Tips for linking shell companies to their secret owners

These are great techniques and helpful advice, but note that they are basically of zero use whatsoever in the case of (for instance) a Delaware LLC.<p>The amount of information regarding beneficial ownership that’s out there varies by jurisdiction and entity type - and again, these tips are great ways to dig into those and quite likely come up with some interesting findings in a lot of cases - but in most cases a Delaware LLC is basically a black box.

Not shell companies but made me remember They Rule…!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theyrule.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theyrule.net</a>

&quot;Shell corporations are companies that don’t actually do any business&quot;<p>This, I think, is a fairly key differentiator between valid and invalid use of incorporation. If a company doesn&#x27;t do any business, then it shall not have a right to exist as it has no reason to exist, as the reason companies exist is to do business.<p>One may argue there are other reasons a company may exist, but I&#x27;d argue those reasons only exist as an unintended consequence of the ability to exist as &#x27;shields&#x27; or &#x27;cut-outs&#x27; as discovered by those familiar with the peculiarities of international law and accounting&#x2F;finance.

The <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencorporates.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencorporates.com&#x2F;</a> site is also useful for finding companies registered using a stolen identity or a fake address that matches yours. In the past, I was a victim of some bad guys registering a shell company using my address in a not-yet-built house. I reported that to the tax officers back then.

financial privacy is the way you get corruption - i dont care if you dont want anyone to know you spent a bazillion dollars on your yacht, too bad. companies especially dont deserve special consideration in this respect. as a community we could expose corruption and greed at the highest levels if financial privacy ceased to be a thing.<p>edit: ofc this is what the whole article is about, ive calmed down and read it now :D... still, dont know why these things are allowed to go on

Shell companies, in a sense, have been used to evade local laws and ordinances, even by semi-public institutions. IIRC, Harvard University, for example, used LLCs and law firms to buy land secretly in Brighton and Cambridge, MA against the policies of local governments. It would be good to know the real institutions behind such transactions...

In several U.S. states (Wyoming, Ohio, and others), the ownership information of an LLC is never registered with the state at all. The only information is:<p>#1, someone who filed the formation paperwork, which can literally be anyone.<p>#2, a registered agent who will receive mail or an in-person courier deliver for the LLC so it can be sued. This service can be also be provided by literally anyone.<p>If fees are exchanged for #1 or #2, the payor might be an owner but that’s not guaranteed and the provider doesn’t have to disclose that either.<p>Actual ownership will be on documents the LLC owner maintains custody of and which can be kept private. They only become relevant if the LLC is sued and ownership is part of the question of the lawsuit. Even then, the LLC can be represented by attorneys who may keep the owner’s identity entirely private.

I find it ironic in an interesting way that on HN there is such a strong privacy bent generally, but on the topic of financial privacy it seems to be the reverse

Double blind trusts are specifically designed to keep those in control of the assets isolated from public scrutiny and taxes.<p>The fact the News cycle quickly forgot about who the Panama Papers exposed... proved there is a deeper cultural issue in North America.<p>This has been going on for over a century, and it is foolish to think one could stop someone&#x27;s full-time job hiding wealth. =)

Not only those - majority shareholders must always be mentioned when any company is being talked about for any reason. Shareholders should not be able to hide behind a smoke curtain while profiting from destructive corporations. Every company must be named along with its majority shareholders before its ceo.

There is a new national law for all corps to have their beneficial owners disclosed to the Department of the Treasury by the end of 2024, and all new firms within 30 days.

Both encryption and shell companies are technologies to achieve privacy, and both are sometimes abused by bad actors.<p>It&#x27;s very sad to see commenters here fail applying the same principle to both.

One use of shell companies is to protect &quot;not US&quot; businesses from the US govt.<p>The US Govt asserts jurisdiction over companies that do business with US entities, even if said companies don&#x27;t do business in the US. As a result, many &quot;not US&quot; companies won&#x27;t do business with US entities.<p>One solution involves a shell company outside the US set up by a US entity. That shell company then does business with the &quot;not US&quot; company on behalf of said US entity.<p>This is not a scheme to evade any law. Like any other company, the shell company is responsible obeying the laws of the country where it is based as well as the laws applicable to dealing with the &quot;not US&quot; company. Similarly, the US entity is responsible for obeying all applicable laws wrt its dealings with the shell company.<p>Yes, the US govt can go after the shell company but that doesn&#x27;t reach the &quot;not US&quot; company.

Get the filings for the shell company from secretaries of state. Search for other entities that have the same mailing addresses. Search local records for construction permits, zoning applications, business licenses and suchlike concerning the same addresses. These cross-checks have worked well for me in the past.

I don&#x27;t even know why shell companies and companies with secret ownership are even allowed. Well, I mean we all know the real reason: because it benefits rich people and they make the rules. But, what would a politician disingenuously cite as the public interest aligned justification for having these entities? Are there legitimate non-nefarious uses?

