Swiss Bank Account

"If you can't trust a Swiss banker, then what's the world come to?"

— James Bond, The World Is Not Enough

No self-respecting big-money criminal or superspy would stash his loot in anything but a legendarily secretive Swiss bank account. In fiction, a Millionaire Playboy can walk into a luxuriously appointed bank office with a Briefcase Full of Money and the staff discreetly add it to his secret, numbered account with no paperwork. In the hands of particularly lazy thriller writers, a non-Swiss character merely possessing a Swiss bank account is proof that a person is up to no good.

In more recent stories, an account in an offshore tax haven, such as the Cayman Islands or Panama may be substituted.

In real life, the usefulness of these numbered accounts is limited, due to how hard it is to get one nowadays. The Swiss, well aware of their banks' increasing reputation as havens for no-good-niks (not particularly helped by their willingness to stash Nazi Gold, though they were originally formed to help people hide money from The Gestapo), require numerous references and a general OK from the person's country of origin. You can certainly get an account with a Swiss Bank - although if you're a foreign national, the bank will take a copy of your residence permit and passport details - but it will just be a regular bank account in Switzerland, not this trope. Some of the original anonymous accounts that gave rise to this trope do apparently still exist, but under current regulations they cannot be transferred to other people, so - eventually - every one of them will be closed.

In any case, truly anonymous bank accounts are a thing of fiction. Even if protected by a code number, the identity of the client (and usually the source of the funds as well) is known by the chairman and high-ranking personnel of the bank, either in Switzerland or other tax havens. Money laundering and stashing of dubious funds are the province of professional accountants, finance experts, and (of course) lawyers, who know how to give a decent face to the business they manage. Don't try to just approach a bank with a Briefcase Full of Money and no plausible story and expect it to work.^note Many countries have laws that require the reporting of all deposits of certain amounts (in the US, it's $10,000) to the government anyway, and attempting to get around them is illegal under structuring laws.

Despite the name of the trope, any work that uses an offshore account with loose rules as a point of interest to the audience coming from any country can qualify. Heck, the country itself doesn't have to be mentioned, and it can even be a Fictional Province.

See here for more Real Life information about Switzerland.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Golgo 13: A Smug Snake villain figures out how to use the very existence of the assassin protagonist's Swiss bank accounts and the fantastic sum that must be in them to run an international scam.

Comic Books

• In the Asterix adventure Asterix in Switzerland, Petitsuix opens a Helvetian bank account and stashes Asterix and Obelix in a safe to hide them from the Romans. They get hungry in the middle of the night and, since the safe wasn't meant to be opened from inside, Obelix simply kicks the door off its hinges. The bank's owner, Zurix, has the Gauls moved to someone else's safe. That someone else turns out to be the Roman centurion who comes searching for the Gauls, finds the broken safe and questions the bank's security (while sheepishly justifying why he has such an account to his men).
• Deadpool vs. The Punisher has a variation: a criminal empire founded on the absolute secrecy of its accounts. The secret is the villain's son, who knows the list of the account codes by heart. In the end the villain (who'd hired Deadpool to protect him from Frank) turns on Deadpool, and ends about as well as you could expect of someone pissing two of Marvel's more graphically violent heroes.
• In the Tintin adventure Flight 714, there is an amoral corporate executive who is abducted so that the villain can obtain the details of his Swiss bank account.

Fan Works

• The Karma of Lies: Lila has one, though she privately observes that it's literally just a normal bank account that happens to be located in Switzerland... one that she's kept largely untouched until she needed it.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: In a fictional world variant of the "tropical island tax haven", Hunter J has a major bank account in Pummelo Island.

