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I’ve experienced it first hand. One day my card was declined while paying for dinner. I paid cash and thought something was wrong with their card reader. I che
by simplecomplex 7y ago
I’ve experienced it first hand. One day my card was declined while paying for dinner. I paid cash and thought something was wrong with their card reader.
I checked my bank account, and it had $30k in it (my life savings at the time). So I thought nothing was wrong and went to bed.
Next morning I try to pay for groceries and my card is again declined. I call my bank. They say my account has been flagged and it’s frozen. They can’t tell me why, or how to appeal.
I go into the bank. I ask why I wasn’t notified my account was frozen. They said they “oh sorry someone should have called you”. I ask what I did to get my account frozen. They said they don’t know, it’s part of some social security electronic audit. They say it’s all automated and because it’s the government it was out of their control. I ask how long will it take to unfreeze they say they don’t know. They tell me to call an 800 number, and that nobody in the physical branch has any power over really anything.
I tell them my rent check is going to bounce, they said “we’re sorry”.
Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was never given a reason. I missed rent. I couldn’t buy food.
I committed no crime, and was never accused of committing any crime. This was a personal account not involved in any business. I deposited paychecks into it and bought food and paid my rent. That’s mostly it.
Just FYI money in the bank is not yours. If the government wants to freeze it for no reason they can, despite all the people who say otherwise. It happened to me. This was at Chase bank in US. I now keep thousands in cash hidden in various places, and bought some bitcoin as well. At least if the thugs in the federal government want it they’ll have to fucking physically take it.
- october_sky 7y agoThat really is awful, and I'm sorry that happened to you. I also moved to hoard a few types of liquid assets, and also have accounts with three banks (and multiple cards) to reduce the risk of a single-bank causing this level of impact to me.
- eru 7y agoOf course, trying to work around regulation like that, is probably against some other regulation.
- xiphias2 7y agoNot really, but the government may freeze all accounts of a person in all banks in the world.
- eru 7y agoI was thinking of something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
- xiphias2 7y agoI see, but what I know is that it's allowed to use multiple banks for the purpose of increasing the amount of money under FDIC insurance (which is more like $100k/bank, not $10k/bank). There are services that split your money between multiple banks just for this reason.
- sokoloff 7y agoFDIC deposit insurance coverage limit is $250,000 per depositor, per FDIC-insured bank, per ownership category. https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/covered/categories.html https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/covered/categories.html
- xiphias2 7y agoIn the U.S. yes, I'm from the EU though where there's a similar insurance (EDIS) which has a 100k EUR limit.
- war1025 7y agoWe make a point to have backup accounts with some small but non-trivial amount of money in them for cases like this. Normally when we run into it is if our debit card for our main bank gets compromised.
- dboreham 7y agoThe money equivalent of when the super smart AI spam filter sends email from your business clients to /dev/null ?
- HashThis 7y agoThis is a good post. Why is it grayed out?
- simplecomplex 7y agoNobody knows. HN has downvotes for a secret group of users. HN weights votes using a secret algorithm, so some users may have the ability to grey out posts with a single click.
- netfl0 7y agoNow your post is grayed out. Someone is watching...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoI was tempted to downvote both of you just to cause untargeted suspicion :P
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoAll you need is a certain amount of karma - which you currently don't have. There is no other criteria. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- princeb 7y ago> Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was never given a reason. it is illegal for the bank to inform you of any AML investigation undertaken whether internally or the FBI or fincen or any of the other federal bodies. if you don't like the way this is done, i suggest you take it up to your congressmen.
- hndamien 7y agoOr buy Bitcoin.
- hakfoo 7y agoThat seems like absence of explanation is an explanation in and of itself. If the bank can give you a straight answer, it's clearly not AML. If they start giving you no answer, it's presumably that. Id' expect if you were seriously in that game, that's one of the clear signs something's awry and you'd better start activating panic measures. I'm also sort of confused about the concept of freezing accounts during an investigation. If it was late stage and they were saying "okay, shut it down, we'll be sending over the cops with the arrest warrant within an hour", that's one thing, but any sudden movement on accounts is likely to change the behaviour you're trying to monitor and document. The darkweb market seizures seemed smarter in that regard-- they let some of them run with no obvious changes so they could gather data, only taking it down once the case was completely built.
- simplecomplex 7y agoI don’t even know what agency in the government did this. Or that I was part of an investigation. Or anything. Different people at different positions in the bank would say the same thing “the computer says your account is flagged” “the system says your social security number is flagged” etc. When I would ask what “flagged” means they would just repeat nonsensical shit. All they would really tell me is that they had no control because a government system had flagged it.
- Mengkudulangsat 7y agoWhich is why some (e.g. Bitfinex) use warrant canaries [1]. I would love if we have a warrant canary button tied to all our accounts of any kind (banking, social media, netflix subscriptions etc.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
- cwyers 7y agoWhy on earth were you keeping $30,000 in the account you use to pay for groceries?
- simplecomplex 7y agoWhere else would I keep it? In the stock market where it can disappear overnight? Where do you keep your savings?
- novok 7y agoI would suggest researching how to invest your savings, otherwise it's being eaten away by inflation, and there is no savings account that has enough interest to match that rate currently. It's harsh to say it, but that statement is a demonstration of your ignorance.
- hndamien 7y agoThanks for providing insults rather than enlightenment.
- journalctl 7y agoI see this a lot online, but this is not good advice. Savings are meant to provide liquidity in an emergency. If you have $20,000 in a savings account, you can walk to an ATM and withdraw some of that immediately. If you have $20,000 locked up in mutual funds, well... you’d better hope your rainy day has some lead time. Investing is great. Put $10,000 in something diverse and passive and sit on it. But also keep a savings account for immediate emergencies, and keep some cash on hand for even more immediate emergencies.
- novok 7y agoYes, that is called an emergency fund. I didn't want to go into a big explainer of how a typical pre-tax & post-tax index fund savings brokerage works + cash emergency fund in savings works to a random on the internet while there are many other better resources out there.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoI am sorry this happened to you. In future, at the minimum, you should have 3 accounts. * In bank 1, a current account, for everyday use. This should not have more money than 1-2 months of expenses. * In bank 1, a savings account, which is your primary savings. * In bank 2, a savings account, which has enough money for a few months of rent. * Stash somewhere in your house, in cash, enough money for a week of outside food and transport to family/friends who can take you in, in case of you losing your primary accommodation. This all depends on you being rich enough to afford all of this, but I imagine 30K in the bank account is rich enough. Also, as others have pointed out, you should consider investing.
- ur-whale 7y ago> In future, at the minimum, you should have 3 accounts. Or have no account at all and pay cash. Which is not very convenient with physical money. But becomes fairly workable with something like Bitcoin.
- jevgeni 7y agoThis is pretty poor behavior from the bank. But for it to be a form of control, their actions must lead to you doing something what they want. And I don’t see that here.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoDid you own crypto before this happened? If not, I can't even imagine how you got on the government's radar.