Related:<p>On the same website, there is also apparently the following article:<p>&quot;Following the Money, from Laundromats to Central Banks&quot;<p>(by Laura Oliver, September 25, 2023):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gijn.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;following-the-money-from-laundromats-to-central-banks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gijn.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;following-the-money-from-laundromat...</a><p>Potentially related:<p>Wikipedia article on Monetary Policy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monetary_policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monetary_policy</a>

this area is super murky with legitimate use cases for shell companies. im wondering why this is an area that hasn&#x27;t been solved by eager engineers. seem like there is a large gap to fill for people needing turnkey IBCs but one problem might be using offshore data centres.<p>I often see advertisements for incorporating offshore but there is no legitimate way to know which are authentic and which are just skimming on top of what you can do by yourself.<p>It&#x27;s quite fascinating enough that I need to hire a CFO or someone specifically familiar with IBCs

An awful lot of tax evasion could be solved with just two things:<p>1. Clear beneficial ownership of any company; and<p>2. Taxing at source when the beneficial ownership isn&#x27;t clear.<p>This particularly applies to real estate. Two of the biggest tax havens now are the US and the UK. The US requires all sorts of financial disclosures from other countries but doesn&#x27;t reciprocate. The UK (London in particular) seems to exist solely to allow billionaires from sanctioned countries to launder money through real estate. Like that&#x27;s the entire business model.

I&#x27;m much more concerned about the naked corporate lobbying that occurs in every &quot;democracy&quot; on earth than I am shell companies.

I was going to post something “low content”, but instead, I will say: please donate to the ICIJ[1] and&#x2F;or the OCCRP [2] if you have the funds!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icij.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icij.org&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.occrp.org&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.occrp.org&#x2F;en</a>

Where&#x27;s fucking blackrock and freaking vanguard real owners at, thats the QUADRILLION dollar question

YCombinator accepts Cayman Islands LTDs and LLCs too IIRC.<p>It&#x27;s not always about dirty deals of trafficking substances and arms, it&#x27;s honestly desirable for a corporation to be located in a tax neutral jurisdiction and then the various owners can vote with their feet where to locate themselves according to their individual preferences.<p>The inevitability of death and the fact that you can&#x27;t take money with you (and also the fact that people accostumed to a certain lifestyle would find their life pretty lacking in a 0% tax country) would compel the aforementioned owners to cash out and start spending at some time and then non-0% tax countries would get their fair share tax on their capital gains, income as well as consumption.<p>If a guy never cashes out and never spends, then what can you do? They are just monodimensional, obsessed individuals, perhaps heavily on the spectrum too, that&#x27;s their tax right there, not a monetary tax but still a huge tax and a heavy burden that they &quot;paid&quot; throughout their lifetime.

I knew a company where they had cookie data for ads. They were able to figure out how tons of companies were related from that. Company A would own a bunch of other companies. But certain people would be common to all of them. Creating connections.

Can someone do this with userbenchmark? I&#x27;m dying to know what unhinged maniac runs that site.

I&#x27;ve heard that you can create two LLCs which own each other, and be completely anonymous. This should be possible for regular people to do at a small nominal cost. Not sure if it works in practice!

Don&#x27;t burn other people&#x27;s shell companies - start your own.

I see lots of people wanting to go after shell companies here, and with good reasons. But if you live in a country where the state takes away 65% of the money the employer sets apart to pay you, and then your means are precariously sufficient to live in a small one-room apartment and you struggle to sustain an elderly parent who doesn&#x27;t receive any support whatsoever from that same state that takes your money away for &quot;social security&quot; ... Yeah, then you start looking for &quot;shells&quot;. This is the financial equivalent of the cherished right of Americans to have guns.

Isn’t all of the data available to the government especially in the US via federal banking system?<p>Every dollar transaction in the world is reported back to banks in Wall St.

This podcast interview with Brooke Harrington gave me some good insights into how people manage offshore wealth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;237-...</a>

Funny. I did a job interview once that covered basically this. Building a full stack app that would track the other companies of a given billionaire.<p>Looking back at it, I did a bunch of code challenges crazy like that.

Now this would be a good LLM application - something that can query all those sources and dig until the actual owner appears.

Can we now get a guide how to fully obfuscate ownership of shell companies?

I think it&#x27;s fascinating that when the topic is &quot;shell companies&quot; that the HN discourse is essentially &quot;if they have nothing to hide then they don&#x27;t need secrecy&quot;. I think that if the article were about linking &quot;tor users&quot; with their secret owners then we would see the opposite stance being taken.<p>I&#x27;m not taking a position here, and I&#x27;m not saying even that these stances are necessarily contradictory, but just that the blanket argument &quot;X shouldn&#x27;t get to be secret because I don&#x27;t think they have a legitimate reason&quot; doesn&#x27;t differentiate between these two cases.

I see no comments so far about the Corporate Transparency Act[1] and how it affects privacy with LLCs, etc. The US government will soon have a database of all (complying) beneficial owners. This database will eventually be hacked, leaked, shared with local law enforcement (further allowing it to be leaked).<p>How will the &quot;rich people&quot; maintain privacy&#x2F;secrecy after the Corporate Transparency Act?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uschamber.com&#x2F;co&#x2F;start&#x2F;strategy&#x2F;small-business-corporate-transparency-act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uschamber.com&#x2F;co&#x2F;start&#x2F;strategy&#x2F;small-business-c...</a>

Colour me unimpressed.<p>It&#x27;s mostly picking up info from the regulators in the various jurisdictions. Glorified alternate UI frontend to public info basically.<p>That&#x27;s not nearly enough to untangle what&#x27;s going on in complicated multi-jurisdiction structures - even for structures not designed to conceal.<p>To put it into terms hn will understand - it&#x27;s the equivalent of claiming to deduce how software works from the source code filenames only. I mean yeah kinda, but not really.<p>Also, article is missing WorldCheck.