Film

• In The Bourne Identity, the amnesiac hero starts out with no clue to his identity except the details of a Swiss bank account.
• The Day of the Jackal: The titular Jackal has a bank account in Switzerland where the OAS is to deposit the money they're paying him to assassinate President de Gaulle.
• Fun with Dick and Jane: The local bad guy has stashed all his plundered money in an account like this (it's never mentioned what country it belongs to).
• At the end of F/X: Murder by Illusion, Rollie and Leo use Rollie's special effects makeup expertise (and the stolen account information) to drain Nick DeFranco's Swiss bank account of nearly ten million dollars before the Swiss bankers find out that Nick has been killed.
• Interceptor: The heroine overhears the Big Bad using an apparent code over the radio: ZSB 1996. She realises that the letters stand for Zurich Schweitz Bank, and therefore he's not the Well-Intentioned Extremist he's pretending to be.
• The titular assassin for hire in The Jackal uses these to accept payments on contracts. The FSB (former KGB prior to the USSR's dissolution) were among his clients, the agent currently working with the FBI to stop his latest plan noting that payments to him in the past were made to accounts either in the Bahamas or Hong Kong.
• James Bond:
  • In The Spy Who Loved Me, after the two scientists complete the submarine tracking system, Stromberg transfers $10 million into their Swiss bank accounts. He then kills them, and cancels the transfers.
  • In Octopussy, it's mentioned that the anonymous seller offering a Faberge egg for auction at Sotheby has a numbered Swiss bank account. That doesn't stop MI6's art expert from guessing (correctly) that the seller is Russian, given that the eggs haven't come from any legitimate source and therefore must have been smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain.
  • The Banco De Isthmus in Licence to Kill is clearly one of these, since they're owned by the local drug lord Franz Sanchez, and don't even blink when Bond deposits over four million dollars in cash. They also have some sort of 'arrangement' with the Casino, which is also owned by Sanchez.
  • The page quote is from the pre-title sequence to The World Is Not Enough, as Bond confronts a Swiss banker in Bilbao, Spain, trying to retrieve money stolen from British oil magnate Sir Robert King.
  • Casino Royale (2006) has a minor example of this. The $100 million pot for the winnings of the poker tournament is held by a Swiss bank, with Monsieur Mendel as the account manager. Rather than a secret, numbered account, it is simply an escrow account, where all the player's buy-in cash is held, with the bank itself being chosen because it's impartial and secure.
• Johnny Mnemonic: Johnny's contacts in Beijing make a point to tell him that half of the fee Johnny is owed for transporting their data was wired in advance to a "Swiss account", as they were instructed to do.
• Subverted in The Last Stand. The Big Bad is fond of bribing cops to get his way. When it's suspected that he's done so, the FBI chief has his department investigated, easily tracks down the one bribed through a Swiss bank account, and even chastises said mole for thinking it was beyond their reach.
