Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

Just a tip, stick with Bitcoin, not crypto.

Why reach for crypto? My strategy would be to have a small emergency fund with a different bank. The risk of being debanked by two independent banks _at the same time_ seems lower than crypto.

Using Crypto is probably the #1 reason for being debanked ...

Unverifiable, untraceable money arriving into your account does not work well with AML regualations.

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.businessinsider.com/republican-states-accuse-jpm...

[2] https://nitter.cz/OccupyWallStNYC/status/1674022837084991489

[3] https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/chase-bank-cancels-nonprofits-b...

Just follow any Conservative, Christian, or Gun group and you will see stories of Chase closing accounts for political reasons,

Chase is will known for this in many political circles

Eh. I can only assume parent is referring to negative media search most financial institutions do as part of their 'know your customer' barrage of acronyms. From that perspective, anything you do that ends up on the internet and is part of a cause, could be considered political and banks do do periodic re-assessments of risk.

At least, that is the charitable interpretation.

No such thing as "an algorithm run amuck" - more like "another department run amuck". Someone programmed the thing, someone is running it deliberately.

Yes, they sent me a cashier check for a small balance (around $1000) I left, as Chase gave me 45 days heads up for closure. However, for some people, Chase dragged out until after CFPB complaints are filed.

The case one should worry about these banks is this: you deposit a $500K check, or you got a wire for $500K; check was cleared on the sender's side. Now Chase/Big Bank holds your funds, saying that this check is fraudulent, and that bank closes your account after finding you risky (risky because of this $500k and by looking back at your account history). Now $500K is in Chase's hands, your account is closed by Chase, and Chase doesn't want to give $500K, nor does Chase want to return $500K to the original bank/sender. This is where you should file a complaint with CFPB right away. Without CFPB complaints, the fraud department at Chase, its Bank employees just give you run around for months. File CFPB complaint right away, if any bank holds your funds after 10 business days; don't listen to these employees at all.

CFPB can't force banks to reopen your accounts. Just to get your funds, file a complaint with CFPB right away, and don't trust any bank employee on getting your funds.

> This worries me because my mother, who currently resides in a SE Asian nation, is transferring some of her money to me (in the hope that she can use it when she migrates to the US).

The problem is what you are describing is not exactly legal. You are acting as a money transmitter for your mother; and this might even trigger for you some complex tax obligations.

What you should do is open a Chase bank account for your mother. You already bank with the agency.

You get a check for the balance of your account, but they take their sweet time getting it to you.

Regulators fine big banks for "weak controls". To show that they have "strong controls", they have to show quantitative data. Now, every bank is engaged in one-upmanship. Since we don't have data on the number of account closures, we should look at SAR/CTR statistics provided by FinCen. Every year, SAR numbers go up by 20%; that's because banks fill SARs with "transaction with no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose". Just gamify SAR reports with vague stuff.

I feel sacking customers got really popular during Covid and continued after.

Many phone systems have a thinly veiled threat about zero tolerance policies, to treat staff with respect, and in the case of certain government agencies here in the UK, that they will refer cases to the police. The same is repeated on written posters in eg doctors and dentist offices

Just a coincidence I’m sure but I find employees (especially on the phone) even more condescending and unhelpful these days

Earlier, banks used to warn customers at least once for any disrespect towards employees. Now, expect big banks and financial institutions to close accounts without any warning, unless you are a wealthy client. Charles Schwab and Chase do that.

See “amazon disabled account after delivery driver misheard automated message from security system” incident.

Same thing in New Zealand. If you can't get something worked out with your bank you complain to the ombudsman and the bank must respond. Sometimes, even the mention of a potential ombudsman complaint is enough to grease the wheels.

No, they don't; however they cancel your checking, savings, business checking, credit cards. Only exception is mortgages.

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.

Banned from Interac? They won't let them get a debit card again through any bank/credit union? Or won't let them ever send email money transfers? Won't let them ever receive email money transfers?

