How BofA froze my account for supporting my children | Hacker News Reader

How BofA froze my account for supporting my children

edfine.io

7 pointsStavrosK8 comments

Tl:dr; frequent transfers to South Africa for a long time that led them to categorise him as a Money Service that needed to provide business documentation. From his conclusion it appears that the DoJ rules would lead any bank to do the same, so now he uses wire transfers instead of ACH with his new credit union account.

And he should probably thank BofA that they tipped him off 30 days in advance!

I suppose. It's kind of hard to thank them when they blatantly mis-classified my personal bank account as one that needs to implement an anti-money laundering program, though.

I don't live in the USA so I don't know, but it seems likely that the requirement for that classification probably came from the government. The bank isn't spontaneously going to reclassify your account for no reason.

A personal account could be used to launder money, so if personal accounts are exempt, that's obviously what money launderers will use. If you're going to look for suspicious account activity, you can't go by the "static type" of the account but by "how it quacks", so to speak.

I appreciate your point and don't disagree.

I guess I'm just saying that even though I have a record of every payment made to my children, clearly showing the legitimate destination accounts, and there is no other activity they queried, and I explained everything in writing to the bank, they still chose to classify my account as an MSB.

It reminds me of how the Inquisition types used to "prove" a woman was a witch: put her in a ducking stool and throw her in a lake. If she floats, she's a witch, so burn her at the stake. If she sinks and drowns, she's innocent, but she'll go to heaven, so it's all ok. Either way she's fucked. That's kind of how I feel: the more you prove your innocence, the more guilty you are.

I suppose I'm making a fuss to make a statement about our steadily eroding freedoms, and the gradual onset of totalitarianism in the USA, all in the name of protecting we, the people. (I shouldn't complain, though; I could still be living in South Africa.)

Thanks for the summary. I'd like to add a couple of salient points to it.

1. The insidious nature of the DoJ rules allows the DoJ to target "risky" industries (with no need to pass new laws), such that companies in those industries can't get a bank account, making it hard or impossible for them to do business. This helps the DoJ to push out industries it doesn't like, using the banks to do its dirty work.

2. It's much worse than it sounds, being required to "provide business documentation". Being classified as an MSB would force the account holder to implement an anti-money laundering program that is subject to independent review, and possibly report transactions of a certain range of values. For a personal bank account? This is, frankly, an egregious abuse of the law.

Disclosure: I wrote the blog post. I struggle to "omit needless words", sadly.

It really sounds like your problem is with the DoJ, but your blog post is all about Bank of America. Nobody gets surprised or very interested by a story on "Bank fucks over customer" so I don't think that focus helps you.

Your point is well taken.

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