• The Menu: The tortillas in the chicken taco portion of the meal are laser-printed with the guests' secrets; the ones for the tech bros depict their Cayman Islands offshore accounts, amongst various other criminal activities.
  Soren: Dude, chill, it's a fucking taco.
  Bryce: A fucking taco that might hold up in court?!
• In Munich, Avner opens these for his mission to assassinate the Black September leadership. He and each of the men on his team gets one to hold their accumulated salary, and the other receives $250,000 for operational expenses. The Mossad accountant sternly tells him to keep receipts to justify using the unlimited funds. He left out the bit where Mossad has the authority to remove the funds from their accounts, which they do after the protagonist decides to quit.
• The Negotiation: Shady CEO Koo Gwan-su has a sufficiently shady Swiss account that Tae-gu asks him to restore as one of his conditions.
• The Order: The character Ben Nur has one.
• In Samurai Cop, the villain Fujiyama is accused of being a 'death merchant' who deposits his vast riches into a Swiss account during a narmy speech by the eponymous hero.
• Implied in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. When Holmes and Moriarty have a discussion about Moriarty's assets, Moriarty claims that he's rather fond of Switzerland. They know how to respect a man's privacy there, especially when he has a large personal fortune.
• The Spanish Prisoner:
  Jimmy Dell: You now have a Swiss bank account if anybody asks. Credit Nationale Du Geneve, code name 'PADDY'. Lavish awkward gesture. All of fifteen Swiss Francs in it, but if you ever want to impress anybody, they can find out you have a Swiss account. But, Swiss law prohibits the bank from revealing the balance. Thus are all men made equal.
• General M. Bison from the Street Fighter movie has one, which he wants the $20,000,000,000 ransom wired to.
• Tenet has the freeport system being used in this way by Andrei Sator. Assets such as art can be stored indefinitely in a secure warehouse in an international airport without the client having to pay import duties. It's explicitly compared to the Swiss banking system.
• In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Thomas deposits a large pile of small bills in Switzerland after the bank heist in Boston. Investigator Vicky observes that the Swiss are "notoriously casual about certain formalities," like searching airline baggage.
• A group of mercenaries are being briefed in Water (1985):
  French agent: This is a dangerous mission, and some of you will die. But remember, in a world gone mad, you will die for a principle that you all hold close to your heart. Money!
  Mercenaries: Viva franc! Viva deutschmark! Viva dollar! Viva numbered bank account in Switzerland!
• The Wolf of Wall Street features a memorable negotiation scene between Jordan Bellfort and a Swiss banker.
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar has a benevolent version. Henry's accountant John moves to Switzerland so he can legally handle the money Henry wins from cheating at gambling around the world, which is in turn used to set up several charitable organizations for children.
• Where Sebastian Shaw keeps his ill-gotten gains in X-Men: First Class.