(Interac is the Canadian debit card system, owned by a network of banks, which has also branched out into person-to-person money transfers between bank accounts because we don't have Venmo/Zelle/etc here).

A single retail account is of no consequence to a national bank that has tens of millions of customers. It doesn't matter if you're spending $10 or $50,000 a month. They care about you as an individual about as much as Google cares about a single Gmail account. If an algorithm flags you as potential trouble, off you go.

If you want better service, there are two ways. One is to be an ultra high net worth individual. But the threshold for that is pretty high - from what I recall, real private banking nowadays starts around $5M to 10M in assets with a single institution. The term "millionaire" doesn't mean as much as it did in the 1990s.

The other option is to go with a small local bank or a credit union. If you're in a CU with 10,000 members, it's a lot easier to resolve problems or discuss unique circumstances.

Banks don't really have much choice in the matter. They have been deputized to enforce federal laws, and given penalties if they don't. To add a cherry on top, the laws are vague and require the bank to investigate, judge, and execute account closures.

That being said, if you know when are are leaveing,.where you are going, and when you will be home, you can often put a vacation note on your account, and then the bank will know you are on vacation. That is what I did when I spent this summer in Japan, using.my bank debit card because it has no foreign transaction fees, the whole time.

I travel overseas a lot to Europe and Asia anywhere from a few weeks to almost a year. I VPN, but not always back to the US. I use wise.com. I kept my US address.

I’ve had zero problems. I think we’re all getting excited about anecdotes.

100% agree.

Crypto today is the only way how you can take control of your own funds.

What use is the money in your Bank account if the ruling political party can label you an ultra-right extremist and retroactively lock all your money down, just because of a single 1$ donation you did to a cause you believed to be right, like Canada did?

Wouldn't expect any less from HN, but can't blame them much when people like Senator Warren make up lies about terrorist funding.

On the other hand, crypto provides copious evidence for the need of some level of regulation.

Ah yes Crypto definitely solves all of the problems. Please ignore the rich men behind the curtains shutting down exchanges and stealing money, the numerous ways people have had crypto stolen from them or how volatile crypto is in general.

Make sure to hold my bag for me.

> Funny you criticize crypto [currency], when it actually solves all the bullshit you're mentioning.

Maybe if you're talking about Monero or another currency with the key security property of untraceability. Otherwise it's only a matter of time until cryptocurrency exchanges require documentation about the sources of money, which will likely resemble a parallel blockchain that carries wallet metadata.

To OPs point, everything you said is why criminals use it too

He's not wrong

Crypto has been a scam from the beginning, the only thing that's changed is the public perception after NFTs bombed massively and crypto was once again left without any use case.

> 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.

2023 is very different to 2012. I remember back in the day you can open a paypal account with only an email and receive/send money with it. No kyc required.

I did something similar and my banker told me to knock it off.

The big factor is whether you change your address or not.

Keep your US address on there and VPN (though frankly I’ve never needed to for anything other than Charles Schwab) and you often glide through unnoticed.

Simply spending money can trigger anti-fraud measures, but those are usually easily sorted out with a call.

What all the people profiled in the article have in common is that they were depositing money in "suspicious" ways.

If you're still an American citizen, don't you technically still owe US to taxes on that "salary"? And since you're paying it as salary, I'm not sure that you're able to deduct any of the fees as expenses from what's owed.

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

If they are stealing money why haven’t they been sued in criminal court? Last time I checked, stealing was a crime in literally all countries.

I got put on a watch list during my time in Saudi and Abu Dhabi. Didnt affect my banking but every plane ticket i got for years had “SSSS”[0] printed/sharpied on it and all my luggage would get a secondary hand-search at every stop immediately pre-boarding both domestically and internationally.

I am just average white US citizen who was working on oil rigs but most likely some of my whatsapp/facebook/iMessage contacts were related to families involved in dissidence against the Saudi government (because the oil region of Saudi is populated by a minority Shia group that is severely underrepresented in governance). Their mosques also had individuals with mental health issues who occasionally try to bomb the mosques in a very, very similar parallel to school shooters back home here in USA.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_Security_Screening...

