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Comment by thereddaikon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a european but I do have an example. A few years back I purchased a project car in cash. I don't carry checks, who does anymore? And my bank would have given me grief trying to transfer an amount that large at once. I had tried before and it would trigger their fraud detection and give me headaches. Its good its there but can be a barrier when I'm just trying to buy something. So going to branch and withdrawing the cash was the most convenient option.

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I'm in Denmark, and the last car I bought was from a private seller on a Sunday, we met at a coffee shop and settled the (large, cars are expensive here) payment via an instant bank transfer that I initiated from my laptop. The money immediately showed in the seller's account and we transferred the title/registration via a government online service (which is free of charge).

Easy as that, no need for checks or cash.

In the US, it’s quite possible your bank may not exist tomorrow. This just happened with two banks here. Plus during natural disasters you won’t be able to load up your laptop to transfer money for groceries, or NFC for that matter. These things still need cash.

No need for people that understand and trust the systems you used. That doesn't mean everyone understands how to do what you said, but they can count cash just fine.

This seems a US centric problem. No one in Europe has carried checks since the 90s and large bank transactions are really a non issue as they resolve within a banking day and for a small fee you can usually do real time transfers too.

Or for free. One of the reasons Venmo and similar do well in the US but have almost no equivalent (and certainly not at scale) in the UK, for example, is that free, near instant transfer of cash from retail (i.e. ordinary people) bank accounts has been free for years. If I need to pay someone, I need their bank account number and their bank identifying number, and that's it; the money will be in their bank within sixty seconds, with no fee. I've told people mine so often to get paid that I've accidentally memorised it.

Even some people who historically took cash (such as household tradesmen) now often simply have the money transferred instantly on the doorstep, rather than have to carry cash around in their pockets all day. I imagine a similar story in much of the rest of Europe.

We’re a few years late but getting this now with FedNow.

Checks are still a big thing in France nowadays.

Idk about europe, but as an American I would have used a money order for this. Unless I'm buying up a friends junker. Gotten grief lately from local DMV when we don't have a paper trail for buying up cars out of state when it comes time to get them registered here. But if I'm buying locally it's easier to just call up a Notary friend and stamp a printed bill of sale while we hand over cash.

In NL, all transactions above 10k are monitored and tracked, if you want to collect larger than x-k from your bank in cash it is monitored and tracked (depends on the bank, usually less than 3k). Depositing large cash transactions is monitored as well. If you are staying within the law there is no real way to get around it since hardly any legal employer will pay you in cash.

If the banks actually track it or not is another question. Every now and then a report comes out mentioning a banks failure to do so.

To be clear, the ~10k USD cash limit before reporting is standard in all highly advanced countries for global money laundering agreements. You see these same restrictions when travelling internationally.

Easy workaround is that you do more than one cash payment.

If your goal is to avoid scrutiny, I would not recommend breaking up a cash payment into a series of smaller cash payments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

In the US banking system, that's called structuring. Which means that transactions of $10,000 or more are legally suspicious, and transactions under $10,000 are legally suspicious.

Logicians, please simplify the previous statement.

You are incorrect: "Transactions under $10k" are not legally suspicious, but rather, multiple transactions that are very large but under $10k but when added together are more than $10k. It's not that easy to end up under scrutiny for structuring unless you're running a cash heavy business without declaring it. Moreover, 99% of the time, the "scrutiny" is "fill out this paperwork"

I stand by my statement. Are banks required to scrutinize $10K+ transactions? Yes. Are banks required to scrutinize <$10K transactions to determine whether they're really $10K+ transactions? Yes.

Compare: in the US, you can be detained for driving over the speed limit. You can also be detained for driving under the speed limit, if police believe either that your slow speed is dangerous, or that you are driving slowly to avoid being detained. In all but the most egregious cases of abuse, a driver will have little reason to complain that they shouldn't have been pulled over.

These are both dragnets.

Which is probably illegal!

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