Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a tip, stick with Bitcoin, not crypto.
Ethereum trumps bitcoin in pretty much every metric except for market cap, which is lagging because bitcoin has the name brand, simpler for people to understand, and misinformation spread by bitcoin maxis and competing chains
Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
341–350 of 901 posts
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#342Protip to anybody who wants to spend an extended amount of time overseas - you’re looking at a strong opportunity to join the list of people who have their accounts closed. Red flags include quantity of overseas debit card transactions, setting a PO Box (this one apparently is a very big red flag to banks) or a PMB as your bank address, lots of wire transfers. Open multiple bank accounts at different banks, use servi…
>use services like wise.com for transfers Last I heard, wise.com is outright stealing people's money now. Otherwise, this is a good heads-up. Banking for expats can be tricky; a lot of US financial institutions don't want to service customers who live overseas, and will automatically cancel your account if they find out you don't live in the US. The US is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where people…
Really? Wise has been reliable for a long time and they've improved the partners they work with in the last year to get much faster transfer times. I've sent around 15-20k usd with wise
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they issue you a check you can take it to the banking institution listed on the check and they will honor it. The downside is, now you’re dealing with cash (and some companies went DD only a long time ago).
For the moment. New Zealand doesn't have cheques any more. Banks here totally phased them out a couple of years back. The USA will also make checks obsolete over time. Plus cash is disliked at many retailers and cash is not acceptable at some locations (e.g. my skifield only accepts cards - I was told it is because the nearest small-town bank won't accept cash deposits from the skifield). I suspect our government wil…
I wouldn’t necessarily expect us to follow New Zealand’s example. We’ve accumulated a lot of methods for exchanging money without really discarding any in particular.
New Zealand is a small country way out in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean 2.5K miles (or over 4K kilometers) away from its nearest neighbor and with a population smaller than NYC. The United States is 50 stubborn ass States plus the Fed’s occupation in southern Maryland. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has an address in Wellington, is owned by the New Zealand government and answerable to Parliament. The Federal Reserve system isn’t even a single bank with a single board of directors, isn’t wholly owned by the US Government and isn’t directly answerable to Congress.
There’s no easy way to make a lazy comparison between us and have it be convincing. Parts of the Federal Government would likely love to see the United States become a cashless society but they don’t always get what they want.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#344I'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've been a part of a system like this (a financial system that happens to not be technically a bank). The system was constantly under attack by fraudsters: You could find subreddits with guides on how to try to outright rob us. So we had teams building detection systems that tied to detect said fraud as early as possible: Hopefully before we handed the fraudsters any money. Depending on how bad the score was, there might not even be a manual review step before we closed the account, because the numbers were that blatant.
As with any classification system though, 100% accuracy isn't going to happen. But there's always some customer service rep that can look at the details of the account, and see why in the world the system said what it did. But a detailed explanation of why we thought something was fraudulent could (and sometimes would!) just lead to another fun reddit post where someone describes how to hide the fraud a little better.
For any given system like this, how much harm is actually being done, vs how much is being prevented (as fraud just leads to raising prices to cover for it: financial companies are not charities)? I've read way too many CSR conversations where a blatant fraudster with world-class chutzpah would claim that we were destroying their family for no reason, when the data was damning. But this doesn't mean that everyone who isn't a fraudster really reaches out to the CSRs, and has the energy to prove there was no fraud. The actual levels of damage are just hard to measure.
We should have sensible, mandatory, available customer service access, which costs just enough to access to not be hammered by bots, but that is completely refunded in case of error. But what is really causing this is that many companies have lowered the barrier of interaction so much that we are letting a lot of fraud through the door. Remember how getting a merchant account in a real bank is a multi-day affair? How getting hired to become a delivery driver needed an interview, with a real person, and a manager checking between deliveries? The price of not having to interact with a human to sign in is fraud detection that isn't a boss you interact with every day, makes sure you are working, and is paid from the work you do. Companies with billions of customers and probably hundreds of millions of suppliers aren't exactly workable without automating a lot of those intermediate jobs away.
Maybe we made the wrong call across the board, and lower-productivity, but far higher trust commerce is the way to go... but a lot of that commerce is losing in the market, right now. So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#345The crazy thing to me in all this is that the types and amounts of transactions you make with your money and the bank is not criminal and never could be. It could however be a technique used to hide things that are criminal like fraud or theft. Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a c…
> Somehow somewhere along the way we as a society decided we were ok with criminalizing the types of transactions that can be used to hide crime. That to me should have been a clear step in the wrong direction. Totally wrong direction. > "Money laundering" (however that is defined) should not be a crime. Theft, fraud, etc. should be. This goes back to this weird fetishism where people think it was oh-so-cool to arres…
Prohibition-era USA was, if not failed, at least a failing society. There was by this point pretty widespread public corruption and general lack of respect for the law.
Anyway, wasn't the tax evasion also an actual crime? It's not like you get a pass on the tax evasion because you're also strongly suspected of committing much worse crimes, is it?
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I can never wrap my mind around the Walmart thing.
Not only do we subsidize their workforce, we pay for the police to arrest shoplifters for them.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You can’t game something when the maximum award is still designed to be Not Enough On Its Own. That describes quite literally every US government aid program— from food stamps and school lunch debt at the very bottom of the financial ladder, to grants+loans for those who have demonstrated the academic merit to get into college, to healthcare and social security for literally every citizen in this entire country. Ther…
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." -- Karl Marx
We don't need to imagine how that would work out. There are plenty of examples.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> on balance detrimental to society relatively recently Let's not forget Crypto mining has a not insignificant energy footprint, and is a driver of climate change. Really, detrimental to society from the get-go.
minting coins and printing bills has a huge energy footprint too
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#349"Multiple SARs often — though not always — lead to a customer’s eviction."
Justice is never applied evenly.
Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts
#350Earlier 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…
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/from-mothers-pensio... "For every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud (via a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service). Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been ov…
I didn't write about fraud. Everything these folks did was perfectly legal and followed the rules.
Well, except the off-the-books job.