Yeesh. Do you have any trouble flying these days? Your travel destinations are like a “who’s who” of red flag destinations.

Cool ,I'll remember that when I'm starving because my account was frozen. For 'efficiency'. I'm glad they care so much about me as a customer.

Banks are about to lose more trust, and money. I'll be doing some research into my credit union as well. Can't trust these institutions, man.

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.

I’m very impressed Google fi didn’t shut you off, I’ve heard around the web they do that pretty regularly within 3-4 months of moving

Expanding on your point, when people say 'overseas' they should be more specific. To take an extreme example, spending a bunch of time in France is different than say Somalia.

Horrible. I've heard similar stories but this one's the worst by far. This shouldn't be allowed to ever happen again, such sudden closures without warning need to be illegal.

The issue is banking is highly regulated but a lot of the regulation is about AML, terrorism screening and such. Not actually protecting customers from abuse but rather the other way around - banks are taking precautions to protect themselves from customers. Some of the regulation is also the result of decades of lobbying efforts by major players, making it extremely hard for new ones to compete. Banks are rarely held accountable because for some reason most regular people are fine with this or don't understand it.

There is a solution - not sure if everyone's ready to hear it yet: Decentralized finance. Good luck to a bank trying to shut down your self-hosted Ethereum wallet. Banks provide important services and will continue to exist, but giving them full unchecked control over our life savings and finance is mad. There are a lot of other issues with the current system, and many people don't really understand the contracts they're signing, including that they don't legally own "their money" in the bank account in most cases (they're creditors). But the question of effective control over ones own funds is the most crucial one to me.

I wonder if the bank can be sued for this. That's how random bank managers get found in a river, due to policies like these impacting the innocent.

You should have switched Bitcoin LONG ago.

Soon we will have to stop having sympathy for people who get screwed by the banks as the alternative is just too easy and obvious.

I think a lot of folks reading this will immediately be critical and tell you exactly how easy it would have been to solve your problems from spiraling out of control. They are likely largely factually correct.

What is not being said is that many folks are operating at the limits of their executive function. Add something like this to an already stressful period of time to such people, and they simply will not be able to advocate for themselves in an effective manner or make logical decisions in the moment.

I say this from personal experience. Small stuff like this, in particular gatekeeping kafkaesque stuff, absolutely kills my life in a way that is not logical or explainable. It effectively shuts my brain down. I've lost many years of my life due similar issues, where in the end someone else could have handled them as a minor annoyance.

Let's transition to cashless society, shall we?

Sorry to hear, but the bottom line here is to not trusting a single entity. Not having funds split between traditional banks and crypto (exchange + offline wallets) is just asking for problems.

I find it really difficult to believe it was a "one chance" thing. Universities have late enroll, plus appeals processes in place. It's in their interest to get paid in the end.

I've considered doing this for some time now. Do you have any sort of link between the two accounts? Maybe not directly, but e.g. are both connected to the same brokerage or anything? Is one online-only or do both have physical locations somewhere?

When something similar happened with an immigrant co-worker in the UK, I quickly picked up a second bank account.

He got stuck for about a week and a half with his money all locked up in an account he couldn't access. It was early enough in the month that rent and bills etc. wasn't an issue, we just ended up helping him out buying food for a few days while he sorted out another account and got an advance on his salary.

I remember the range of excuses and explanations for delays from the bank left us all gobsmacked.

Thank you for your empathy, it was a very difficult time and i am glad i made it out. Banks have substantial power with the ability to close accounts unexpectedly, we must push for a financial system that minimizes those risks and enhances consumer protection. Situations like this is a clear reminder of how crucial financial freedom and security are.

Have you reviewed your banks T&Cs?

This happened to me a decade ago (not in the US), and I was surprised to find that every bank in the country had similar provisions in place. I'd be surprised if yours doesn't too.

Not the devs, they have no agency in the decision. Management, for sure, post their name and LinkedIn profile.

I don’t think these decisions are happening in apps.

