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Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

bitsaboutmoney.com

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Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#41

Post by jagraff »

RandomBacon wrote: post #21
renewiltord wrote: post #17

Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash.…

> There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k. I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out). I always read about people being hass…

Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#42

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #10
rufus_foreman wrote: post #6

It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely get some attention.

For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already withdrawn/spent the funds. In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam described in TFA.

[deleted]

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#43

Post by jccalhoun »

danso wrote: post #2

Jesus CHRIST — this article should be taught in writing classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely important. I'd about how this article could be vastly improved if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure what the point of the article was. > A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that d…

> > The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history.

Agreed. The author could have written, "it turns out the writer was from a wealthy family, grew up in a 200 year old home, and is president of the family's $2 million charity."

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#47

Post by JohnMakin »

Everything else aside, I find it very unusual from an amateur journalist's perspective that his intuition led him to doubt the veracity of this story, yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting. Seems like a good way to waste a lot of time or come to a completely wrong conclusion.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#48

Post by danso »

BryantD wrote: post #36
danso wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, wh…

It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message. I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piec…

> The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article.

She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag for around a decade.

Is it possible that such a New Yorker could have all those things while barely making in the middle-class? Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income, e.g. maybe she or her husband worked at Goldman Sachs before their current careers, or come from rich families.

I too assumed that $50k was too big of a cash draw for any non-business account, but it didn't seem like a stretch to imagine that she fit the bank's profile of a wealthy customer (esp. at her young age). Patrick knows far more about the financial system than I do, so I have to assume his skepticism was founded in what he thought were widely applicable hard-coded rules and policy. I wish he would have spent a fraction of his word count telling us the assumptions/knowledge about bank rules that he had been misinformed on. Because this year-long multi-thousand dollar fraud investigation of his couldn't have just been because he didn't imagine a NYMag financial columnist might be wealthy?

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#49

Post by jldugger »

danso wrote: post #29
MostlyStable wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".

But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't really inform us about the ways bank actually operates, because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly assume that a N…

My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks operate differently for a select few, and his primary error was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the error.

For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post:

> It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.

Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

#50

Post by ValentineC »

jagraff wrote: post #41
RandomBacon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k. I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out). I always read about people being hass…

Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

> having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking relationship, but not prevent other banks from opening new accounts.

From what I understand, there are other reporting systems in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this form of information sharing.

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