Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 121 posts

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#51
post #26
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the most useless and stupidest trigger of all. I've got a PayPal account for my small side business. I did not receive any money on that so far, only paid with that account for whatever I needed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Euro over the last 3 years. Last week I received something like 12,30 € and PayPal locked the money and the account somewhat down, because of "unusual behaviour" that needed invest…

Well, I agree about PayPal. But their whole business is predicated on being extremely vigilant against scammers, to the detriment of ordinary customers. But regular American bank accounts are pretty different from PayPal or European bank accounts. (The original poster is talking about Chase so I assume the account in question was a regular checking account.) I lived in the US for a couple of years, and the oddities o…

> ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other.

This is just because you chose a crappy bank. My bank supports it via online banking, but I admit not all do.

https://www.navyfederal.org/services/transfers/ach.html

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#52
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I agree about PayPal. But their whole business is predicated on being extremely vigilant against scammers, to the detriment of ordinary customers. But regular American bank accounts are pretty different from PayPal or European bank accounts. (The original poster is talking about Chase so I assume the account in question was a regular checking account.) I lived in the US for a couple of years, and the oddities o…

> ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other. This is just because you chose a crappy bank. My bank supports it via online banking, but I admit not all do. https://www.navyfederal.org/services/transfers/ach.html

I don't think any of the top 5 largest banks in the US support consumer ACH sending. So you can't really expect it to be available when you want to receive money from someone.

In Europe, free bank transfers are mandatory. You literally can't be a consumer bank and not offer this functionality. The transfers have also become immediate and 24/7 with the latest SEPA upgrade within the Euro zone.

(Also it seems to me that US bank account numbers are unsafe in a way that European accounts are not. I have no qualms about sharing my Finnish bank account number with anyone, even in public, since there's no way to use just the number to extract money. But the US system seems to be full of leaky access points that makes this a bad idea.)

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#53

For all we know, OP my be a sanctioned person by the US Government for ties to the upper echelons of the current Russian government. Of course Chase will stop doing business with you.

If that were the case, why would they legally expose themselves by posting their situation online?

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#54

I see this account was created only to post this complaint about an account closure. Stripe employees have commented on HN about this behavior as it occurs frequently. That behavior being an account with no history whining about how some big evil bank attacked them, a poor powerless innocent victim, for absolutely no reason. Almost always the account is closed due to fraud only after several rounds of correspondence…

It does seem like it always comes down to crypto or other shenanigans banks want nothing to do with.

Would love to know all of the unbiased information whenever this type of post happens.

@op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account?

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#55
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bizarre claim that FDIC insurance is funded by taxpayers is becoming more prevalent. So a bank offers financial services to a citizen and in exchange makes money. The bank uses these profits to pay insurance on the deposits. And by some mental gymnastics, this makes the bank taxpayer funded? If we taxpayers buy phones from Apple, is Apple now taxpayer funded? Is an antitrust fine on Apple meaningless because it’…

FDIC is a Federal organization that can not go under. Banks pay to insurance on deposit up to 250k. We now know that the insurance is unlimited but the fees are only based on 250k liability So if the amount of money left in FDIC is less than the amount of money needed to make depositors whole the FDIC gets its money from either the taxpayer or the Fed prints the money If Apple were to offer some kind of protection pl…

> FDIC gets its money from either the taxpayer or the Fed prints the money

The piece that your missing is that if they do (like what just happened here) it done essentially a loan. And any funds provided will be recovered via a special assessment on banks. Essentially they will increase their insurance rates that banks pay. It is legally required that the banks themselves cover all costs, and FDIC cannot just take money from tax-payers to pay back private banks.

You are mistaken when you say that the taxpayer pays for it or the Fed prints money and pays for the result. That's not what happens at all.

You can read it from the FDIC directly on SVB

> No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by taxpayers. Shareholders and certain unsecured debt holders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#56
post #4

https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/ Banks fail closed without notice or recourse or any burden of proof. Plan accordingly.

I assume you're the author of that rant? I think you have one valid point:

Liquidity is king. If you have access to large amounts of money, you want to ensure the liquidity of a certain amount of that in various forms of crisis. Don't put it all in the same bank, don't put it all in banks, don't keep all of it digital. Having enough cash to bridge a temporary loss of access to your funds is probably a good idea the same way having enough potable water and non-perishable food at home to bridge a temporary infrastructure failure is a good idea.

The rest of the article however feels like a deepity[0]. Yes, your money isn't yours. But that's because there's no such a thing as "your money", or even "your anything" to begin with. Private property is a social construct, a mutually acknowledged fiction we turn into reality by abiding by it, under the threat of violence. Even gold has no intrinsic value, its value is entirely determined by what others are willing to give you in exchange and your ability to coerce them into doing so rather than simply taking it from you.

