Barclays stops UK clients from sending funds to Binance

They ask because most large checks of this kind are real-estate related, and they want to sell you the mortgage on that deal.

Community bank near me does it because they had a number of folks who were getting scammed via some scam calls (family member in jail scam, fake IRS scam, obvious scam 'investments' and so on).

They've stopped a handful of scams just by asking the customer what they're doing. For a few of the folks involved the amount of losses would have been devastating financially and certainly emotionally (they're elderly with very limited finances).

I know the usual 'the bank wants to sell you something' lines will come up, but it's not hard to just say no, and the teller there might not be Snidely Whiplash...

This is all a psychology game and it works better if you understand their psychology. Banks do not care. They don’t want you to make them care. It is also true that they employ compliance officers whose job is to care and be skittish. So don't say drugs, terrorist financing or poorly understood things like crypto. Make up anything else such as you are filling up a pool to swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.

For more leniency, use a bank that took a “criminal non prosecution agreement”, like Wells Fargo, where they remember that Compliance Officers are at-will employees too.

...for now. I'm not usually one to pull the slippery slope argument but they seem to be overstepping quite a bit here.

I see you guys have never had your bank call you and ask what you are doing with all that cash you are withdrawling, for their report for the government. I should've just said 'strippers'.

That doesn’t stop them asking though.

That's what people always said: if you don't like Twitter's policies, build your own.

Turns out if you do that, you'll also need to build your own AWS, your own DNS, your own payment systems, your own internet providers.

No, it doesn't work this way.

Barclays once blocked all of my company accounts for a week but never told me. Eventually I found out when stuff bounced. When I rang up to find out why they (no joking) asked me to explain why I had transactions from something called "Federal Reserve" (it was part of a US government contract).

I explained why. Then they asked me to explain who this "Federal Reserve" was. I laughed thinking they were joking...Then found myself having to actually explain it. They then had me on hold for ten minutes when they checked with their manager...

Maybe it’s not a binary thing of “your money is free or not free” but rather it is and always has been on a scale.

There have always been things it hasn’t been ok to purchase, but as per comments above, it’s the ability to enforce these whims on a global scale that’s new

Spending money on illegal things, is illegal. Spending money on dubious things, is not. I'm sure crypto exchanges and the like are illegal in some parts of the world. But it isn't clear to me whether that's the case in the UK.

The argument here, presumably, is that banks shouldn't have a policing function. You can choose to (dis)agree with that, but it's a valid argument.

Except this is neither a state prohibition nor about explosives.

No they haven't really. The state control of money is very recent concept, post gold-standard. States and empires even rarely had their own coin. The opium war was less than 200 years ago. Even passports werent enforced until WW1. Control on the scale we have today was never possible , for technical reasons

Not only transactions. Publications too. The ability to express what you want and how you want, and distribute to a large number of people without a prior approval is a very recent thing. Some say it's a mistake.

Bitcoin (or Crypto) is not people and I don't think it's going to explode or emit gamma radiations anytime soon.

In those cases, possession is prohibited. You’re probably not allowed to manufacture explosives or own people either.

What do you mean? Is there some sort of a magic force that stops one person from handing over a suitcase of cash to another?

What this bank does is trying to prevent crime before it may or may not happen.

This is sick and dystopian.

What's next, are we going to arrest people because they have cutlery and may or may not do something with it. That's preposterous!

You're confusing something that's for sale freely with something that's not. Though maybe if you add a few more pounds... But more relevant to the parent's comment; would your bank prevent your from trying to spend that pound?

Correct. And they are now lobbying aggressively for the ringfence to be removed again (their investment bank is not regarded as economically sustainable as an independent operation).

Yes, after their executive team left. And why did you expect to hear about it? Do you work in financial services? Most of these stories don't appear in newspapers because the public isn't that interested in the implementation of financial regulation (in this case though, there was actually an op-ed in the Telegraph from one of the Chairman who was forced out which basically made explicit what they were reported to have said to the BoE).

This is correct but, crucially, not what was conveyed by the reporting on Binance in almost all of the major news outlets. For example the massively misleading previous headline "Binance banned in the UK" in the FT.

The FCA ruling is not really the problem imo, i'm more reacting to the financial press such as FT and the Economist. Cooling down overleveraged small traders about to lose it all on some bad investment is definitely a good thing. However, intentionally misleading people via major newsites including the BBC is not.

The "average consumer" should be educated on different types of financial ownership by the state run media/financial press: custodial-legacy (Barclays), custodial-challenger (Revolut), defacto-custodial(arguably all centralized crypto exchanges..e.g. you can move the crypto off it), non-custodial (Meta Mask) etc. Then they should be allowed to risk or derisk as they see fit by choosing the most competitive option on the market. IMO stability in the economy comes from having a large number of prosumer types who can take activist positions when they need to, simply by quickly switching provider and getting a better deal or supporting something in their interest or to their taste. This is especially important considering the real alternative DeFi provides versus bank based lending and slippery financial constructs endemic in that industry (wasn't it the latter that caused 2008? Nearly any alternative is better than that situation.).

Other points:

- KYC exists on most of the major crypto exchanges with Coinbase and Gemini doing this properly. Proof that it works in the long term is not there yet of course.

- Fraud mostly happens through the traditional banking system. It's more complicated and embedded in how things are done but it's still fraud. The BBC on Barclays role in 2008: "At its worst, for every £100 the banks had lent, if as little as £3 or £4 failed to be repaid, it might be enough to bankrupt them."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51593639

- I struggle to see the sharp differences between a Coinbase or Binance (ok minus the overleveraged trading on the latter) and a Revolut or Monzo. Both allow different ways of accessing crypto within custodial model, have KYC, have a debit card. The only difference is how they have each responded to poorly formulated regulatory frameworks (2-3 years ago). Once again, binance sucks in so many ways but there's still something incredibly misleading about the way it is covered.

- Tether is no good but Dai is an excellent alternative. In any case, Tether operates similarly to many banks where 1:1 shadowing of money held/money deposited is obviously never going to work out as a profitable business model. Tether is not viable long term but neither are most banks then.

These things aside, my main overall point here is that:

- UK financial institutions should protect consumers but should not create information asymmetries (via state run media and highly influential financial press) that heavily predispose a certain outcome in the favour of a tiny subset of companies innovating in this space. For example, FUD focussed on a single company that is directly competing with Revolut or Monzo. This is anticompetitive in my view and there is such a lack of clarity on what is acceptable that it is likely to stifle any innovation going forward.

An subsidary that Binance bought was banned by UK financial regulators to do business in UK. Not Binance itself. This has been cleared up multiple times, but I guess if you repeat the same lie often enough people start believing it.