accusations.
There is strong evidence to suggest that the users of the apparently unsupervised AI, i.e., the commercial banks involved, will not only have to bear the intangible damages of those affected, but also their costs for defense and data removal.
We are happy to be available for further discussions regarding data protection.
More information will soon be available at www.ra-cocron.de