In other words, money is no different from any other "liberty" afforded to you by the state. Yes, the state can shut down your bank account but the state can also confiscate your physical cash (especially easily so in the US[1]). The state can even raid your home, put you under arrest or even kill you[2]. The Federal Reserve Bank may be a separate entity from the US government but it exists as the whim of the US government, as does CEDE and Company, which ultimately owns all stocks in the US.

If you think this is bad, you don't object banks, you object the state. And if you want to be ideologically consistent you should also object all corporations (which without the monopoly on violence of the state could only exist through private security, i.e. private militias, no different from feudal lordships in Europe prior to nationalism). This ultimately boils down to libertarian socialism ("free association"[3] being a key concept), though you strike me more as a right-libertarian type so Egoism[4] (not to be confused with "Egoismus" in German, which translated to "egotism" in English, i.e. self-obsession) might be an easier onramp to those ideas for you.

If you think that's going too far, I think you need to think more about the systems you exist within. The state can eradicate you at any moment and it doesn't even have to do so intentionally. There's no way to curtail the power of the state as any rights protected by it are only granted by itself unless there's a more powerful entity ruling over it (e.g. state vs federal law in the US).

On a more practical note, the situation you describe in your article seems to entirely boil down to not following the rules and then finding out there are consequences to that. There's a Process™ and you opted not to follow it out of willful ignorance. You clearly took the time to find out how to register a company but then opted not to find out what the steps to undo that are and offloaded your responsibility to the company handling payroll for you. Yes, this is hard to do yourself and yes, it's unfair that those millionaires you know can probably easily afford to just hire lawyers to take care of all these details without having to know of any of them, but that's pointing at a larger issue of structural preference for people who are already very wealthy. I'm with you on these legal tripwires being unfair because you're just supposed to know them or have the time to look them up (or even know what to look up) but it's just one of many ways in which the system punishes those who are not already in positions of wealth/power, even if it does so entirely without malice.

[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

[2]: Death penalty aside, law enforcement officers are rarely tried and found guilty for deaths, even in Germany. Infamously a Black immigrant died (either by being set on fire or prior to being set on fire) in a police holding cell in Germany a few years back. The original internal investigation was dropped and while the follow-up investigation in 2020 found evidence for "illegal" behavior from police officers, it found no justification to investigate any of the officers for murder or attempted murder.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_of_producers

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Stirner#Egoism

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#57
post #22

This is 100% related to (suspected) fraud, anti money laundering, or other types of financial/political sanctions. You may be 100% innocent, but they will never disclose any information to you about their reasoning (and in fact it is illegal for them to do so). Sorry this has happened.

Yup, HN loves to rail on banks like HSBC getting busted for money laundering. Well, this is the result - they come up with certain criteria (which is never divulged or else people could work around it) and if you hit it, boom, your account is closed.

It's the natural response to government attempts at clamping down on money laundering. Your individual value as a customer comes no where close to the financial hit from a massive money laundering scandal.

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#58

For all we know, OP my be a sanctioned person by the US Government for ties to the upper echelons of the current Russian government. Of course Chase will stop doing business with you.

> Of course Chase will stop doing business with you.

Why cant the bank say we are closing your account because of X reason

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#59
post #54

I see this account was created only to post this complaint about an account closure. Stripe employees have commented on HN about this behavior as it occurs frequently. That behavior being an account with no history whining about how some big evil bank attacked them, a poor powerless innocent victim, for absolutely no reason. Almost always the account is closed due to fraud only after several rounds of correspondence…

It does seem like it always comes down to crypto or other shenanigans banks want nothing to do with. Would love to know all of the unbiased information whenever this type of post happens. @op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account?

> @op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account?

Geez... Let's let the guy have some privacy. Whatever happened to presuming innocence?

If OP is in the wrong, no advice we give is going to get them out of it, but if they're in the right, we might be able to help them. Trying to find fault in OP seems pointless.

Re: Tell HN: Chase shadow banned and closed my bank accounts

#60
post #59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem like it always comes down to crypto or other shenanigans banks want nothing to do with. Would love to know all of the unbiased information whenever this type of post happens. @op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account?

> @op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account? Geez... Let's let the guy have some privacy. Whatever happened to presuming innocence? If OP is in the wrong, no advice we give is going to get them out of it, but if they're in the right, we might be able to help them. Trying to find fault in OP seems pointless.

Mate he's welcome to not respond. No privacy has been violated unless OP decides to respond.

Presuming innocence is for the court and legal systems. I am neither.

I am not forcing him to answer and I will of course respect the decision if he doesn't want to.

Post reply on HN