There’s privacy, and there’s privacy. And this post, unlike the last one, is set on the other side of the Atlantic.
In October 2025, Interpol issued a red notice for the Chief Executive Officer of currency exchange Cinkciarz after Polish authorities charged him with orchestrating a fraud and money laundering scheme.
In May, United States authorities detained the CEO pending a Polish extradition request.
Naturally, the ongoing affair is being heavily reported in the Polish media…minus one teeny tiny detail.
The CEO’s last name.
Polish publications only identify him as “Marcin P.” due to Polish privacy laws.
The U.S. Marshals Service is under no obligation to comply with these laws, and printed the CEO’s last name in its media release. But on the slight chance that a Polish citizen may be reading the Bredemarket blog, I won’t reprint it here.
But Marcin P. is only a suspect
Of course, Marcin has not been convicted of a crime. But if he is eventually convicted. Polish law WILL allow publication of his last name.
Unless he lodges a request for GDPR “right of erasure,” a right that has been upheld in Luxembourg.
“The case concerns the former president of a trade union organisation from 1985 to 2002, against whom charges were brought for forgery, abuse of trust, fraud and theft. The case involved several million ‘Luxembourg Francs’ (the Euro banknotes were introduced in 2002) and hundreds of victims. The individual had confessed and was sentenced in 2007 for various offences to a prison sentence of six years, with a two-year suspended sentence….
“A TV program was broadcast in 2018, followed by a radio show in 2022. In the meantime, the individual filed a legal request in 2020 to prohibit the media outlet ‘from mentioning the name and publishing the image of the claimant on its TV broadcasts, radio programs, and websites in connection with its activities related to […], under penalty of a fine’….
“[T]he Court of Appeal found that the dissemination of the image and the publication of the name and surname were not necessary to achieve the goal of information.”
To date, I know of no case in the United States in which a convicted criminal’s name has been suppressed.
To date.
Bredemarket 