Citibank may lock bank accounts for 45 days if breach suspected
twitter.com
twitter.com
Moved to a foreign country during covid
Meantime, the debit card expired, 3 months later when I try to login to mobile app/internet banking, can't do anything without the debit card.
Call the bank to send new one
3 month waiting
Call them multiple times: we can send new one but we'll cancel the one 'in-flight. Do you want to do that or wait another week?'
Eventually I requested a new one, two times
1 year waiting
The last phone call the staff admited they could be getting stolen
I've requested multiple times to send the card by Fedex or DHL they refused to do anything that didn't follow "their process"
A debit card sent by untracked letter!
Meantime they refuse to give me any alternative access to the account, move any money or make any transactions.
Lesson learned, don't trust _ONE_ bank with your savings/banking needs!
Can't be safe unless you have multiple bank accounts, crypto, and some nice friends.
There is also problem with deposit insurance. In EU deposit in single bank is insured upto 100k euro. If bank bankrupts, you loose anything over that. So it is better to spread deposits across multiple banks, each with 100k euro deposit.
And by aware that many banks are owned by the same group, and use just different brand as front. Insurance is per bank license, not per bank brand.
There is also Cypriot bail in in 2013...
This is generally a good advice, as a bank typically has your money and lose nothing being slow or painful.
On moving to foreign countries while keeping banking access, it's such a world of hurt.
Some banks will straight stop your account and flag it the minute they understand you've been out of the country for any specific length of time (from 1 full month to 6 months depending on the bank). Many banks will just not allow a foreign resident to keep an account.
Citibank in Japan has the funniest rule: you have to receive in person a letter sent to your residency address every month if you intend to keep your account alive. Failing to do so for whatever reason automatically locks the account and you have to come to them to prove you still meet their requirements.
While this is annoying and is excessive to what's required in law (it must be done at least yearly, and most banks do not try to annoy foreign residents more than what's legally required), Japan does require all Japanese-domiciled bank that they verify that the owner is either a Japanese national or a long-term resident in Japan. In fact, most Asian countries do have a "must be a citizen or resident" or even the much more stricter "must be a resident" requirement.
At least it's not India, according to Mastercard and Visa India even prohibits foreign long-term residents from maintaining an account in their country of nationality (and therefore we must always certify that upon our knowledge we do not send cards, even debit, to India).
That is very, very excessive... Do you know what the official reasoning is for that?
It's the default regardless of the country unless you are sanctioned.
It's a factor but only a single one among multiple others.
Also, since that some may just scratch their head, here is the relevant provision from MasterCard (https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...).
It's the same in most countries. The regulatory burden may be different but banking presence is required in the country if you are serving domestic market at scale.
Indian residents can open HSBC expat account domiciled on the jersey island as an example.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/citi-agrees-sell-japan-retail...
(In Canada at least, mail can be set for "no forwarding", so the post office won't redirect in said cases.)
That's the explaination I got when I discussed opening an account there. To note I wasn't a permanent resident, which might have set different conditions.
Went with Mitsubishi, and they were just fine.
You are never 100% safe. You could be killed by a car, a falling plane or a meteorite an hour from now. Or an artillery shell or nuke just after the start of an unexpected war. Or that painful spot that you have could turn out to be terminal cancer, which could kill you within 3 months.
Also any currency and any set of stocks can go to near-zero faster than most imagine. A natural disaster can happen that simultaneously wipes out your house (if you have one) and your insurance company. (This is actually the reason I'm insuring my house with the same company that holds my mortgage, so at least I don't have to pay the mortgage if they're wiped out in such an event.)
The real question is how much risk are you willing to accept, and what costs are you willing to pay to mitigate the risks. And of the above, I think the main risk driver was to go abroad (paired with being unlucky about covid's timing).
Going abroad while depending on a domestic bank with a log-in method that would soon expire was adding to the risk.
The combination of the above put you into a small subset of the population, meaning you and people like you didn't have leverage when the disaster struck.
