Hacker News Reader

Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

>use services like wise.com for transfers

Last I heard, wise.com is outright stealing people's money now.

Otherwise, this is a good heads-up. Banking for expats can be tricky; a lot of US financial institutions don't want to service customers who live overseas, and will automatically cancel your account if they find out you don't live in the US.

The US is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where people weren't allowed to leave. Even China doesn't have this problem; there are tons of Chinese expats living in democratic nations, and they don't have problems like this.

View on HN

Really? Wise has been reliable for a long time and they've improved the partners they work with in the last year to get much faster transfer times. I've sent around 15-20k usd with wise

Wise was reliable and cheap up until October when they cancelled all the business debit cards and changed all business account/ routing numbers, both with a 2 day heads up. There’s no way to pay any of the bills that require debit/credit cards, so I just had to get a brick and mortar account. Wise said they’re “working hard” on getting to issuing new debit cards, but can’t give any sort of timeline.

I’ve moved the majority of my money out since it feels like they might fold soon, there’s just a lot of things on autopay with that account so it’s kind of a hassle to move everything off.

Can you recommend any alternatives?

For international money transfers, I prefer Remitly.com

Thanks, I'm going to try that, do you have a referral link? https://www.remitly.com/us/en/home/referral-offer-program

Sending money through them still seems to be OK, mostly. But holding funds -and similarly to the Chase stories in this post- seems to be risky business, if you don't fit a cookie cutter model of a business (for whatever Wise's definition of that is). Ironically if you're using Wise, you probably aren't a cookie cutter business in the first place, so I don't know what's going on with them.

Anecdotally it definitely also seems to be related if you deal with the third world much, as the linked OP below and myself are. Luckily the worst I've come across is arbitrary extra KYC popping up exactly as I'm needing to do time-sensitive transfers.

Good thread on recent events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069117

I exclusively use Wise for dealing with the third world. I never keep a balance there, just instant transfers, as I don’t trust any pseudo banks like paypal to not freeze accounts for no reason.

Thank you for the thread link

If they are stealing money why haven’t they been sued in criminal court? Last time I checked, stealing was a crime in literally all countries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com