This would make it easy to intimate or bribe the people who can commit fraud for you in that app.

Listing the specific problem that led to a service denial could be helpful, but could be not. I bet that it's very rarely something like "You did <this one forbidden thing>, so we ban you according to the rule 3.6.4.2 of ToS". It could be something like: "The pattern of your activity is very similar to patterns of activity of 9823 known scam attacks". Or even more detailed: "8 out of 11 statistical models analyzing 982 parameters of your activity during last 48 days showed the probability of your account being used for illicit fund transfers above 0.92, and the remaining 3, above 0.57. In particular, our 100M-paremeter AI model (link to a PDF with technical details) has classified your activity thusly: (a 20-row table follows). According to the law, we use a publicly available model, widely accepted as a standard in the industry. You can inspect the model's weights at huggingface (link follows)".

Interpreting such results is a job. Disputing such results in a court, or with an arbiter, would be really hard, unless you're a practitioner of the pattern-recognition craft yourself.

I had my Venmo account frozen. I'd only made about three payments. Two to a food bank and one to a school organization. Via email, they said the decision was permanent and their policy was to not discuss why the decision was made. Luckily for me it was only Venmo, which I don't really need to use.

This is one of the consequence of strong Anti Money Laundering law. Bank much prefers to avoid False Negative (letting money launderers operate).

They can't even get the legal system to function, how are they going to fix ALL corporations?

Some of best examples are the juvenile and and family court systems in a state like Ohio. Not only do they not even TRY to do what is fair or right, they have one simple mandate, pay for their own existence. As soon as the system set up to punish children is made to profit off those same children you have a sick and broken system but thats where we are today. So, VERY little chance we are going to convince a company to make less money for the social good when even out children's courts are run like a business.

Also the people who are harmed are unimportant. Nobody cares if Harvey Weinstein is part of a dystopian social experiment.

I want to dive into the "how to politely resist this in an effective way".

1. Opt out of these things as much as you can. Often times you can't opt out of the underlying actual thing (school, banking, etc) but you can opt out of the terrible new thing. You don't need to explain to people a deep "why". Instead give the people polite, reasonable (and generally true) excuses. "Oh, it doesn't work on my computer". "Oh, I don't understand how to use it." "I don't really like technology."

2. Help other people, particularly children, the elderly, the vulnerable, etc, in opting out of these things and bypassing them when needed. Help them fill out the paperwork, call the right people, cause the right fuss. Frequently, you'll find by helping one person they'll go on to help other people do the same thing.

3. Tell other people, in appropriate times and circumstances, that you don't care for these things and opt out of them. Don't be weirdly obnoxious about it, but when someone gripes about it or complains about it not working for them.. just agree with them. Most people don't like these things. These things don't generally work (for anyone). They suck. Let other people know you agree with them that these things suck.

There are cases where this doesn't work - automated account closures, automated sentancing, rent shenanigans. You can of course do the usual things of bugging your congress critters (and you should) but you should also use the full range of pressure available to you. Don't do business with shitty companies - and when they inevitably try to sell to you, tell them why you don't do business with them. When a politician supports automated sentancing tools, explain to them why you aren't voting for them.

Surprisingly a little bit of pressure goes quite far.

> 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.

Plenty of people in the comments here want to enforce that approach via laws and regulation..

> So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.

.. and I wonder if they are taking this into account.

> 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.

If I were in charge, it'd be too bad for your company, and they'd have to give a detailed explanation every time even if that would be the result, because the alternative is way worse.

> 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.

I worked for a company doing this sort of fraud detection. Knowing features and weights really would make it easier for fraudsters.

Not if we successfully neutralize this paradigm's ability to take over crucial institutions, such as by enforcing lines of responsibility as I've suggested

The problem is that the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon are normalising (have normalised?) "scale via automation" and are making bank on an unprecedented scale as a result.

If they can do it, so can we.

Just like offshoring manufacturing and service centres to places that pay the lowest wages (even though us proles aren't allowed to buy entertainment media from those same places, but that's a separate topic)

Race you to the bottom!

