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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

I spent a year traveling in SE Asia circa 2012 and I didn’t have any problems with my bank account. n=1 and all that, and I didn’t have income coming from outside of the US, but I had countless ATM withdrawals and credit card spends.

The only time a compliance officer has been in touch with me was when I was moving money to crypto exchanges.

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The big factor is whether you change your address or not.

Keep your US address on there and VPN (though frankly I’ve never needed to for anything other than Charles Schwab) and you often glide through unnoticed.

Ahh, good point I was running my own VPN with all traffic coming through Dallas for financial stuff.

2023 is very different to 2012. I remember back in the day you can open a paypal account with only an email and receive/send money with it. No kyc required.

I traveled to SEA extensively in 2022 and 2023. Never had any problems with using ATM to withdraw money. The only problem was with using Amex card.

Problem because it's not supported or problem due to fraud prevention by amex? I've travelled a lot and never had issues with amex or chase (once I used my chase credit card for the first time in over a year on the opposite side of the world and the transaction was instantly approved).

It depends on the bank, your profile, your visa/mastercard credit card type, the volume you are doing with the bank, etc…

Amex are less accepted because they have a higher processing fee.

Simply spending money can trigger anti-fraud measures, but those are usually easily sorted out with a call.

What all the people profiled in the article have in common is that they were depositing money in "suspicious" ways.

I did something similar and my banker told me to knock it off.

What exactly did they tell you?

I've been doing it for the last 7 years without any problems.

The compliance officer was following up with me I think because it looked like I was doing structured transactions, back when crypto exchange max ACH was $500/day. I did some explanation of crypto and he was like “so it’s for investment?” and that was it.

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