Literature

Examples by author:

• People in the various John Grisham novels prefer accounts in the Grand Caymans to accounts in Switzerland. Even the good guys do their banking there.

Examples by title:

• Artemis Fowl has several Swiss Bank Accounts, though probably not as many as when he was still (moderately) evil. A couple of villains (most noteably in The Eternity Code) also had Swiss Bank Accounts, ripe for Artemis to dig his fingers into.
• The Amnesiac Hero of The Bourne Series starts out The Bourne Identity with no clue to his identity except the number of a Swiss bank account. This doesn't ultimately turn out to be a sign that he was a villain, but he did have something to hide.
• In A College of Magics, one of the minor antagonists turns out to have embezzled a lot of money and stashed it in a bank account in Zurich.
• In The Da Vinci Code, one of the clues to the Holy Grail is held in a Swiss bank. Though with the account being held over several centuries and the bank manager going to frankly illegal lengths to keep the main characters safe from the police after their visit, it has more of the feel of a Binding Ancient Treaty than anything that could be considered a normal banking relationship.
• In The Dogs of War, a Corrupt Corporate Executive is buying shares from an eccentric heiress and is cautioned by the Swiss banker not to put his bank's name on the cheque as little old ladies tend to think of Swiss banks accounts as fulfilling this trope.
• In the Everything's Eventual short story "In the Deathroom", the protagonist thinks that "in the end there might only be one way to tell the thugs from the patriots: when they saw their own death rising in your eyes like water, patriots made speeches. The thugs, on the other hand, gave you the number of their Swiss bank account and offered to put you on-line."
• One figures into the plot of Fatherland as the hiding place of documents providing evidence of the (long ago completed) Holocaust. The original purpose of such accounts is also touched upon - the Gestapo is said to be particularly suspicious of people with them.
• Played with in Frederick Forsyth's The Fist of God: the account is Austrian, not Swiss, and the client's identity is known to the banker, which for Mossad, who are trying to deduce the identity of Saddam Hussein's mole so they can stop relying on them for intel, means Honey Trapping the banker's secretary.
• Greg Mandel Trilogy: In Mindstar Rising, teenage heiress Julia Evans gets the bank records of someone who's plotting against her company by buying the entire bank! She points out that it's actually a good investment.
• In Death: Chief Simpson uses one to hide his illegal transactions.
• Jack Ryan:
  • In Clear and Present Danger, the mystique of this trope is bluntly deconstructed, not only because the Cartel having their drug accounts in Swiss banks does nothing to protect them from seizure once their illegality is discovered, but it's explicitly pointed out that the only thing that makes the banks more secure is that fact that the countries they reside in weren't invaded as much, giving the illusion of security.
  • In Rainbow Six, Dmitri Popov sets up a Swiss Bank Account for the terrorists he's hired, as a secure way to transfer their payment to them. Once it becomes obvious that they're going to fail at the mission, he transfers all the money to an account he set up for himself.
• Subverted in MARZENA: while undergoing a Journey to the Center of the Mind to steal the banking information of some criminal crook who goes by the alias of Dr. Sam, we find out the hard way that he doesn't have a Bank Account in Zurich, although Kristen and Lauren seemed to think that he did.
• In Modern Villainess: It's Not Easy Building a Corporate Empire Before the Crash, the Moonlight Fund (the protagonist's personal wealth) is based around a private Swiss bank account, which is the hub for the funds that manage the US-based assets that make her most of her income. Repatriating that money to Japan requires some financial shell games, foreign exchange trades (borrowing in yen and repaying in dollars), favors owed by the Ministry of Finance, and later Russian oil.
• In the Modesty Blaise novel The Night of Morningstar, it's mentioned in passing that all the members of the terrorist group are getting their cut paid into Swiss bank accounts.
• In On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett, Ross Perot and his executives are approached by a shady character who offers to get their colleagues out of an Iranian prison in exchange for a considerable amount of money to be paid into an escrow account (meaning the money isn't handed over till after the deal). After debating the matter, they decide to refuse because they suspect they're being set up for a bribery charge.
• Robert Ludlum plays with the lazy version of the trope in The Ostermann Weekend. The protagonist discovers that a man who may be a foreign spy has a Swiss bank account, and considers this to be evidence, but it turns out that the man is innocent, and his response to being accused of having a Swiss bank account is basically, "Yes, I do. What's your point?"
• OUT by Pierre Rey tells the story of a bunch of mafiosi trying to get their funds (2 billion US$ in 1977) back from a numbered bank account in a Zurich bank after their dishonest lawyer tried to abscond with the funds and gave these gangsters a false number and codename.

