Chime has been suddenly closing accounts, not returning customers’ money

Of course they have. It's no accident that accounts like these are heavily marketed to people with terms like "faster access to YOUR money" and "virtually no fees" and "manage YOUR MONEY from anywhere, down to the penny!" These companies are targeting people for whom every single dollar is of vital importance.

To then yank the accounts right as a large deposit from a government agency lands is malfeasance, or at least immoral.

The vast majority of us who post on this site have plenty of money, or at least credit, in reserve so that even losing $10,000 worth of deposit isn't crippling. It's bad, for sure, but it's not "I'm homeless starting tomorrow" bad. We are not the target market for apps-that-should-be-proper-banks like Chime.

> She was directed to a passage in the company’s account agreement that states, “Chime and/or Bank may suspend, freeze, or close your Account for any reason with or without notice”

Yup, sounds about right. And of course there's a binding arbitration agreement, requiring all arbitration actions to be on an individual basis.

So customers can be turned away with no reason, no recourse, no private right of action against the offending company, and no ability to group together to push back on a larger foe.

This is, no pardon requested, fucking bullshit. I loathe that we've gotten so deep into contracts of adhesion and abstractions between supplying company and supplier and third-party relationships and "oh it's someone else's problem" and automated customer handling.

It sounds like it depends. If the bank has good reason to believe the funds are fraudulently sourced, then it may lawfully be entitled to hold them until it can be shown (either to their satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a court) that the funds are legitimate.

I would caution that before people try to blame the victims here ("don't use small banks!" "don't use banking apps!" etc), these things happen with large/established banks too. With accounts just being randomly locked for a "fraud investigation" that can take weeks (particularly for cash movements over 10K).

What my spouse and me are doing is we have two checking accounts at different banks with a different one of us as the primary. Pay-checks are received at one, and a scheduled transfer moves some money to the second, and bills paid from both. That way even if one of our accounts did get suspended while a hassle, we could weather is with relative ease.