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Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

nytimes.com

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Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#501

Post by raincom »

zlg_codes wrote: post #431
raincom wrote: post #41

Banks 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…

Do you happen to know if credit unions can hide behind banking regulations? As an account holder, I also own a share in the company.

Yes, they can. At least with credit unions, they can call you for clarifications when they or their system flags your transactions suspicious. With big banks, once they find your transactions suspicious, they will send a notice to close your accounts. No human being can help you.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#502

Post by dale_glass »

krupan wrote: post #117
dale_glass wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is crypto. There's even a whole lot of cryptocurrencies based on Bitcoin with a variable or two changed somewhere.

Sorry for the confusion. The term Bitcoin can be used to refer to the code that runs the Bitcoin network upon which the Bitcoin currency/token moves around and is stored. The inventors could probably have come up with different names for each of those things, but what can you do? Cryptocurrency folks do sometimes take the open source Bitcoin code and make small (or large) changes to it in order to do their work. When…

Yeah, I've messed with the stuff a bit in the past. I understand the technical details decently well.

I don't see any significant difference between Bitcoin and the rest. Bitcoin was just the first thing that stuck but that doesn't grant it any special privileges.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#504

Post by jgilias »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #489

> According to Thomson Reuters, banks filed over 1.8 million SARs in 2022 > The algorithmically generated alerts are reviewed every day by human employees. At 1.8M reports either banks employ an army of reviewers or there is fuck all of a review. > or wire transfers with banks in high-risk countries. Sounds like something ripe for discrimination against immigrants.

It totally is discrimination. A friend of mine in an EU country had the experience where a client’s payment to his business rang all the alerts and was delayed by his bank for a month just because it came from an African country. Both totally legitimate businesses doing no shady stuff whatsoever.

Try to explain to your employees how their salaries are delayed because your bank suspects you’re terrorists or something.

This and some other experiences turned me to someone who believes that the freedom to transact is an inalienable right, and that it should be taken out of the hands of governments and centralised institutions as much as possible.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#505

Post by jgilias »

ArabicBaklava wrote: post #481

Bank of america did this to me, in the same weekend i was moving out. All my stuff was in the car, it was a friday at 3PM and i was in the gas station. I couldn't fill up my gas. Called and they told me to come to the bank with two forms of ID. When I arrived to the bank the fraud department was operating in NY (3hrs ahead) and they were closing, so they told me to come next tuesday (it was a long weekend). I went ho…

Sorry this happened to you! I’m glad you managed to eventually pick yourself up after that experience!

Stories like yours highlight how important the freedom to transact is. It’s all fine and dandy until one day suddenly it isn’t and you’re completely fucked.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#506

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #211
raincom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators fined Chase and other big banks for "weak controls". One way to show that these big banks have "strong controls" is to change parameters for these algorithms. Many legitimate transactions fall under structuring, layering, smurfing, laundering. After all, any goal of money laundering is to make their transactions appear "legitimate". Now almost all transactions (except for big businesses and people with few…

> One way to show that these big banks have "strong controls" is to change parameters for these algorithms imagine if some bank knowingly facilitated money laubdering, and needed to show they gave strong controls. What eould you do? Thats right, you would close 10k minor accounts of random schmucks for 'suspicious activity', report 'job done' to the regulator, and continue your corrupt practices

The fundamental problem here is that these regulations are totally useless. Look into the effectiveness of KYC laws -- they're basically zero percent effective.

And the reason for that is that if anybody knew that somebody was engaged in criminal activity, they wouldn't have their bank account closed, they would be arrested and their finances seized by court order. So the bank account closures only happen to people for whom there is not enough evidence to charge them with a crime. In other words, a ton of innocent people.

Conversely, the bank is not a law enforcement agency and has no real way to distinguish between the kind of criminals who know how not to be obvious and the aforementioned totally innocent people, and if anything the practiced criminals are the ones who know how not to trigger the fraud detection algorithms, unlike the innocent people.

So the criminals don't get caught and the government blames the banks for this, but the banks still don't have any good way to know who the criminals actually are, so all they can ever do is round up random innocent people to put on a show of punishing somebody.

The fraud is that law enforcement should be an obligation of the banking system and that fraud needs to be eliminated.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#507

Post by VladimirGolovin »

patmcc wrote: post #72
slovette wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehm. No. Innocent until proven guilty, not guilt until proven innocent. Being de-platformed from financial infrastructure is tantamount to being economically jailed and instantly forced into life altering poverty. This isn’t some silly app you’re getting banned from… Banks shouldn’t be allowed to ban anyone. They should need a court order to lock up/ban someone from access/mobility of their own property. That said, t…

>>>Banks shouldn’t be allowed to ban anyone. This gets pretty tricky - telling a bank they need to keep dealing with customers that cost them tons of money and are actively trying to defraud them (and other customers) seems awfully harsh. I think the government should provide a basic bank account to anyone who wants one though.

>> I think the government should provide a basic bank account to anyone who wants one though.

Absolutely agree. Holding and transferring money should be a basic human right.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#508

Post by rfrey »

zlg_codes wrote: post #436
panarky wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is about whether I trust Chase or not. It's about the big claim that Chase monitors the political activity of their customers and systematically closes the accounts of people with opinions Chase doesn't like. There's precisely zero evidence that they do this. Even if one blindly accepts your citations from "The 700 Club" and some random post from "Nitter" as authoritative, even they provide zero evidence…

So if MSM doesn't report, it doesn't exist? State the requirements of 'compelling evidence'. You debate like that Chase email explains their reasoning.

"Compelling" evidence would be great, but SOME evidence would be nice too.

The media not reporting it is certainly not evidence, down that path lies true crazy.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#509

Post by nicbou »

jltsiren wrote: post #361
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #78

Protip 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…

Protip to anybody dealing with a bureaucracy, no matter whether it's automated or human-based, public or private, fair or oppressive: don't look weird. Bureaucracies function by finding the right category and using the appropriate process for the category. If they can't place you in the right category, you may be in trouble. To avoid that, you can try using products and services that signal the right category, even w…

I'm not weird and still got my accounts frozen due to a clerical error by the tax office. So did my tax advisor once.

The onus should not be on us to fit their model, but on them to fit their model to reality.

Re: Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

#510

Post by rfrey »

raincom wrote: post #137
panarky wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chase monitors your political activity This is a big claim. It should have big evidence to back it up.

At least in the UK, NatWest debanked Neil Farage's account for his political views. Even its CEO resigned over her lying. "19 Republican states accuse JPMorgan of closing bank accounts and discriminating against customers due to their religious or political beliefs" [1][3]. Of course, this site is not favorable to conservatives and their views. Some left activists' accounts are closed as well [2]. [1] https://www.bus…

Even if Farange was targeted for his political beliefs, that is independent of whether Chase monitors customers political activites. Farange's politics were a matter of celebrity.
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