Live-Action TV

• Con artists Charlie, Elizabeth, and Samantha from Birds on the Wing keep their bank accounts in Geneva. In "Charlie Tries to Con Elizabeth and Samantha", Charles is humiliated by the bank's manager leading him to try to trick Elizabeth and Samantha out of their money in an attempt to feel better, which ends in disaster in "Charlie's in Geneva, Girls are in Tokyo", when he tries to meet the girls in Geneva, unaware they have swindled him and run off to Tokyo with his money.
• Breaking Bad: Gus Fring pays his underlings through offshore Cayman Islands bank accounts. The DEA accidentally discovers these accounts hidden in a confiscated picture frame, freezing the accounts, leading to the bulk of the drama in the first half of Season 5, as Mike is forced back in a partnership with Walt to recoup the lost money, as that pay was what keeps the underlings from ratting them out after they get arrested.
• Burn Notice:
  • Michael's friend Barry specializes in setting those up and using them to launder money for criminals and spies.
  • In one episode, a government agent is trying to bully Michael, so he has Barry set up an offshore account in the agent's name. They then move the same few thousand dollars in and out of the account repeatedly to make it seem like the agent is receiving payoffs through the account. Michael then blackmails the agent with this to have him back off.
  • In the episode "Friends and Enemies":
    Michael Westen: Who do you work for?
    Gregory Hart: I work for an 11-digit Swiss bank account number, and an anonymous email address.
• Daredevil (2015): In season 3, Wilson Fisk is laundering his money through shell companies that are supposedly based in other countries and have charters to do business in the United States that were filed by his lawyers. Red Lion National Bank, the bank which moves his money around, also is mentioned to have a branch in the Caymans.
• Farscape gives us Shadow Depositories; privately held banks that service the criminal scum of the Uncharted Territories. Their security measures are every bit as good as the top-secret, maximum-security military bases of any of the warring stellar nations.
• In the Human Target Season 2 premiere, Ilsa (a good person) has a vault in a Swiss bank which can only be entered with retina scans of both Ilsa and her late husband; the bad guy uses her (in a hostage situation) and her dead husband's eyeball, removed from his body to get in to steal their billions. In another episode she transfers a couple mil from her Swiss bank to a local bank specifically in order to draw out some Dirty Cops who were looking for her; in that same episode the main bad guy has an offshore bank account in Barbados where he stores his ill-gotten gains.
• The Villain Protagonist of Kessler has a Swiss bank account containing wealth looted from occupied Europe during WW2, and gaining access to these funds is a source of tension with his fellow Nazis, between the younger members who want to fund a neo-Nazi resurgence and the older generation who just want to live comfortably in exile.
• Luke Cage (2016): Mariah Dillard is using Caymans banks to move the proceeds from a shady stock deal she makes with Piranha Jones at the start of season 2.
• Mission: Impossible:
  • The mobsters in "The Council" are using a Swiss bank account.
  • The villain of the week in "The Bride" is a mob courier trying to get his employer's money to Switzerland to be deposited in one.
  • In "The Legacy", the team is sent after a group of Neo-Nazis trying to get to a cache of Nazi Gold believed to be in one. The account actually contains an envelope holding a few hundred deutschmarks and a microdot on the envelope itself, showing a map to where the gold actually is.
• One episode of Murphy Brown has a millionaire fall in love with Murphy and shower her with expensive gifts to try to get her to marry him, until he flat-out tries to bribe her with a large check. She says no, the guy finally relents... and proposes to Kay, who immediately accepts. When Murphy is horrified and calls Kay out on this, her response is, "Don't worry. I'll have this money in my Cayman Islands account before we're within miles of an altar." (Because Status Quo Is God, the guy divorces her and takes back the money.)
• The Pretender: In "Collateral Damage", Jarod hacks into the villain of the week's Swiss bank account to confirm that he's been receiving payoffs from a drug cartel.
• Standard means of paying for dubious services in The Professionals.
  • In "Slush Fund", CI5 detain a South African hitman as he enters the country.
    Cowley: What was the drill? Check in; wait in the hotel until contacted?
    Van Neikerk: Why don't you tell me?
    Cowley: Half the money already in a Swiss bank?
    Van Neikerk: That's right, I took over Hitler's account.
  • In "When the Heat Cools Off", Bodie and Doyle search the apartment of a witness and find the number of a Swiss bank account taped underneath a drawer. Turns out it was planted there to make it look like the witness was bribed into giving false testimony.
  • In "Not A Very Civil Civil Servant", a high-ranking bureaucrat has a cozy relationship with a Corrupt Corporate Executive in the building industry who comments: "Your Swiss bank must be having to build an extension. Or is it Liechtenstein?"
  • A variation occurs in "The Untouchables" where Bodie (posing as the middleman for a contract killing) insists on being paid in Swiss francs. However, in this case, it's to leave a money trail as the person paying for the hit has to make special arrangements to get the money converted after the banks have closed.
• In a Saturday Night Live sketch, Steve Martin lists his top wishes, including $30 million a month deposited directly into his Swiss bank account.
• There's one in Smiley's People, the TV adaptation of the spy novel series The Quest for Karla.
• The unsophisticated drug lord Marlo Stanfield from The Wire has to be introduced to this trope (Antillean offshore version), and even then, he decides to visit the bank in person to verify that his money is actually there.

Music

• "Foot of Pride" by Bob Dylan:
  They like to take all this money from sin
  Build big universities to study in
  Sing "Amazing Grace" all the way to the Swiss banks!

