#4. GAME DEV TIP: AVOID BEING MISTAKEN FOR AN ARMS DEALER
December 06, 2023 - post by Jono
Tena koutou Katoa!
Hey remember in our first blog post we spoke about the time that we were mistaken by the bank as arms dealers? Well, we figured now is the time to expand upon this story.
Basically, it started when one of our contractors said that he hadn’t received a payment that we knew we had paid the week prior.
This was very strange as one of my policies of working with contractors is that we immediately pay them on completion of their milestone. One of the things I disliked about freelancing years ago was that I’d finish a job on say, March 2nd but the client wouldn’t process the payment until the end of the month and then it would take another week for the money to show up… 5 or 6 weeks after the work was completed. So how do you pay bills in the meantime?
Where was I? Oh yeah, pay your contractors immediately and they’ll love you for it. It seems to resonate well with our contractors because they often let me know when they have additional availability.
Anyway… So our contractor hadn’t received his money, which was weird. Then I received a message from the bank saying that a payment was blocked and I needed to resolve it immediately. So I check my bank mail and find this:
“As a bank with operations in more than 30 countries, ANZ must comply with laws of various governments and supra-national organisations, including the United States, European Union, and United Nations. This includes undertaking screening on all international payments. In order to ensure this transaction is compliant with our international obligations as well as ANZ policy, please provide the following information.
1. Nature and purpose of payment
2. Please provide full detail regarding the mention of "Rifle" in the payment reference field
3. Details of any goods involved, including country of origin, name of manufacturer, and who the end user is intended to be
4. Confirmation that any required licences/import/export/on selling permits relating to this purchase are in place
5. Please confirm whether there are any direct or indirect links to Syria, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Belarus or the region of Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk
6. A copy of the firearms licence held by the customer
WTF? How did we get here? The key is point 2 “regarding the mention of rifle in the payment field”.
So I go back through my bank details and find that I wrote ‘payment for rifle asset’ in the reference description and that was all it took for the bank to enquire whether I had direct (or indirect) links to various regimes.
In case you’re wondering, here’s the rifle in question:
This weapon belongs to Cardiak, one of our starting characters in the game. Hyper competitive to a fault, Cardiak augmented her heart and lungs with an artificial cardiovascular system, just to gain that competitive edge. She has a cardiovascular link to her weapon which makes her do more damage when her health goes below 20%.
Well, what started as a post on not getting blacklisted by the bank has turned into a character reveal.
Hope you enjoyed it! See you next month!