Icelandic media have caught onto the unfolding #BadBanki scandal – and are beginning to dig into why one of their own institutions is being sued by innovative human rights tech startup Talk Liberation. Our team is back in court in Iceland today – and this time, it’s the bank on the stand – and they’re having to answer our questions.
Let’s review the story so far: In June, an Icelandic judge sided with Talk Liberation’s request to compel testimony from Islandsbanki staff. The major Icelandic bank debanked us in 2022 and froze our seed funding — before backtracking and returning our funds to us nine months later, but still leaving us without an apology, compensation or the ability to operate our accounts. Worse – we’ve struggled to find new banking services in Iceland, likely because Islandsbanki’s actions against us are recorded in the international AML (Anti Money Laundering) system which are accessed by all banks.
So we sued, and after nearly three years of battling to get to this point, Islandsbanki is now being forced to show some of their cards. The bank had claimed to be immune from giving testimony in the case, but that didn’t hold up in court and they are now required to testify in their defence today – Tuesday, 2nd September 2025.
Our team is back on the ground and will be reporting from the courtroom in Reykjavik, Iceland as we hear the bank’s testimony and hopefully, see justice unfold.
As we continue to shed light on the systemic hurdles that we face in trying to bring ethical technology to the masses, people the world over are sharing in our plight. We’ve featured on shows like Redacted with Clayton Morris, the UK Column, New Zealand publication The Daily Blog and more. We’ve also been documenting our progress as well as tracking and aggregating global news about the tidal wave of debanking cases caused by banks and their practices — check out BadBanki.com!
A Problem Shared is a Problem Halved
Recently, our story broke in mainstream Icelandic media, where publications such as Morgunbladid and Útvarp Saga took a supportive view of our ordeal.
While banks have a mandate to de-platform criminal activity, weaponizeddebanking is an abuse of human rights in order to achieve total surveillance and economic control. It is the fight of our era as economic freedoms underpin all facets of modern life.
Together with media and your voices, we will succeed at bringing ethics back to the internet.
“Software company Talk Liberation, which operates the social media platform Panquake, has filed a lawsuit against Íslandsbanki and is seeking recognition of the bank’s liability for compensation due to the freezing of the company’s funds.
Panquake is a decentralized social media platform founded by supporters of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Sveinn Andri Sveinsson, former Wikileaks attorney, is representing Talk Liberation in the case, where he says the bank has caused the company considerable damage.
The company was established in Iceland because Iceland was considered exemplary when it comes to data privacy and the protection of journalists and information, and Sveinn Andri has previously represented Wikileaks in a case against Valitor” – Icelandic mainstream publication Morgunbladid [emphasis added].
Islandsbanki (Iceland Bank) arbitrarily and without any warning, froze our accounts and seized nearly $1 million USD in investor funds that the accounts held. The bank invoked money laundering and anti-terrorism financing laws before backtracking, which effectively exonerated us from any wrongdoing. But it was too late – the damage had already been done.
To date, the bank has not adequately explained their decision-making nor provided ample evidence to back up their suspicions. For three years, Talk Liberation have been waiting for answers.
‘Extent of damage unclear’
The bank’s actions threw all of our development and hiring plans into disarray and brought our Icelandic operations to an abrupt halt. Even though the funds were eventually returned, Islandsbanki has never compensated us nor our loyal community for the damages that they caused.
‘The funds have now been returned, but of course, they could not be utilized in the meantime. This caused significant damage to the company, as the funds were intended to be paid to programmers and other Icelandic staff for handling the setup and management of this website’” — Sveinsson told Morgunbladid.
The true ‘extent of the damage’ goes beyond the inability to cement contracts and proceed with business plans and commercial arrangements, to the more intangible – reputational damage, brand damage, and most importantly, damage to the goodwill of our large, international community of supporters. We are very cognisant of the dismay, doubt and despair that they were caused to experience by Islandsbanki throwing a spanner into the works of Panquake.
We continue to fight for justice for every person that volunteered their time, resources and belief in bringing our project to fruition, at a time when it was needed most.
Before it was unscrupulously interrupted.
‘Completely unacceptable’
International AML (Anti Money Laundering) systems that banks feed information about their customers into, are supposed to operate according to underpinning legislation. In Iceland, this is the provisions of the ‘Act on Measures Against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing No.140/2018’. Sveinsson points to a lack of transparency in the internal rules and protocols that the bank applied while assessing our transactions and difficulty gaining access to assess whether they complied with the legislation.
‘The problem is that the enforcement of the Act is left to the banks, which are private entities. Their systems and rules lack transparency, and they refuse to provide information about their internal procedures. The government is not involved — only vague internal rules of the banks, which are based on databases that no one knows the contents of’ — Sveinsson told Morgunbladid.
“Sveinn Andri says that such supervision should certainly be in the hands of public authorities.
‘That would be entirely more appropriate. This supervision is based on information that often cannot be corrected or amended, and it may include all kinds of notes entered into the database by bank employees — notes that are treated as absolute truth. This is completely unacceptable’” — Sveinsson told Morgunbladid.
According to the Icelandic AML legislation, only the judge has the power to order disclosure of the AML records that pertain to Talk Liberation and Islandsbanki. A key objective of Talk Liberation is to obtain access to those records in order to be able to accurately assess the veracity of the information contained in them.
Political implications
Talk Liberation founder Suzie Dawson makes no secret of her career in activism and citizen journalism prior to founding our ethical tech start up in 2021. Naturally, and after exhausting all avenues to clear our name with the bank — factors of a personal nature became our primary lead in this investigation.
Icelandic radio station Útvarp Saga 99.4 has delved into the possible political implications of our case, which, if provable, could amount to a form of political discrimination.
“[Suzie] Dawson has worked as a journalist [who] publicly supported Wikileaks. Her lawyer, Sveinn Sveinsson, is the same lawyer who won a case for Wikileaks against Valitor in 2017. Dawson believes that the bank’s actions towards the company is part of a larger pattern in which [the unpleasant voices are wrong all the way down through the financial system] — writes Útvarp Saga [internet translation].
Our case is not just about Talk Liberation – it represents the future of economic freedoms in the digital world. Over the past few months, we’ve documented hundreds of cases of ordinary people being debanked and who are suffering in silence. We are here to amplify their voices, just as you help to amplify ours — by reading, learning and sharing.
Look out for more of our court case updates across our social media and at BadBanki.com.
You can also write to us, reach out on social media or contact our Media Director for interviews and commentary.
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This reads like a real test of Iceland’s post-2008 “never again” ethos—can a bank ‘de-risk’ without transparent due process and still claim to serve the public? If you can share the exact claims and remedies you’ve filed plus a simple timeline of filings/hearings, it’ll help people follow #BadBanki in good faith and hold both the bank and regulators to their own standards.
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