Safe deposit boxes aren’t safe (2019)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109002 - May 2021 (6 comments)
Safe Deposit Boxes Aren't Safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545276 - July 2019 (143 comments)
Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482077 - July 2019 (2 comments)
Keeping physical stuff safe is hard. Banks were specifically invented so that people didn't need to keep valuables on them.
I would not put my life savings in jewelry or something in there, but having an off-premise spot for emergency backup codes and stuff like that? Where's a better option?
A family friend learned this the hard way when a sizeable amount of cash went up in flames and his $300 Sentry safe was a melted mess, the contents forever lost.
This is not at all common today, imo.
How do you remember a strong passphrase after four months in hospital recovering from a cerebral trauma?
Emergency emergencies. Off-site physical backups are important too.
How do you remember where your safe deposit box is after four months in hospital recovering from a cerebral trauma?
There's no perfect solution.
Obviously.
> Banks increasingly regard safe deposit boxes as more of a headache than they’re worth. They’re expensive to build, complicated to maintain and not very lucrative.
Reading the leasing agreement, the bank made it very clear that the "Safe Deposit Box" provided far less assurance that my (non-existent) valuables would be protected than they would in a good safe in my home. The paperwork reminded me that purchasing insurance for the Safe Deposit Box[0] was a necessity and the bank would not be liable for losses.
It's basically a product where the entire thing the customer wants to buy, security at the expense of convenience, is precisely what they are not selling you "despite the name". To make up for that problem, apparently, my local bank thought it'd be best to give them away to people, like me, who have no use for one. Of course it's not lucrative! People who would be willing to pay a reasonable sum of money to protect their assets aren't going to rent a Safe Deposit Box with a "your stuff will probably be there, but get insurance" guarantee.
[0] Do they make Safe Deposit Box insurance or do you add those valuables to your homeowners? I never found out.
Where is the best for a safe to survive in a burning building, but also not be visible to anyone and remain thermally neutral?
Fire safes are passive thermal sinks that reflect and damp heat transfer for as long as possible before ultimately turning into a giant heavy toaster oven. I wonder if active fire safes are a thing? Imagine the security of a safe but with an armored thermal pipe sticking out the top that goes to a heat sink somewhere outdoors. Kind of like AC but for precious documents / grandpa’s watch. I guess you’d want it to fuse and fall off if the pipe started piping heat into the safe.
I would think (no numbers to back it up) for most houses the risk of flooding is higher that the risk of burning down
Edit: oh crap, not again
Honeypot safe only works if the real one is well concealed. So then it's only worth having if it's somehow known/assumed that you have a safe at all. (Otherwise just leave it well-concealed and you can say 'I don't have a safe, there's some cash in my wallet and a little jewellery in the bedroom' just as effectively as 'Here is the safe it is definitely the real one'.)
I believed your safe could be real, until I read that heh.
I could easily bury several caches of valuables, that only my immediate family knows about, and let nature regrow over it.
I mean, what are the chances that a rando stranger is going to be in the middle of nowhere with a metal detector?
Don’t take your cell phone with you when you do the burying. And only tell your family about it with hand written notes. And make sure they know not to look up any information related to the caches. And that they know to never speak of the caches near an internet enabled device.
Also, don’t disturb the ground in any visible way. Just comparing google maps satellite imagery is enough to uncover your hiding place. Probably better to disturb many places and only hide valuables in a few of them.
And to what degree to you trust your family with this secret information?
Edit: Yep, Turing - https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...
Also, lots of cash was recovered destroyed.
Now... One thing I will say about that is, it's harder to find a good spot than you'd think, and good spots are more predictable than you'd think. I've notice several such cash stashes. I worked with a guy that had an even better eye for it.
Now you've got me curious, can you elaborate?
There are signs and landmarks. Trees, stumps, rocks, corners, etc.
Sometimes people make a mark to make it more recoverable, like a notch in a tree, or a topped tree.
Especially when a big part of my job is figuring out what the terrain and vegetation looked like before disturbance for restoration work. I can see 30-100+ years of history on a forested property just by looking around or occasionally reading old surveyors descriptions and stuff.
Beyond that, after you've seen a few, you start to get an eye for the type of spot people like to choose. People are very bad random behavior generators.
They don't burry their cash because it makes sense to do so. They do it because it would be impossible to buy that much gold. Or much of anything, really. I wouldn't be surprised if, after expenses, the Treasury is the largest beneficiary of the drug trade through seignorage
He put a fair bit of thought into:
A) Not forgetting where it is B) it being highly unlikely anyone would ever stumble across it and C) Ensuring his heirs find out about it should anything ever happen to him.
C) was the tricky part, as he’s a lawyer, and therefore doesn’t trust lawyers, and he’s of a generation where technical solutions don’t appeal, and is ultimately the point of risk for anyone trying this route - either you accept that it crosses the Styx with you, or you tell someone, and take the risk therein.
His view on C is that if his kids aren’t smart enough to find it, as he’s apparently left plenty of clues, then that’s their problem, not his. Part of his reason for being obtuse is that apparently in the jurisdictions he has concealed his wealth, buried treasure is taxed far more lightly than inheritance, and he wants them to have reasonable ignorance and deniability.
I'm pretty confident he will eventually die, one way or another.
> apparently in the jurisdictions he has concealed his wealth, buried treasure is taxed far more lightly than inheritance
Ah, so basically it's a case of wanting to evade the laws of the society he lives in.