But you _were_ unlucky. And if luck is bad enough, you're never completely safe.
It wasn't luck. It was someone's decision making that he was subject to with no recourse.
I like this logic.
My only concern would be that, in many cases an insurer might have a clause to pay cash or rebuild, their choice. Or some other conflict which may cause issue with the mortgage holder (many mortgages can force sale in certain circumstances).
But I like your premise, and will poke at it here.
stocks are also diversified (different segments of the economy and geographies)
but yeah, unlucky at that time!
Under normal circumstances, would be easy to fly back within 3 months
How exactly do you think this would work? What jurisdiction is all this in?
So basically my idea is that to have some of my assets (insurance and some savings) with the same company that holds the mortgage, I have a hedge against the credit risk associated with my assets. If the bank goes bankrupt and cannot repay its obligations to me, I can refuse to pay my mortgage back to them, and demand that any net asset the bank would owe me would be subtracted from the liability I have with the bank.
If my assets were in another company, and that company were unable to pay, I would still be stuck with the mortgage, potentially even if the value of the property were to be lost.
As a side not, I remember working on a credit risk (Basel 2) project back in 2005-2006. Until then, inter-bank lending was (by regulators) considered to have zero-none credit risk, but from around that time, banks (at least in Europe) had to allocate regulatory capital when lending to each other. Then came 2008.
Not that it makes a difference, I see their facebook page have 1.6 stars
File a complaint with their regulator and let them know you have.
I did contact a regulator body once I got access to my account
1. It was difficult to use unless native
2. They're basically doing mediation, will ask feedback from me and the bank and end with the bank follow their "procedures" so my problem for "being away"
Anyway, now I'll make sure to have multiple bank accounts across multiple jurisdictions
Things won’t be pretty once we go cashless.
Those same folks could easily wind up homeless if this happened to them.
Overdraft services have been opt-in only for over a decade: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...
I would line up with the other poor people who were too stupid not to have multiple bank accounts, even though like me they may have had a bank branch a block from their apartment (that had already turned them down.)
You can be poor without debt, btw: I do not include debt in with poverty. Debt amount doesn't reflect your quality of life (though garnished wages sometimes might hint at it).
But I figure some fringe cases would absolutely make someone be both poor and that much in debt, generally stemming from things like a family losing an income after buying a home and to a lesser extent, things like student loans and medical debt - though I*m not sure either go as high.
Having $10 in your checking account, OK yeah that is weird. Considering just your liquid cash vs. your debt doesn't make sense. You have to take into account monthly post-tax income, monthly expenses, and the time it would take to pay off said debt using your remaining income.
The truth is I should of never of been given the loan as my parents had very little income and no significant assets. It was ridiculous. But I was lucky enough to finish my degree in CS so eventually I was not poor and paid off the loan. But even with the CS degree and diligent saving it took almost a decade.
Also congratulations on getting out of debt and having a career.
The only account that is legally restricted that I can think of is the ISA which offers good tax incentives for saving but with a limit to how much can be contributed in a year, and I think you can only open with one provider in a given tax year.
If that's anything like the truth, absolutely nobody here knows about it. In an effort to get customers, banks will often give you "introductory" rates which are better than the market, but only for a fixed amount of time (6 months or a year). I know people who have accounts at basically every major bank.
Without the deal, there's no restrictions.
They are not. When you come back from work after a 12-hour night shift the last thing you want to do is managing your bank accounts. You just want one account to work, and to work well, if possible without the bank screwing you too much.
We're not money savvy people particularly, however my girlfriend and I both have 3-4 bank accounts (UK based, it takes <1 hour to setup a brand new bank, from start to finish).
We have a couple of traditional banks, and then also some more modern "internet" only banking (great for travel with their zero conversion fees, and more granular tracking of spending).
This seems to be the norm between all my friends also.
I have 3 accounts, one for salary deposits, one for bills and one for spending so that I always know bills are covered every month without thinking about it and my "fun money" being pre-allocated each month helps me be mindful of my spending.
