But it does seem like the world lacks a manual on How Not To Get In Trouble With Your Bank. “Structuring” in particular is something someone might innocently do just because they like round numbers.
Nothing nefarious and I'm not even sure if I won or lost out of this - but it was interesting to catch.
Why would you do this?
I, too, am dying to know why you do this. I assume that you didn't intend it to be punitive, but that's what it looks like to me.
That means shady restaurant could change your tip the next day if they wanted to pull a fast one on you.
In other words, it’s not possible to get an immediate notification of the total amount charged including tip until 1-2 days after the meal.
(Don’t ask me why the system works this way, makes no sense to me)
- every restaurant PoS has to be updated to handle this use case;
- you have to wait for your server to make a second visit to your table before you can sign your tab and leave;
- every server has to spend extra time dealing with every table's tab upfront, rather than settling after close when no customers are inconvenienced by the time that takes;
- and all this cost and friction to reduce the incidence of a kind of low-value card-present fraud which is trivial for the customer to have reversed, and quite rare in all respects save the purely anecdotal.
If you're going to worry about any kind of payment card chicanery at a restaurant, the thing worth looking out for is skimming, not this.
In fact, the card terminals themselved ask how much you want to tip when you pay and then the card payment is taken on the total. I don't think it would be possible to proceed another way with all the safety procedures in place nowadays.
Otherwise, people used to leave cash on the table when they left even if they had paid by card (meal only) and they wanted to tip.
I have the sense that tipping is much more customary in the US than in Europe, which may also make a difference. Certainly there is a significant semiosis around the concept here, which would also have to change in response to a change in the shape of the practice; I don't know exactly how much that contributes to things staying as they are, but I doubt it's of no import.
Oh, I see. The US are so 1980s ;)
In Europe all card payments are chip-and-pin so they have to hand the card machine to you for you to type your pin.
EMV is pretty common here these days, but evidently optional for restaurants; I suspect there's a carveout in the relevant association rules.
Interesting; I rarely carry a card and just pay with my phone. I've never been to the US, but it certainly wasn't an issue when I visited Canada. I should probably remember to take my card if I visit a restaurant in the US.
That said, I assume even restaurants whose POS equipment is well hidden would be generally able to handle folks who prefer the single point of failure.
It's 69.
I still don't know why Stripe closed my account (I was selling cheap USB oscilloscopes online, never had a complaint. Couldn't get in contact with them at all when it happened.)
My bank account was closed because I filled in a KYC form incorrectly, and they didn't have a process in place to follow up properly when this had occurred.
My bank account was closed because I filled in a KYC form incorrectly, and they didn't have a process in place to follow up properly when this had occurred.
But if you’ve never been on the other side providing customer service, you may be astonished at the systemic fraud/illegal attempts happening constantly.
When I did CS at Blizzard for WoW at least half our work was dealing with compromised accounts (essentially by gold sellers), and then a good deal of “I’ve been hacked!” tickets were by the thieves trying to double steal from an account.
To put that in perspective, it was $100,000s or $1,000,000s in CS costs per month (at just Blizzard) to help customers who were victims of a large scale full time industry (not individuals, organisations) which compromises accounts to make a living.
People banned for confirmed cheating with 3rd party programs would make support requests repeatedly in the hope they’d come across an agent who “makes a mistake and accidentally unbans them”, occasionally you would see lots of them trying the same strategy or telling the same story since they saw a forum post of someone who said “this worked for me”.
Legitimate mistakes happen, but they’re like 1% of the time, the rest of the time it’s systemic attempted fraud.
So the person you’re replying to is most likely aware of this reality and says that “complaining on forums” is most often by people who aren’t telling the full story.
Hence them saying, if your story is legit, take it to the right place to get help, otherwise you’re looking like a just another fraudster (who do this systematically) trying to game the system in some way.
IME they really don’t like when you work around their eg 50k/day ACH transfer limit by initiating 50k ACH transfers on 4 consecutive days to move an account of 200k. But they don’t tell you what they actually want you to do if you want to move 200k - and for obvious reasons they probably don’t want to make these transfers fully frictionless. They just assume you’ll know to show up at a branch in person or get on a phone to ask about it and treat you like a criminal if you don’t.
