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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

> You want to ensure that the money either moves, or doesn't move, that it doesn't get lost somewhere in between

Speaking of which, I finally hit this nightmare scenario -- in one hand I have an international wire proof of payment from a customer, in the other hand I have my bank insisting that they never received a transfer. It's weeks later, I never shipped, and my customer says they never got the money back -- but they haven't been applying pressure to me, so if they are a scammer they are very bad at it. They also know an atypical amount of RF engineering for a scammer. At the moment it really does look to me like the banking system ate his money.

I sense a bit of Fear of God motivating your story, something that motivated your management to care -- who is that authority, so that I might get them on my case?

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From my experience in cross border payments, sanctions screening (Office of Foreign Asset Control - OFAC) is the most likely source of the problem. Most likely, your customer's bank uses a US bank as a correspondent for all of their USD payments. The correspondent bank will scan every payment instruction that they receive against a list issued by OFAC. If there is a match, the correspondent bank will not execute the payment, and will seize the money from your customer's bank's account with the correspondent. In order to get the money un-seized, your customer will need to provide his bank with a lot of documentation proving that he is not the bad guy on the OFAC list. This can take a while. Your customer is probably aware of all of this and that is why he is not hassling you.

So yes, the banking system did eat his money, but that is what it is designed to do.

I had an OFAC compliance department hold up a wire from US->IRE because the bank it was going to (Permanent TSB) shared the suffix TSB with some Russian bank. There are 6 chartered banks in Ireland, but I had to dig out all sorts of info about the bank to prove that the Irish bank wasn't in Russia.

I think it was 3 weeks or so to sort it out, when usually this is a nextish business day thing.

That sounds plausible. RF equipment moving around the world at a time of international tensions could very well draw this kind of attention. Historically I have seen it at customs, but in a world of increasingly non-tangible goods it probably makes sense to start going after payments instead.

It would have been nice if I had heard this from the bank, but I understand that nobody involved considers it a high priority to keep me informed. Thanks for the theory!

This was my guess as well. And based on my experience working on international payments, an additional headache is that in some cases, depending on exactly which jurisdictions are involved, some of the parties can be forbidden by law from giving you detailed information about what's happening.

This is another "doing what it's designed to do" situation (the idea is to avoid revealing certain information to bad actors) but it can be pretty frustrating to deal with.

> I sense a bit of Fear of God motivating your story, something that motivated your management to care -- who is that authority, so that I might get them on my case?

Haha! :) The authority is none other than Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau at UW-Madison, along with NASA's Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code [1]. Storage faults and safety bugs, or the general lack of assertions in so many software projects, do indeed terrify us as a team!

It's also all credit to Coil's leadership, for caring and being willing to invest long term in better open source infrastructure for payments for everyone—and particularly Interledger, as an open interoperability protocol, to create an ”open network of networks” for payments, to fix the problem of payments for everyone [2].

I'm glad also to see that sibling comments have given tips on how to unblock that nightmare scenario you encountered!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

[2] http://interledger.org/

Are you in the US?

https://www.helpwithmybank.gov/index.html

That's a website from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the org that regulates US banks. Dig through the topics to find one most applicable, make sure you did everything they recommend, and then hit the contact button. Or just go to the contact page to contact the OCC directly, most of their recommended steps are “call the bank and ask what’s up”.

Also good is the CFPB, and while I’m not sure if a business situation will be something they can address, it wouldn't hurt to contact them as well

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/

It's a UK -> US transfer. I'm on the US side and I'm not entirely sure which step broke down, but I have had a difficult time getting the US banks to talk to me so this information is helpful.

Thanks!

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