Since moving to that system I've been able to save significantly more each month.
I have an online centered account and a local one, they serve different purposes.
Multiple accounts in use greatly increases the chance that you have the money but it’s in the wrong place.
Have we gotten so deeply nested that we've forgotten the title of the thread?
I too have multiple bank accounts, mainly because in the case of bank failure your deposits are only guaranteed up to something like £80k.
Also, in the UK basic current accounts are free, I doubt this is the case everywhere.
I still have one main account that my wages go into, and all bills come out of. The other account is just a backup.
Twitter on the Android app works well for reading a thread, but on the webpage it is frustratingly cluttered. Admittedly I do have an adblocker so don't see the ads on thread reader.
Twitter is annoying, invasive, naggy, and surveillance tech. I've disabled JS on the site which both nudges me to alternatives and adds significant friction to reading using it.
Another element is that many banks effectively centralise virtually all decision authority within computer systems. Patio11's recently submitted essay on branch banking addresses this in part. See <https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/branch-banking/> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32679233>
Most banks, even quite large ones (though Citi might be an exception) no only centralise operations to software but use the same very small number of vendors for that software. Brian Krebs wrote an essay in 2018 giving some details on just how consolidated that market is: <https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/what-is-your-banks-secur...>
Discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534820>
The fact that the banks have tied their own hands doesn't excuse them, though this may in part explain what's going on, and how you might choose to calibrate your expectations, risk models, and mitigations.
Now, I'll churn their credit cards time to time just to feel like I'm doing my part to stick it to them.
Rant out of the way, I've had something like this happen to me. What's more, all bank security I've dealt with treat you as a liar, always condescending, and are generally not allowed to provide any information as to why they are doing what they're doing.
I highly recommend spreading some amount of cash among at least two financial institutions. No matter how great you think they are, they can turn on you in a heartbeat for some esoteric reason.
Banks are deputized by the government to check for all sorts of suspicious transaction. They get fined when their procedures are not sufficiently stringent. They're not allowed to tip you as to why your account is being suspended or closed.
At any moment, any bank can lock your account for months without informing you of anything. It's unfortunately the power we decided to give them to prevent money laundering.
I know I'm at risk of upsetting the "private companies don't have to obey the constitution" police, but if the government is essentially acting through banks to deprive you of life, liberty or property then maybe the bank should be providing some sort of due process to you.
"We" did no such thing, most of these regulations are created by non-elected administrative state that has far far too much power
Of course, if the bank wished to do so, they could give information or unblock the funds. But the fines that the regulator can impose to the bank are disproportionate (hundreds of thousands, per individual case) to "convince" the bank to comply.
Thus, is not "the bank" who is doing that to you, it's the regulator, and the agreement between the bank and them. And this "agreement" is a requirement in order for the regulator to give a banking license, so...
Let's be clear, the bank is not gaining anything out of this, quite the opposite: they are at risk of bad reputation, having an angry customer at their offices or calling daily, etc...
It's a very frustrating situation, tho. I do understand that.
The problem described in the Twitter thread is on another level entirely. As another commenter here pointed out, it sounds more like that one failed a KYC review of some kind.
It's part of RBI (Reserve Bank Of India) guidelines. The scope is expanding every few years to cover every situation.
You cannot sue someone for doing something they're legally required to do. Well you can, but you will lose immediately...
For what it is worth, I think a lot of AML is bullshit. But that doesn't change the fact it is the law, and many people support it because they assume it only affects drug trafficer and terrorists and billionares engaged in questionable activities. I heard this week that when AML checks on cash came in, the limit was 10kUSD for a cash transaction to be reportable. That was in the 70s, so the equivalent now would be 70kUSD today. That's per year. But the limit has not changed, so expect to raise a red flag if you sell a nicer end car or your tenant asks to pay in cash...
They fit in the new place in law where you are not a "state actor" so you do not have to adhere to the limits placed on the state by that pesky constitution, but have been grated state like powers and authority to more or less do anything they want to individuals without any possibility of recourse.
