Its funny how people made a big hoopla about chinese system of black marking individuals to me this seems to be the same. And from the looks of it in China at least prosecutes you or you know why you have the black mark. In the US you get black mark then are not even told why so not even sure what you did wrong just like the US no fly list. The land of the free.
Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
311–320 of 901 posts
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If a bank has 1M accounts, regulators want to see a certain number of SAR/CTR filings, a certain number of account closures; regulators go hard on financial institutions, if the latter don't follow the industry average (#SARs, #CTRs, #closures) Oh lord, this just asks for gamification. If there's a multi-million dollar customer and a five thousand dollar customer, who do you reckon they'd rather lose in order to re…
Regulators fine big banks for "weak controls". To show that they have "strong controls", they have to show quantitative data. Now, every bank is engaged in one-upmanship. Since we don't have data on the number of account closures, we should look at SAR/CTR statistics provided by FinCen. Every year, SAR numbers go up by 20%; that's because banks fill SARs with "transaction with no apparent economic, business or lawful…
Do you have evidence such quotas exist or that banks are competing on SAR numbers? This all seems like wild conjecture if there's nothing to back it up.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
People do track cash by serial number, each and every bill has a unique one. However in practice it doesn't happen a lot. I would think that's because: - There are a whole lot of bills to keep track of - The serial numbers are not easily stored and compared with computers (at least not for private individuals) That second point, bills not being on computers, is why cash isn't the easy answer to the banking problems w…
> It is, however, somewhat possible to track Bitcoin going too and from the addresses because it is all on computers and this is a trade off of Bitcoin being permission-less and not controlled by a single entity that can decide to unbank you, and online so that you can send it to people across the country. It's not "somewhat" possible, it's 100% possible because the history is public and permanent. If you make a mist…
There is no personally identifiable information stored in the public ledger. Just addresses, scripts, and Bitcoin amounts. If someone that knows you (like an employer or a Bitcoin exchange) sends you Bitcoin, they will know addresses that you claimed were yours. As soon as the Bitcoin moves from those addresses to another address then the provable link to you is broken.
All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.
Further reading:
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#314I'm somewhat surprised no one here views this as an automated decisionmaking problem It's increasingly clear that automating important decisions like this is causing a lot of harm while removing most forms of recourse available to those affected. Coupled with the way automated decisions are used to perform and then launder fraud on a massive scale, maybe we should target laws at the automation itself: Require decisio…
I think that is mostly, because no good bank will rely on an automated process for this. Not one bank I have been to had 'derisking'/'divestiture'/'whatever they call it there, because, surprise, this idiocy is not standardized; government just gave companies general idea of what it wants without actual mechanisms' that was ultimately dependent on an automated process. The decision was always human with bankers ( especially commercial ones ) arguing for 'their' customers.
Now, I do not know how bad fintech scene is, but I do know that they generally suck when it comes to actual BSA compliance. Then again, I do not really consider fintech banks. Neither does treasury for that matter[1].
Still, this is not THE problem even if you raised a valid and relevant concern here. The issue is and always has been BSA legislation that put this requirement on banks without specifics. More than that, the core issue is that the stupid population that was so scared post-9/11 that it let this thing pass through with minimal whimper.
Clearly, it got bad enough that it got some important people and Treasury had to issue a guidance[2]. No one cared for 2 decades.
I am sorry for the tone. I am glad this is getting a wider audience, but I do have a bee in my bonnet that it took this long.
[1]https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1105 [2]https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1438
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
What qualifies as an "extended amount of time overseas"? If you go on a vacation for 6-8 weeks, does that get you in trouble? I would think banks would want to keep big spenders who can afford months-long international travel.
A single retail account is of no consequence to a national bank that has tens of millions of customers. It doesn't matter if you're spending $10 or $50,000 a month. They care about you as an individual about as much as Google cares about a single Gmail account. If an algorithm flags you as potential trouble, off you go. If you want better service, there are two ways. One is to be an ultra high net worth individual. B…
For pseudo private banking, HSBC Premier is decent if you travel often to Europe or Asia. They are basically Wise for HNWs with a dash of money laundering thrown in.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the productivity gainz from AI!!! Jokes aside, we are entering a world of AI-decision hell. If it is any similar to the algo-decision hell from the past decade, humans are fucked.
Not if we successfully neutralize this paradigm's ability to take over crucial institutions, such as by enforcing lines of responsibility as I've suggested
The hell is guaranteed because no one in the decision making loop cares - yet.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#317Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#318Banks hide behind Bank Secrecy Act and other regulations in order to debank people. Chase closed my account, and the reason Chase gave: "Financial institutions have an obligation to know our customers and monitor transactions that flow through our customers' accounts. After careful consideration, we decided to close your account because of unexpected activity on these or another Chase account." I didn't dispute any t…
> Chase monitors your political activity This is a big claim. It should have big evidence to back it up.
Eh. I can only assume parent is referring to negative media search most financial institutions do as part of their 'know your customer' barrage of acronyms. From that perspective, anything you do that ends up on the internet and is part of a cause, could be considered political and banks do do periodic re-assessments of risk.
At least, that is the charitable interpretation.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all I never said "all". Some years back, and acquaintance of mine detailed how he gamed the system. He'd work until he met the minimum number of employed weeks to qualify for unemployment, then he'd do a lousy job so he'd get laid off. He'd then go on unemployment. Being unemployed required him to look for a job, so he'd look for a job, and flunk the job interview. When the unemployment compensation ran out, then h…
This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" anecdotes with no facts backing them up don't work well on a site where people research things instead of taking them at face value. If you want that kind of echo chamber, may I recommend Facebook or something similar? 70% (approximately) of people on welfare a…
Take a look at a graph of the US poverty rate over the years. It went down until around 1968, where it bottomed out and started going back up.
What happened in 1968? Johnson's Great Society program.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can I pay my bills with bitcoin while being debanked?
> How can I pay my bills with bitcoin while being debanked? Acting as an alternative to krupan's Bitcoin-centric answer: - There are other crypto rails other than Bitcoin that could be used in its place. USDC & stablecoins in general is going to be the medium-term winners in this space, as more services are set up to help people pay their bills with stablecoins. Here are 2 services that I've found within a few minute…
USDC and stablecoins are centrally controlled and do not solve the problems that we are talking about here.