Tabletop Games

• In the board game Attorneys at Flaw, stashing your money in a Swiss bank account makes it safe from being lost if you bungle a lawsuit — but the win condition is accumulating a million dollars in cash on hand, and Swiss bank money doesn't count.
• In the Champions adventure Red Doom, when Colonel Vasalov hires some supervillains to attack the heroes, he promises to pay each of them with $100,000 in a Swiss bank account.
• In Eberron, House Kundarak fills this role, a Dragonmarked House of dwarven bankers from a mountainous country who will give anyone who can afford it a high-security vault.
• In Junta, the object is to divert as much money as possible into your family's Swiss bank account.
• In the Savage Worlds setting Tropicana, set in the Presidential Republic of San Jose, the secretive El Banco is both the financial center of the entire country and known worldwide for providing confidential banking services for anyone. Including known criminal and terrorist groups.

Theatre

• In Evita, the corrupt government's lavish spending is explained in the song "And The Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)", which is all about Eva's charity work until the last verse:
  If the money keeps rolling in what's a girl to do?
  Cream a little off the top for expenses—wouldn't you?
  But where on Earth can people hide their little piece of Heaven?
  Thank God for Switzerland
  Where a girl and a guy with a little petty cash between them
  Can be sure when they deposit no-one's seen them
  Oh what bliss to sign your checks as three-o-one-two-seven
  Never been accounts in the name of Eva Peron!

Video Games

• In Day of the Tentacle, Dr. Edison has a Swiss Bank account that's almost completely depleted. One of the more significant puzzles in the game requires you to get access to the account through trickery, then find a way to get a lot of money into it, so that you can use the money to buy a really big diamond.
• Druglord: The player character's bank is supposed to be a Swiss bank.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Eliza transferred funds to an account in the kingdom, despite being a Zeta citizen. This comes in handy when Zeta freezes most of her bank accounts after she sides with Akira against them and becomes a fugitive.
• In Mega Man 9, the villainous Dr Wily is revealed to have a Swiss bank account with the account number 19-871-217 (a shout-out to the original game, released on 1987-12-17).
• It's revealed in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater that the Allies (plus China) pooled their funds together for the war effort in World War II and kept them hidden in various locations around the world with Switzerland being one of them.
• The man pulling the strings in The Outfoxies offers Swiss Francs for all contracts fulfilled.
• 80% of your loot in PAYDAY 2 goes into an "offshore account". It can only be used to purchase contracts (rather than waiting for them to become available or joining another player's game), go infamous (the first five ranks costs $200M), and bet in "Offshore Paydays" for additional loot drops.
• In Tropico, one of the scoring metrics is how much money you can embezzle into your Swiss bank account. El Presidente can earn funds through the Building Permit edict (which increases all building costs by 20% to earn 10% of the cost), setting childhood museums to "Retirement Fund" mode, setting the customs office to "Customs Duty Evasion" (which requires paying customs officers $25 each to keep quiet), setting banks to "Slush Fund" mode (which only works while the treasury is positive), turning ruins into excavation sites, and building the mausoleum. Until the Modern Times expansion, there was no use for the Swiss account. In Modern Times, a minimum Swiss bank balance is required to upgrade the palace to a presidency and set water treatment plants, sanatoria, and SWAT HQs to "Happy Powder", "Psych Ward", and "Personal Death Squad" modes.

Webcomics

• Early on in Sluggy Freelance, Bun-bun makes a killing by setting up a viagra trade in Tijuana, and has his profits stored in Switzerland. The problem, as Torg points out, is that he can't get to his money because it's in Switzerland.