Basically, that thing you think is awesome will never be.
[0] https://medium.com/fetch-ai/fetch-ai-nabs-5m-in-institutiona...
I once was denied access to my own money over a very long weekend during which a bill popped up that I had to settle immediately. I ultimately ended up borrowing money from my family.
The reason for the denail turned out to be a clerical mistake.
The feeling of dread I experienced thanks to this tought me to always kept a small stash of cryptocurrency (and cash!) for situations like this.
In the age of uncaring mega corporations and unaccountable governments, having money not controllable by either is a necessity.
Or to pay for anything else, for that matter.
https://www.finder.com.au/crypto-bill-payments
There are probably equivalent companies in most markets.
However had I had more time to liquidate my crypto, I definitely would have used crypto. I know two people wouldn't mind buying my crypto with traditional currency.
You get to be your own bank, including being in charge of security. Screw up once, and you're screwed.
Store most of the fortune encrypted and out of internet connection or on hardwallet, if you have large sums, transfer small sums (like, monthly usage) once in a while to your phone wallet and use freely.
It's not that easy to loose access, by the way, if are not dumb and don't open all shady executables you could find in the internet.
Related question, can you pass the money to your relatives when you die?
* Use 2 credit cards, alternate between them on a weekly basis
* keep as little money as possible in your checking account, keep a book balance of $100, transfer # from savings on a weekly basis to cover what is due.
* have at least 2 savings/MM accounts at 2 banks that are not the same bank as your checking account.
* Keep your investment portfolio in at least 2 accounts at 2 different companies
A long time ago before that was a thing and interest rates were non zero, my local credit union had automatic overdraft protection that drew from your savings account with no fees. So I would just keep the checking account balance at zero and draw from my savings for every check. Apparently at some point this triggered some automated check and I could no longer do this.
Regulation D only allows you to transfer money from your savings account to checking six times per month, but apparently that rule was suspended during COVID.
>keep as little money as possible in your checking account, keep a book balance of $100, transfer # from savings on a weekly basis to cover what is due.
I am not sure what the point of that is if they are in the same financial institution. Also most savings accounts pay shit for interest, and most checking accounts still pay shit but it is about double the amount of shit...
> Since he was traveling and was relying on @Citibank, he was screwed.
Does anyone actually do this? I don't know anyone who'd rely on a bank. You just have like 2 or 3 credit cards. Pre-war, one of my friends was actually in Russia and lost their wallet, and Visa (yes, Visa, not the bank) actually hand-delivered him the card. Blew my mind.
Everything is terrible. The US dollar is on par with the EURO though.
I travel for half year every winter to south / central america from Europe, and there have been cases when my bank cancelled my credit card because of technical problems with contactless payments even though I didn't need contactless.
Another time Revolut just blocked my access to their app for a few days until I could prove where I got the money from.
Another time a bank blocked my card because I was travelling and they thought it's a fraud.
Depending on banks for long travels far from my home is scary, so I make sure I always have enough BTC and cash to survive.
I would carry 500-1000 USD at most.
When carrying €10,000 or more into or out of the European Union, you must complete a cash declaration. In practice, I'd feel uncomfortable carrying more than I'd be happy to count while hurrying for a plane, especially if the value were close to the limit and in a currency other than Euros. (Other currencies are explicitly included in the EU rules, which makes sense, not least because some EU member states use other currencies instead of Euros.) I don't know whether you can complete a cash declaration in case the exchange rate changes such that the value of your cash crosses the threshold, but if you can't then maybe carrying cash close to the limit would attract a lot of attention from customs or airport security (because it might look like you're violating the rules until the cash had been counted and the interest rate checked).
This is not true, you can carry 10000 EUR without declaration, you just neet to declare if you carry more (I look at the regulation and of course eurusd before I start my travel for winter).
"Entering or leaving the EU after 3 June 2021 with cash or certain valuable items worth over EUR 10 000? ... "all travellers entering or leaving EU territory are already obliged to complete a cash declaration when carrying EUR 10 000 or more"
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs-4/prohibitions...