I know what you are saying but I want to counter the interpretation a bit.

What the spokespeople say is a claim…it’s not truth, we don’t have independent evidence of it, of course they would claim that.

Even if they did have human in the loop - what does that meaningfully look like? Are those humans given the authority to actually overrule the decision? Are they given the evidence to do so? Are they punished or perceive that they will be punished if they do?

I don’t think taking the banks answer to any of those questions at face value is responsible citizenship. Yes it’s what they said - no I don’t think that supports calling it reality.

I’ve mentioned this in other threads related to medical billing. My wife and I have had crazy medical bills for bizarre things the last few years. They are never correct, often they are basically fiction. The people you talk to just point to the bill as if it is inherently correct because it’s the bill. I’ve shown pictures of me on vacation on another continent that same day they charged me for a service…well the bills the bill. That’s not human in the loop, it’s a human shield around the automated decision making loop.

It’s a fixable problem, make incorrect billing an actual crime. It already is to mid bill the government, just not people.

OTOH Paypal is an absolute crapshoot. Something like fifteen years ago they just decided I shouldn't be able to use Paypal anymore. No indication of why. It took them six months to cut me a hard check for the $100 I had in my account at the time. Complete BS system.

> guaranteed electronic banking and funds transfer services

That alone exceeds the requirement of “minimal” as there’s now a need to hire staff for fraud monitoring, handle disputed transactions, chase fraudulent transfers, deal with those who forgot their passwords to electronic banking, had their passwords stolen, etc.

What are the new revenue channels that will pay for all that extra staff (and considering it’s USPS, their pensions)?

I don’t see the connection between the Postal Service and banking. Is it just it was historically there? If that’s the case, you could attach it to any department.

The US Postal Service did serve as a bank from 1910-1966. It should simply restart.

We actually have this in Brazil. The mail provider from the state is in far away areas the only bank that exist in some places!

In New Zealand the bank that provides government departments with banking is required to provide "banking of last resort" facilities to people, even going so far as people who have (for example) done bank fraud. The facilities are minimal - no overdrafts or credit cards, obviously! - but provide enough to function in a society where cheques don't exist and cash is rarely used.

They should probably give people an email account that they can scan all your correspondence to for people who are without an address.

> It's federally required to exist, [...]

Are you talking about a specific law, or about the clause in your constitution?

If the latter: the postal clause merely gives congress some powers, but does not require them to do anything.

Ironically those KYC requirements are there on account of the United States, not necessarily the Germans.

Indeed. I've sent money to more than one individual over time that had no way of receiving it other than crypto. For instance, when you're homeless or in some third world country crypto may well be your only option (that, and WU but they're outrageously expensive and inconvenient).

I cannot get paid by my company without a bank account. No company would pay me my salary in cash. A bank account is no longer optional if you want to live a normal life.

Cash is absolutely subject to freezing/seizure. Try carrying $25,000 and letting the police search your vehicle.

Banking is not optional in today's advanced societies, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we'll have proper regulations mandating a minimum level of banking service, eg. Limited deposits, withdrawals, debit/secured cards.

I'm not sure I would agree that banking is optional in today's society.

Canada has laws[1] intended to ensure access to banking, with $10M fines for violations. Not familiar with them myself and wondering how effective they are, and whether anyone has sued and won. It's maybe a bit ironic considering how the government here improperly locked a lot of people out of their funds during the trucker protests (the inquiry found collateral damage where people completely uninvolved were affected).

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

> Banking is optional

Banking is definitely not optional. Certain transactions, specially those done online, require digital payments that cannot be done with physical cash. It's increasingly a required part that's needed if you want to participate in modern society, and the lack of access to such banking systems forces people to adopt subpar services as a replacement.

In the ideal case, banking should be a utility like power & water: A necessity for modern life, without which certain daily routines would not be possible.

> Banking is optional

I believe it's optional for you, but not for the great majority of people. Lack of access to banking services specifically holds back a lot of people (look up 'unbanked').

