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What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

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Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#101

Post by zippergz »

dexterdog wrote: post #97
saarons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically Americans have been wary of handing out their bank account information because that's all the information needed for a bad actor to issue an ACH debit and pull money from your account. The NACHA guidelines have very strict rules around this and the payment protections are rather strong but it's still a pain to deal with as a consumer. RTP itself is non-reversible so when someone sends you an RTP payment…

You hand out your bank account information every time you give somebody a check

And indeed that's one reason (of many) I don't like to write checks. But I'd still argue that the threat model from giving a physical check to someone you know or do business with is different from linking your bank account with some online service like Venmo, where any mass breach or vulnerability might result in a wide array of people now having access to my banking information. And even if my bank covers me in the case of fraud, they don't compensate me for the domino effect problems that can come from having bill payments bounce because the account was emptied.

To be clear I'm not arguing that this is a good system, but as long as it is the system we have, it's wise to limit who you give your banking account information to, regardless of channel.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#102

Post by refurb »

xfitm3 wrote: post #64
reaperducer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checks are for what now? For me this week: Paid for a city license, paid the cat sitter, paid for a small magazine subscription, made a charitable donation, and paid the rent. The cat sitter and the charity were check only. No other option. The magazine has a PayPal option, but I don't trust PayPal. The city license could have been done with a card online, but I'm not interested in setting up yet another account with…

I have not written a check in over 10 years. I do, however, use my bank's online bill pay system. When I was a renter I used this to pay. I don't have to touch any paper, or stamps.

Yup, the online bill payment ends up sending a check anyways, but saves me having to find a stamp and envelope.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#103

Post by rifung »

dexterdog wrote: post #97
saarons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically Americans have been wary of handing out their bank account information because that's all the information needed for a bad actor to issue an ACH debit and pull money from your account. The NACHA guidelines have very strict rules around this and the payment protections are rather strong but it's still a pain to deal with as a consumer. RTP itself is non-reversible so when someone sends you an RTP payment…

You hand out your bank account information every time you give somebody a check

This is exactly why Donald Knuth doesn't give out checks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#104

Post by vinay427 »

nickjj wrote: post #85
tempsy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double edged sword IMO. If you use Zelle and off a digit in a phone number or email you are out of luck. No way to recover funds once sent.

If you send it to an email address that doesn't exist, does the transfer go through? If so who ends up with the money? It's been a while since I sent funds to a new address but I am pretty sure my bank's UI provided protection against that, and now when I send future funds to the same account, I just pick them from a drop down box instead of entering it manually.

It cancels after a few weeks (IIRC) of remaining unclaimed.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#105

Post by anonymouz »

wereHamster wrote: post #31
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use checks all the time actually. Every other form of payment online is “pull”, I only want to “push” my funds to external people.

> Every other form of payment online is “pull”, […] Wat? When I transfer money to another account via my bank's ebanking app that is very much "push". The transfer is executed either immediately or at the end of the business day. Nobody is pulling anything.

I assume you live in the EU (or somewhere else outside the US), where it is the most natural thing to just send money from your account to another one.

This simply isn't a thing in the US, as I discovered when moving to there for a time. They use third-party apps, cheques, and wire transfers (which are expensive and seem to work via ACH, a pull type system). It's simply not possible to go into your ebanking app and transfer money to someone elses account. (With very restrictive exceptions, e.g. same bank, or maybe the bank has integrated a third party service...)

As inconceivable as the American system is in the beginning for somebody coming from the EU, I guess for many people from the US it's similarly non-obvious that a push system can (and does) exist somewhere else.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

moftz wrote: post #83
bernardom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to use RTP for my business- do any third-party processors offer it already?

Paypal (and subsequently Venmo) offers it. I've "instant transfered" money from eBay sales right to my account. They do charge a 1% fee (up to $25) versus zero fees for classic ACH transfer. If I need the money right away, I'll pay the 1% but I usually can wait the couple days.

[deleted]

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#107

Post by munk-a »

tjpaudio wrote: post #48
munk-a wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elitism is no reason to avoid having a definition of jargon. HN has discussions on a wide variety of technical topics most of which aren't directly useful in our day job - or at least on the topic of information we'd seek out independently... But we have this list in part because intellectual curiosity is a good thing and maybe, within the way that whatever an ACH is deals with a dead person, there might be some inte…

It's not elitism. ACH is a term that should be familiar to anyone even remotely informed on the topic. It's ok to read articles on things you are unfamiliar with but it is also on you as the reader to educate yourself when you read on topics that you are unfamiliar with. If every detail was explained in layman's terms, reading would be terribly boring and nuanced technical writing would be dead.

But... I've worked with technical writers and PhDs, technical writers (the good ones) can really easily pull analogies out of thin air to help elevate a reader's understanding, I think (maybe due to star trek) that a lot of technical PhDs are quite good at forming comprehensible analogies as well. Usually CS papers are ~40% comprehensible to the vast majority of non-CS people, this differs from more liberal artsy fields where other field pieces are taken as a given and the assumptions compound to the point where education ends up being about familiarizing yourself with all that jargon.

There are some terribly complex CS concepts (try and explain how a hash function produces essentially random output - or how private and public keys are actually computed in a manner to make private keys non-trivially derivable from public keys) and some terribly ingrained jargon (Oh, how's that SSL cert was it SHA signed?) but the effect on your topic of how these jargony terms work is usually easy to express, you don't need to know the history of POSIX to comprehend that CS people have a tool that checks if a string sorta looks like an expect format that we use everywhere, and you don't need to explain positive lookahead zero width assertions to convey that point.

Having a single clause stating "ACH (the preferred US method for bank-to-bank transfers)" would instantly clear all this up... it's also insanely relevant because the topic of the article is about what happens when bank-to-bank transfers have a recipient who is dead.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#108

Post by delfinom »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #72
itcrowd wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be…

A partial answer is also the US's approach to banking regulation. First off, the US prioritizes having many small community banks. The US has 4,909 banks, while Japan has 198. This necessarily makes setting up inter-operation between banks more complicated. Second, US banks are regulated on both a Federal and State level. A system that works for a bunch of banks in California may not be viable for interoperation with…

I like community banks. They don't fuck you in the ass like big banks.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#109

Post by pbreit »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #88
moftz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paypal (and subsequently Venmo) offers it. I've "instant transfered" money from eBay sales right to my account. They do charge a 1% fee (up to $25) versus zero fees for classic ACH transfer. If I need the money right away, I'll pay the 1% but I usually can wait the couple days.

Yup. Just transferred $2K from my PayPal account (ebay sales) to my checking account. Slight clarification: PayPal caps the transfer fees at $10.

Folks do realize that paying 1% to speed up a transfer by 1-2 days is equivalent to a 180%-365% interest loan?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#110

Post by pbreit »

edubs25 wrote: post #67
itcrowd wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be…

Snarky answer - there's no real motivation to change it and from an institutional perspective it's not broken. - it costs a lot to fix or redesign a money system moving billions of dollars in volume per day - change is risky - any impacts on reliability would be unacceptable and have significant economic impact [both direct and indirect] - stakeholders that fully understand the existing system and have the knowledge…

The biggest reason is that fast money is almost never needed, and usually indicative of a problem.
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