I was traveling recently and when trying to pay for a hotel room the transaction was declined. I needed to call my bank to explain that I am traveling, so they tuned down their anti-fraud alerts. Thankfully, one phone call was all it took to resolve this.
However, this block was only triggered because the transaction in question was relatively high amount ($1500), the very same card would still work perfectly for small transactions.
Yes. I use Revolut for that exact purpose.
I only have one debit card available, I'm from Europe. That's why whenever I travel I also carry cash with me.
Imagine suddenly all your bank accounts are blocked. Do you have a plan for this?
> . Pre-war, one of my friends was actually in Russia and lost their wallet, and Visa (yes, Visa, not the bank) actually hand-delivered him the card.
Little known, but it's actually standard feature for CC starting from some class. Used it twice - once bank blocked CC and I figured it in airport, another time I lost the CC.
Don't rely on gmail/Google Drive, they might arbitrarily block you with no recourse. (This one I've known about for years, but have yet to find the time to properly address.)
Don't rely on a single bank, they might arbitrarily block you with no recourse. (This one was news to me.)
Et cetera.
The thing is, addressing each of these means first knowing about it, then deciding to act, then actually investing the energy. All of this requires technical proficiency and time that people may simply not have. What I want to know is, why have we built so many footguns, and how can we start disarming them? Why is technology moving us to a Kafka story instead of a Star Trek story?
That's a problem which has nothing to do with technology itself. Technology makes providing support cheaper, so if the only changing variable was adding more technology, we would be getting better support, not worst.
The problem is cultural individualism. People give too much power to centralized entities, and don't respect the paramount importance of free market competition in accountability. A typical argument is that technology causes this centralization, but it's simply not true. For each service, there almost always exists both centralized options, and decentralized open-source ones. It's on users to go above the individualistic perspective and chose the option that's right not only for their own individual needs, but also for their community.
That's not something we can fix by making different choices in the browser marketplace, which increasingly is just Chrome wearing different wigs. Even if we solved it in the case of browsers, this is a systemic issue across not only companies, but industries. Fixing this would mean something more fundamental than individuals changing their preferences to prioritize nonhostile software. It would require society at large agreeing to change it's priorities so that good options could be presented to them in the first place.
> A typical argument is that technology causes this centralization, but it's simply not true.
I think when people say this, "technology" is best understood as "the technology industry" or "technology, the social phenomenon" rather than "technology, the artifacts of engineering." I don't entirely agree that technology is amoral (not that you claimed this), but I think that's true enough for a first approximation. But when people say "technology causes centralization" (or "technology causes X" generally) they mean, "technology, as it is implemented in our society, given that it doesn't exist in a vacuum," and that has moral dimensions for sure.
> But I disagree that it is possible for individuals to simply change their behavior and create that world using their collective purchasing power. This arrangement works well for the companies and investors that create the options consumers may choose from, and they have and continue to offer the set of options that match their preferences.
With proper cultural norms, it will definitely be possible to change the current corporate technology landscape to be more user-friendly. Individual consumption habits have a huge impact, that's why the advertising industry is so big after all. Of course the necessary cultural change won't happen without a collective pain and awareness of the problem. I would say we might be half-way there in the pain dimension, and awareness of the benefits of open-source is growing everyday (what with the explosion of AI artwork thanks to the Stable Diffusion open-source release).
I think there's an widely held conception, which comes from orthodox economics, that consumers demand something and then businesses respond to give them what they want. But I think that's wrong in a subtle but important way; it neglects the ability of business interests to shape what consumers demand.
