Regular readers of this blog are probably quite aware of my long-running crusade, dating back almost a decade, to free Daniel Garcia or, more accurately, to free people named Daniel Garcia from the stigma of sharing a name with someone on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Other posts on Daniel Garcia are here and here.

The impetus behind this crusade was that people named Daniel Garcia are routinely denied financial services because someone else named Daniel Garcia is on the SDN List. Worse, officials at OFAC admitted to me, anonymously of course, that no one at OFAC even knew who Daniel Garcia was or why he was on the list.

Well, Daniel Garcias of the world, rejoice! Last Friday, OFAC announced that it was removing the mysterious Daniel Garcia from the list, sans, of course, any explanation for the removal. Because no one at the agency was sure why he was designated, it couldn’t have found that Daniel Garcia had stopped doing whatever it was that got him on the list in the first place. OFAC couldn’t even say that Daniel Garcia was dead or alive or whether, like Schrödinger’s cat, he was both dead and alive at the same time.

No matter. All that counts here is the result. I hope that maybe I played a small part in this removal and in helping  the next guy named Daniel Garcia who tries to get a car loan  drive off the lot in a shiny new BMW.

Now we can focus our attention on Sally Jones.

ABOVE: Paul Davis

Yesterday, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) designated PacNet Services, a Canadian payments processing company, and many of its officers and employees as SDNs under the Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) program. According to OFAC’s press release, PacNet “knowingly process[ed] payments on behalf of a wide range of mail fraud schemes that target victims in the United States and throughout the world.” Prior to this designation, only ten individuals and entities (comprising seven organizations) had been designated under the TCO program.

The head of PacNet, who was designated as part of yesterday’s OFAC action, is an individual and pilot named Paul Davis. According to OFAC, in one of its more colorful allegations, Davis used his piloting skills and aircraft “to move illicit bulk cash within Europe.”

Long term readers surely see now what’s coming next. Over the next several weeks, it is likely that anyone anywhere in the world named Paul Davis will confront a financial nightmare as banks, credit card companies and anyone else with screening software will deny them loans, seize their credit card payments, cancel their leases, and otherwise muck up any financial transactions in which they are involved. And, of course, since these Paul Davises are not the “real” Paul Davis, they have no rights at OFAC other than to try to unblock funds each and every time that happens.

It really is time for OFAC to have the common decency to figure out a solution for these unintended collateral consequences that occur when people with common names are designated. They do it for companies, like Tidewater, Inc, but simply cannot be bothered with mere individuals. And parents, before giving your kids a common name, think twice. Naming your kid Uriah Aloysius is beginning to look pretty attractive.

ABOVE: Epic Games HQ

Although I confess to being baffled as to why grown-ups play online video games (at least until after they have read the entire Western canon), recently a grown-up (and a college professor at that) pitched a fit after the OFAC blocking software of Epic Games choked on his name and told him he was not allowed to open an account with them and play one of their video games. More fun probably than playing the video game (and pretending to be a buff warrior in possession of awesome weapons and spells) is unraveling what occurred next.

Muhammad Zakir Khan, an assistant professor at Broward College in Florida, tried to sign up for an account online with Epic Games in order to play something called “Paragon” (which sounds more like a dish detergent than a video game, but that’s another issue). His effort to create the account was refused, and he was informed that this was because of a match against the SDN List, something that Mr. Khan had never heard of, so, like any other online warrior, he took the battle to Twitter, tweeting:

@EpicGames My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.

Within a just a few hours, the CEO of Epic Games responded (via Twitter of course):

Sorry, this isn’t intended. We’re working to fix ASAP. Cause: Overly broad filter related to US trade restrictions.

Later, he tweeted how they thought they might fix the problem:

We’re working to figure this out. Ideally, not at signup, but by matching name and billing address at purchase time.

Obviously Epic deserves some credit for its efforts to take on OFAC and its SDN list, even though phaser energy guns and revivifying potions are of no use against either. Unfortunately, once there is a name match there is no simple automated solution to resolving the hit. In the case of Mr. Khan, having his address would have been useless because there is no address listed for the Mohammad Khan on the SDN List that caused the hit. Indeed, there is no single adequate way that one can automate resolving false hits. Computers may be able to drive cars, vacuum your living room, and play Jeopardy, but this is something that best practice requires be done by an actual human being.

But there is another point to be made here. Why on earth do we care at all whether terrorists and narcotics kingpins spend money to play online video games? In fact, wouldn’t we prefer that terrorists and drug dealers spend more time slaying imaginary dragons and enemies on their computers and less time doing what they do in the real world?