Why would banking be optional even if every single business accepted cash?

Where are you supposed to hold your cash, under a mattress?

You can walk into any USPS office and buy up to $1000 in money orders anonymously. What prevents them from selling anonymous prepaid cards the same way?

I think there's a recent and ongoing bipartisan bill in the US trying to fix some of the worst aspect of civil asset forfeiture.

With some luck ten years from now there may be a bill in the US trying to fix some of the worst aspect of KYC/AML (like regular people getting their bank accounts closed for no reason and without any explanation).

> A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied. He was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents – and the only black person on his portion of the train

Never answer with any info, never consent to searches.

Bitcoin, not crypto. And poster has to be cryptic and/or sarcastic because even though it's a solution to this very problem staring us in the face, people here shut down any intelligent conversation about it both with down votes and tired, long winded, oft repeated, uninformed arguments against it. It's pretty discouraging, honestly

Not OP but I immediately thought of Monero.

I wish we could have something like Monero run by the Government backed by gold.

>>>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.

The government is the prime culprit when it comes to financially de-platforming people, if you want more secure access to banking, the solution is lighter regulation of banks, not more. Anti-money-laundering (AML) and so-called risk management regulations make it unprofitable and complicated to provided a mount services to many people. The government (and its regulatory bodies) use this ‘flexibility’ to achieve their aims (see operation Choke Point).

Or you need better digital ID systems to reduce risk of fraud?

Example: In the EU all internet transactions require a second factor, it's annoying -- but typing in a credit card number is already crappy UX.

But making identify theft harder could also reduce risk of keeping clients with abnormal patterns. Since the bank will have more confidence that the customer isn't subject to identity theft.

Obviously, there are more options. Maybe, banks should be held more accountable.

But increasing the bar for fraud by having a strong online identity system could probably raise the bar a lot.

Your own link says that they may decline cash payments.

United States currency is legal for all debts public and private (it says so on the notes), but that doesn't mean it's required to be accepted for all debts.

I am unsure what distinction the linked page is trying to draw between payment for goods/services and debt. The first paragraph seems to unequivocally state that businesses do not need to accept cash (from a Federal law perspective anyway).

  There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an 
  organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. 
  Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept 
  cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise.

It's pretty easy to work around that:

Say that officially your steak costs one million dollars, but if you pay electronically, you get a discount down to 20 dollars.

If you want to pay in cash, that will be one million dollars, please.

The crux is that they don’t let you rack up that debt in the first place if you’re cash only. ;)

Yes, back before the rise of credit cards, restaurants used to be common targets for armed robberies - they'd always have a full till at closing time.

I don't see any of those "pet peeves" as justifying totalitarian policy, and people who do are useful idiots for authoritarian projects

Totalitarianism means the state has total authority. There’s no such thing as à la carte totalitarianism. How we deal with crime, drugs, religion, homelessness, and assimilation falls under social contract theory.

That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism

How is it not ?

> If the bank has filed a SAR, it isn’t legally allowed to tell you, and the federal government prosecutes only a small fraction of the people whom the banks document in their SARs.

Sounds worryingly similar to an effective violation of habeas corpus ?

P.S.: To make the matters worse, it looks that trying to rely more on cash as an insurance against getting debanked, raises your risk of getting debanked !

The actors know their lines well, they don’t need direction. In German, it’s called Gleichschaltung.

>There is no centralization/dictatorial dynamic for this in the US, at all.

You are incredibly incorrect on that assertion. There is, in fact, a centralization/dictatorial dynamic at play, and it's called the Bank Secrecy Act.

Now it doesn't read like it, which most acts of american legislature don't, but on further observation of what it actually does, the intent becomes clear. There is one financial system in the U.S., you will play by it's rules or be excluded, it won't tell you why, it will not be a dumb pipe either. It is directly coupled to law enforcement, and the Federal Government, and yes, there is a Master list that if you get on it, will lock you out of withdrawing from (but not depositing into!) every U.S. bank.

