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Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

I discovered recently that my bank (in Germany) can cancel my account without cause. My best guess is they were purging the books of Americans, they refused to tell me the reason, but my takeaway is that if this can happen in the consumer-protection nirvana that is the EU, don’t hold your breath waiting for exploitative practices to be outlawed.

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This is probably to do with the requirements that the IRS imposes on foreign bank accounts belonging to US citizens. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10291...

Well, EU banks hate dealing with USA exporting their laws to their (states') citizens abroad, regarding reporting etc.

Indeed, my other German bank will promptly disown me if I stop living in Germany, but they at least are upfront about it.

Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior, it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!

Did they give you your money promptly? How?

Well sort-of. They have to give two months' written notice, and they did, and I was very lucky to catch it in time as I'd been traveling and they had of course not bothered to send me an e-mail nor call any of the three numbers they had for me.

So I had about a week's warning and I was able to transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd gone in and personally told them where to send it, which would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad -- it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13 years.

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