For instance, I believe Facebook's pivot to Meta was precipitated by Apple's privacy update which limited FB's ability to conduct surveillance on iPhone. Presumably they feel it's an existential liability to rely on their competitor's platforms, because should a privacy-focused arms race break out between Apple and Google, it could destroy FB's ability to monetize their service. So they looked at the resources at their disposal, came up with a path forward which would result in the outcome they desired, and set about trying to convince the public they wanted a metaverse. This is a particularly ham-fisted effort, which makes it a good illustration, but I believe this is a more subtle element of many products. The key element here is that Facebook decided what product would best serve their interests, and tried to synthesize a demand, rather than responding to an organic demand for a metaverse.
This is why I don't think it's sufficient for consumers to simply change their behavior. Consumers cannot put options on the table; they can only express interests and hope they are fulfilled. Additionally business interests can collude much more easily than consumers, as there are fewer of them and their interests are better aligned. Consumers can demand nonhostile products, but at best they'll get differently-hostile products which address some of their concerns while innovating bold new ways to undermine the consumer. Something like, we've stopped shipping DRM with games because we know you don't like it, but we've also moved to a games-as-a-service model where you can't play without connecting to our servers, so we've actually ended up with even more control over your ability to play. It's sort of like a chess game where black has two rows of pawns. The only winning move is to change what game you're playing.
> Then we should use a less general word than "technology".
When it comes to language, I'm a descriptivist. I neither agree nor disagree that this is a bad word choice, my only claim is about what people mean. A framing you may appreciate more is, swapping "technology" for "the social institution of technology" (I think "Big Tech" isn't quite right to swap in, as it excludes, say, technology used by the government or intelligence agencies) is the steel man of the argument, and we ought to consider the merits of the stronger version of the argument and avoid arguing about the semantics of words.
Yet, I do not fear getting screwed over. Every time I hear about the ways American banks will screw over their customers I'm thankful I do not live in the USA.
The American banking system is corrupted and horribly outdated to the point where consumers need to practice defensive financing (and things like tactical debt gathering to accumulate a credit score with a shady financial megacorporation), but that's not necessary in every country. With the right people-oriented regulations and incentives, banks can be better.
It's kind of why I find it funny in all the crypto threads watching people here idolize the current financial system. Yet at a whim or some internal AML flag they can effectively trash your life giving you effectively no recourse.
A local banks follow local country laws, so in Canada, bank cards work in Cuba. However, employees are painfully useless about anything outside the country.
An international bank, because the employees aren’t clueless about internal transactions. However, they are under the strictest restrictions, cards don’t work in Cuba for example. Iran, Syria, etc will also be a problem. But I can move money between countries as easily as I move money between chequing accounts. Also, they send me my cards via DHL, not regular untracked mail like the very painfully dumb local banks.
Canadian HQ bank, their Mastercard and VISA work fine in Cuba.
US HQ bank or any international bank that follows US sanctions (if they want to deal in US Dollar, they do), their Mastercard and VISA do not work in Cuba.
This is just 1 example, but China have their own list. And Russia is an interesting case too.
There is something that triggered the lockout. It's best to retrace steps to be sure about what originally caused the account lockout. That might be something in common with any card provider. When I was young and dumb, I got locked out unexpectedly after losing a job. If you post that you lost a job on social media these days... Lights you can't see can go off elsewhere...
They also ALL know your bank account balance without you even telling them.
But banking in the USA is so archaic to begin with. paper checks?
The benefit of credit unions of commercial banks is that they tend to be considerably less scummy. All of my banking horror stories from the USA come from commercial banks, and I always recommend Americans to use credit unions.
Did the guy in the OP have an old fashioned paper checkbook?
I Only use Credit Unions, and have multiple accounts, 100% of my loans, checking accounts, saving accounts etc are with various Credit Unions
I have a credit card with a non-credit union, and I have an investment account with a non-credit union, but for cash assets I want that in a credit union not a commercial bank
Unfortunately, they can do so for any reason or no reason, so don't post too much wrongthink on the internet, or else
Financial infrastructure should not be in the hands of private corporations.
What makes you think public banks would be any better. Have you ever been to the DMV? At least with private banks you have the chance to switch to a less shitty bank or credit union; with a public bank you have no chance.
Not news by any stretch of the imagination.