Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
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Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
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Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#2Jesus 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 didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better.
I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report.
Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be.
edit: one example of how tendentious this article is:
> 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.
> Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. 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.
So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim.
[0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-...
[2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#3Jesus 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…
Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group.
And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#4Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor:
This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor".
Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this…
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#5> Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce like dew in the morning sun.
This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#6It'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.
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#7Jesus 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…
Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group. And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.
It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I wanted more words of reflection by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an extravagant amount of time and money in investigating something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag wouldn't also fib to the police?
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#8Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor: This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor". Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break…
The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#9This is so overwritten.
tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neighborhood with a lot of rich clients.
Re: Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
#10It'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.