Part of why I no longer do finance work. Once you see how the sausage is made, there is no shower hot enough to slough off the slimey feeling.

> "and it probably won't happen to them."

Until it does ... at which point they'll scream "Bloody Murder!" and ask "How could this happen to me?"

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?

This society sends people to jail for tax evasion all the time, even if the original source of their income was non-criminal.

Al Capone was guilty of running a massive criminal organisation responsible for many many crimes (very difficult to prove due to structures of organised crime). He was also guilty of massive tax evasion (a crime carrying serious jail time), because it turns out it's hard to pay the right tax bill when you're trying to hide the income from your massive criminal enterprise.

The Capone tax case wasn't some made up crime to try pin him. He committed serious tax evasion, which would also carry severe penalties if you or I did it at that scale with legitimate income.

Again, how exactly do you define money laundering? Currently the definition by law seems to be, "anything that could be used to hide criminal activity." In that case, yes, there are plenty of legitimate, non-criminal reasons to make transactions that "could be used" to hide criminal activity. Is privacy a crime?

I have a right to privacy, and a right for my actions to be free from government scrutiny until, at the very minimum, they can show probable cause with a search warrant.

Deputizing the banks to spy on me just makes those banks obligated to the same rules.

Money laundering is a crime predicated on the idea that the money I rightfully own is something they should be able to confiscate from me on hypothetical crimes, and they're attempts to seize it often cause people to try to make it less suspicious to the government. It's bizarre.

If they wanted to fight organized crime, the simple way was always to legalize cocaine, meth, and heroin, and sell that shit out of liquor stores in plain retail packages, all manufactured by regulated pharmaceutical companies that would produce it for a fixed, low profit-over-cost, in measured doses and free from unsafe adulterants.

Government causes problems with bad laws, blames the problems on the criminals, then makes more bad laws to punish them for it, causing more problems. As it is now, it's illegal for you to own and possess cash, though they tend to ignore it as long as you don't keep any in tempting amounts (typically less than $1000).

We as a society have allowed our elected representatives to pass laws that empowered unelected bureaucrats to write reams of regulations that require banks to do these things, all in the name of "security". It's not going to change unless and until we the people give our elected representatives different incentives.

"Money laundering is any deliberate attempt to make tracing those transactions [ones that prove you committed a crime] more difficult."

But that's not true. If it's not a deliberate attempt to hide fraud/theft but otherwise looks like actual money laundering, then it is still a crime, at least according to current KYC/AML laws. That's the real problem with this all. That's what makes the debanking problem (which you agree is bad) so easily ignored by law makers and law enforcement.

We as in "Socialist Party of America"? I did not have a chance to contribute to this "discussion". What happens when this unbanking is practiced en-masse or when the US defaults on its foreign debt, with USD failing as the global reserve currency? The second one is imminent, and not only in my opinion.

Fine, I clicked and read a couple of those. I like the 3rd one that defines a ponzi scheme:

"A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:

1 People invest into it because they expect good profits, and

2. that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,

3. there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,

4. the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while

5. the operators take away a large portion of this money."

This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin and shows that is no more a ponzi scheme than stocks or real estate or any other common investment.

Thank you for the insight.

> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...

> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...

(The following comment is a copy of what I've already said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 )

Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.

Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.

> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.

> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves.

> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.

Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else.

Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/

The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by anyone from anyone willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute.

The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now.

EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will come in the future, have already & will provide.

All crypto is a scam. Bitcoin is not crypto

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, does not talk well about Bitcoin:

https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem...

He also said: " the Internet's Effect on the World Economy Would Be 'No Greater Than the Fax Machines"

I consider Krugeman a clear contra indicator. Bitcon long... :-)

How do you know Paypal usually keeps the money, is there a public accounting of this situation? Would be interesting to analyze - please share any info you have on the data.

PayPal gets around this by claiming they are not a bank

You don't need a lawyer for small claims or for filing a CFPB complaint.