Western Animation

• Biker Mice from Mars has made reference to a "Swiss Cheese account" on two occasions.
  • The episode "Pitfall" has the series' main antagonist Lawrence Limburger and lawyer Perry Provoloni attempt to blackmail their Plutarkian leader Lord Camembert with proof that he is hiding embezzled funds in his Swiss Cheese account.
  • The three-part Origins Episode "Once Upon a Time on Mars" has Limburger use forged release notes for his former superior Dominic T. Stilton's Swiss Cheese account to bribe the Martian government into allowing Plutark to invade Mars.
• In the Central Park episode "Dog Spray Afternoon", Paige discovers that the supposed multiple companies that are buying the mayor's real estate are actually just one company and that said company originated in Panama. Marvin tells her that it's all but impossible to find out who owns a Panamanian shell corporation because it's a very long process to have the information revealed. Paige would have waited six months to have even a vague idea on who's behind it if it wasn't for Birdie blurting out that Bitsy is the one who owns the corporation.
• In an early episode of Family Guy, when the Griffins inherit a huge mansion, Peter fully adopts a snooty rich attitude and mentions that he has one of these. Lois tells him that he doesn't, and he tells his conversation partners that he's keeping it secret from Lois in case things don't work out.
• In the Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles episode "Genesis Undone", Dr. Anton Sevarius attempts to trick Thailog into injecting himself with the clone virus at an advanced stage by claiming that he'll give him the cure if he sends him a large amount of money through his Swiss account.
• G.I. Joe:
  • Firefly mentions having a Swiss account in the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero episode "Eau de Cobra".
  • In the G.I. Joe Extreme episode "Chips and a Cold, Cold Drink", Rampage mentions that he'll transfer the money he got from a deal to his Swiss bank account.
• In the Littlest Pet Shop (2012) episode in which Sharukh comes to visit, he boasts about his Swiss bank account is located in Germany.
• Miles Mayhem, leader of V.E.N.O.M., is said to have a Swiss bank account in the M.A.S.K. episode "Bad Vibrations".
• In the Thanksgiving episode of Regular Show, Rich Buckner attempts to use the golden wishbone of a turducken bred only once every million years to wish for the rights to Thanksgiving as well as a large sum of money hidden in an untraceable Swiss bank account.
• The Cayman Islands version appears in The Simpsons, "Bart the Fink":
  Cayman Islands guy: [on phone] I'm sorry, I can't divulge information about that customer's secret illegal account.
  [hangs up]
  Oh, Crap! I shouldn't have said he was a customer.
  Oh, Crap! I shouldn't have said it was a secret.
  Oh, Crap! I certainly shouldn't have said it was illegal.
  [sighs]
  It's too hot today.

Real Life

• The late Nigerian military dictator, Sani Abacha, had a huge stash of money hidden in a secret Swiss bank account.
• Palestine nationalist leader Yasser Arafat had one as well.
• After he was forced out of power, Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet was revealed to have embezzled tens of millions of public funds in Swiss bank accounts. This made most of his remaining supporters turn against him.
• Jordan Belfort of The Wolf of Wall Street fame got done in this way. Steve Madden was a designer of women's shoes, and a childhood friend of Jordan Belfort's business partner Danny Porush. In 1993, Belfort and Proush's brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont took Madden's shoe company public. Thing is, Belfort, Porush and Madden owned the majority of the company's shares, which was a severe violation of federal law. When the Strattonites drove up the value of the stock, they got rich in the process.^note This was just one of many companies they repeated this fraud with; it's just the only company that was actually viable, making it an arguable (at least for Mr Madden) mild case of Springtime for Hitler. In order to hide his ill-gotten gains, Belfort smuggled cash to a Swiss bank. He disguised them under the name of an aunt of his wife Nadine, by convincing them he just wished to avoid paying taxes. How he smuggled the money was through his drug dealer Todd Garrett, whose wife conveniently happened to hold Swiss citizenship. Belfort was able to convince her and her family to hide the money in their luggage. They ultimately smuggled over $3 million into Swiss bank accounts before Belfort was busted by the FBI. To get a lighter sentence, Jordan agreed to wear a wire and rat out his friends and colleagues.
• Controversial Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos stashed large amounts of his ill-gotten gains in bank accounts in Switzerland, also taking advantage of Swiss financial secrecy to aid in his money laundering operations. So far, more than US$600 million has been returned to the Philippines on the orders of the Swiss government.
• Swiss banks played a significant role in the 1MDB scandal that rocked Malaysia.

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