And he's a lawyer? Unsurprising, but shameful nevertheless.
No wonder banks are getting out of this business.
Every time you drive your car or bicycle you take the risk of running over a star athlete or CEO, and facing a $10 million judgement on lost earnings.
Anyhow, banks will typically require liability disclaimers from deposit box renters, so their exposure is de minimis (probably of freak incident * probability of ineffective disclaimer).
I'm guessing the real reason for not wanting these deposit boxes is the same reason banks are shedding branch staff--labor is costly; and the same reason retailers spent the past few decades selling and leasing back store locations--inflate their quarterly earnings reports by dumping accumulated real estate assets.
[0] https://www.geico.com/living/home/home-protection/safe-keepi...
Why would one need labor to operate a safe-deposit box business? Can't you just have a very secure warehouse full of boxes, with warehouse robots that will grab those boxes and put them into a drop slot when someone taps the appropriate smart card?
Before anyone says that that's impractical/too expensive: there are robotic parking garages that do this for cars, and that's a much higher OpEx.
Because physical security boils down to capable men with guns, whether that's private security, the police, or godfather type arrangements.
>> drones , remote weapons, surveillance tech, “lingering weapons”, has shown that physical security absolutely does not boil down to “ capable men with guns”.
How is that disproving the parents point?
Capable men with drones is not meaningfully different to capable men with guns, or pointy sticks for that matter.
https://uploads.website.storedge.com/60281063-f09b-41fb-be8f...
The allure of a bank is that it’s a bank and it is seen as secure because of the self interest in the bank itself being secure.
It's because most business schools teach business administrators to seek rent for doing nothing.
Making anything, providing any service or really doing anything other than pure rent seeking is an opportunity to be beaten by those who care enough to do it better and so should be avoided.
The ideal business would be one where capital is rented out for maximum return without having to think about how to get the best return.
To a remote man with a spreadsheet everything has a cost and nothing has a value.
To be fair, renting out metal boxes you already own doesn't exactly sound labour-intensive.
At lunch time we used to stroll down to the food market on Leather Lane for a quick bite. It was busy like a bee hive with people working in the city and I absolutely loved it.
I remember walking past all those glitzy jewelry stores on Hatton Garden and staring at the various stuff they had on display - thinking I would never want to work in that business given the risks involved.
Then during the Easter bank holiday in 2015 the famous heist happened at number 88.
I've never seen so many TV vans reporting from the site for weeks on end. It felt completely surreal.
That event confirmed for me that concentrating so many valuables in such a small space (even if tightly guarded) is too risky.
Your home could in theory be burgled but it will never be as attractive as a room full of deposit boxes.
Famous somewhere, but I hadn't heard of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_bur...
Not too bad
(It would 'just' mean one being discovered weakens the overall password, if the finder knows what it is. With SSS knowing any less than all of the shares doesn't reveal any part of the secret.)
And there are various approaches to safeguarding passwords that don't involve writing it down in one place.
TL;DR warrantless search by government, seizure of presumed guilty until proven innocent findings.
It’s probably worse than you think.
Let's say you steal a famous painting worth millions, how are you going to resell it? These are unique pieces, people will know you are selling a stolen good or a fake, no way around it. And the illegitimate owner of the painting will have a hard time enjoying it too, if you show it off, you will get a lot of unwanted attention. In the end, it is a great way of pissing off many people, probably not a great way to make money.
Maybe you can steal and remelt gold items, but still, I don't think that museums make such good targets, not fungible enough ;)
Safe deposit boxes on the other hand often store easy to resell valuables like cash and gold. I fact, I think it would be a terrible idea to put these in museums as it would make them more attractive targets.
If you have land in the middle of nowhere you can bury shit in the ground. But that's not a realistic option for most people.
Wells Fargo — which in recent years has admitted to systematically ripping off customers with fake accounts, hidden fees and a variety of unwanted and unnecessary financial products — didn’t follow that law.
Reading an article like this, you might think you would be better off with BofA or Citibank or Chase, but that’s not the case. They are all the same — constrained by a banking culture and a regulatory regime that forces them to all be the same.
Everyone who works in the media industry knows that will happen -- and I know some people who work in that industry. Even teenagers do this on social media all the time, based on an instinctive understanding of social status.
Take it or leave it, or even better, provide a rebuttal with real evidence rather than a childish emotional response!
The relative status ye. But the absolute status of banks as a group decline.
E.g. used cars salesmen. A honest one's reputation are ruined from the moment they open the store due to bad actors.
Yet somehow smaller banks and credit unions don't have this problem. I've not had any issues like this with my Schwab checking account.
I can prove it didn’t rain yesterday where I live.
Clickwrap agreements are annoying, and devilish when combined with an ongoing service.
If you don't control those assets, they are no longer yours.
You doubt that? Just try to access that safety deposit box when that bank is closed for the night. One day that Bank will close for the night and not reopen for quite a while if at all. What will you do then?
Are you talking about Fridays? Or something else?
Examples: Lehmann Brothers in New York, Pyramid in Australia, that Scottish bank in England some 10 years back, Barings Bank, etc, etc. And there was also the Savings and Loan fiasco in the US around 1990.
Most people lost the lot, or at the very least lost a goodly proportion of their assets.
It's not an issue on the United States. Many countries have similar insurance programs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Co...