I said it's not the same thing, but they did kick me out as a customer, for a day. And it's the same in that it was caused by some irrational actor (people or people who manage software). If they wanted to just prevent me from sending money to a Nigerian Prince, they could have a) only blocked the wire, not locked my multiple personal and business accounts and b) told me I had to perform XYZ additional steps to get the wire unblocked. Instead they silently disabled account access then generated a spiral of BS, exasperation and time wasting, for a day.

Is it by accident though? Aren't US regulators intentionally (but quietly) pressuring financial institutions to do the enforcement of policies that they know wouldn't stand up to public scrutiny?

> System that are shitty by accident

US banks aren't shitty by accident - how could anyone say such a thing. They deleted millions of mandatory records. They manipulate markets. They fund illegal wars, and people like Epstein. They support dictators and tax dodgers. And that's all just JPM! Look at what GMS have done; look at the Panama papers, look at the 08 bailouts.

Giving banks the benefit of the doubt requires extraordinary, profound naivety.

Bitcoin has similar throughput to Fedwire, so if we can build our current infrastructure using the Fed, we can do the same with Bitcoin.

Federal Credit Unions or just credit unions. They're smaller, community banks with a different organizational structure. They're something akin to a co-op, so member-owned.

Federal Credit Union, they have the Federal Deposit Insurance. Whatever that means. I do know that when the California Franchise Tax Board erroneously claimed i owed them a few hundred dollars that J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan locked me out of my account within minutes - and charged me ~$150 for the pleasure - but neither my credit union nor my Mellon bank accounts were affected at all.

>I think its a separate and divisive issue

Right, it is incredibly divisive. So is freezing the bank assets of someone, which can endanger their lives at worst and at the minimum causes major distress.

I think it is important to highlight that if you're working at a bank, certainly at a high position, but also everyday clerks, you are lackeys for an organisation that threatens the lives of other people. Those people can choose to retaliate when your organisation gives them no other recourse. It is a fact. Maybe the banks should hire armed private security companies to safeguard the well being of their lackeys?

After all:

- How are you supposed to hire a lawyer to help get your account back when your account is frozen.

- How are you supposed to buy groceries to feed yourself, and your family the within possibly the next few hours. Not everyone has a fully stocked pantry.

- How are you supposed to buy life-sustaining medical supplies to for example a diabetic?

- How are you supposed to pay rent?

Within 1 month, a debanked person will be completely at the whims of being saved by friends and other alternative support networks. They are essentially robbed of everything. 1 month in a bureaucratic context __is nothing__. An issue with frozen bank accounts can take years to resolve, if they are even resolved?! The bank may choose to not give out the money in cash, and may require another bank to receive the funds by wire. What if no other bank takes in this debanked person?!

So when people talk about how divisive it is to mention the absolute animosity that these people will feel towards bank personell of all levels, ask who started it.

And most importantly, if you can't hire a lawyer, you can't buy groceries, you can't pay rent, you can't even buy gas for your car. Your family is standing in line at a homeless shelter, and your kids are crying. What remains other than desperate violence against people you feel are responsible for putting you in this hell of an existence? If you work at a bank, quit now. Don't wait until you've got blood on your hands because you've been a lackey to an inherently anti-human organisation such as a bank. If you continue working for the banks, even as a private contractor which might be the audience of people reading this, you're potentially in the firing line of very desperate people.

And those desperate people are right to be desperate. History doesn't usually change just because someone "filed a complaint", it tends to need to get really bad, and bloody.

Yes this is what I mean. I dont find bitcoin very practical.

The regulator didn't go through Nigel's case at all, as 'it is understood that the data does not cover his case, given that the bank never followed through with the closure' [1]. What FCA found that banks never debanked people based primarily on political beliefs[1]. However, Banks can use political beliefs secondarily to debank, and that's what Natwest did. Nagel sought documents from Natwest using Subject Access Request, there it is "found that an internal committee had deemed his views did not align with the bank's own. This formed part of the basis for cutting him, the document showed, alongside commercial considerations." [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/19/nigel-farag...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/natwest-meets-quart...

Some of it is pretty controversial. Some of it, pretty sensible.