My last bank had limits like 20k/day and 50k/week, so it seems like yours could have 50k/day and 60k/week if they "really don't like" you using it like this.
And yes, this will cost more and take more time than the spreading-it-out method.
maybe if you're moving 50k/week they'll try and get you on a business account, but at that point you're already not using the account for the purposed you claimed when you opened the account.
If you do what I did, you usually get a temporary hold on your account and some very skeptical bank employee calling you to grill you on what you’re doing.
On one hand I get it. For every story like mine, where this is just a temporary frustrating inconvenience, there’s probably a story where grandma lost her life savings after talking to the nice man from Microsoft on the phone. But also they don’t make it clear at all what you are supposed to do as non-criminal to work around their restrictions, which is just bad for customers.
Yes, it's hilarious.
One of my banks requires me to do the transaction over the phone if it's above a certain limit.
At which point, you talk to someone in a call center, and they proceed to ask you exactly the same information which you needed to introduce in their web interface to make the wire transfer yourself, and nothing else.
This includes giving your web interface credentials over the phone, which could be heard by someone inadvertently or even phished if you happened to have misdialed accidentally. Or stolen by the call center employee.
It's also great fun to have to spell out 20+ account digits, the names of the other people/companies, phone numbers and email addresses to receive confirmations and even a description of the transaction (fortunately I don't always buy sex toys).
Gosh, how I love to spell out all this information, digit by digit, letter by letter, over a phone call! But since it's for my protection it makes it OK, right? Right? Hello?
It wasn’t ever really resolved in a satisfactory way but it got to the point where I was so frustrated and tired that I said “fine, we can settle on $200” because it wasn’t really worth pursuing further (based on my hourly rate and how much wasted time I’d already sunk into it)
Read this case-study from the UK. https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/decisions-case-studie...
"We thought the spending on Marta’s account was very unusual for her and – after the first few payments – the pattern of transfers from her account should have caused the bank some concern meaning that it ought to have intervened. We thought that if the bank had asked Marta about the transactions she would have told it what she was doing."
Consider the implications of this.
It gets worse, "In deciding fair compensation, we also considered if would be fair for Marta to bear any additional responsibility for what happened. However, as we thought the trading platform and correspondence with the fraudsters was very convincing, we decided against that on the facts of this case. So we asked the bank to refund all the transactions which took place after the point we thought it should have intervened."
This regulator does not respect the concept of personal responsibility.
These problems are also downstream of systematic public policy failure. We have had telephones for about a century. Yet in 2023, it is still routine for pensioners to receive calls from organised fraudsters. There is no reliable way to trace the source of these calls, to block ranges of numbers, to prevent scam call centres, to issue pensioner-friendly forms of telephone with higher safeguards. These problems are not technically difficult to solve. All could be fixed if the telcos behaved responsibly. That work should have been done thirty or more years ago.
Since that work was not done, there is now a fraud crisis. In response, regulators have forced controls to the last point possible, which is with the banks. Huge inefficiencies follow.
> The CRM Code did not cover this type of transaction, because the payments Marta made from her bank account were sent to an account held in her own name with the crypto exchange. However, outside of the CRM Code, banks have other fraud prevention obligations – including to look out for unusual transactions.
In other words although there's a document saying what a bank should try to do, that is actually meaningless because the regulator believes banks should somehow stop all fraud even in cases where people are literally giving random strangers total control over their bank account, deliberately, because they can't be bothered understanding how to operate their own financial accounts.
The cherry on top:
> If you invest in a firm which isn’t authorised by the FCA, you risk losing your money, without any protection.
Apparently not, because if some civil servant thinks you are pitiable and the scam was convincing, they'll force the bank (i.e. other customers) to make you whole again anyway.
This situation creates a market for new fraud-detection products, if anything just so that the banks can tell the regulator that they did their due diligence. Of course it depends on how common situations like Marta's are, and how expensive they are for the banks.
It's worth bearing in mind that most financially motivated criminals are after easy marks. If you're too hard or expensive to hit, they'll find another target. If you're seeing like a bank, that's a victory and the protocols are doing their job by reducing fraud.
$20-ish to move 200k safely is nothing. If you are doing it internationally, it's typically tiny compared to the FX cost.
Point is, wires are cheap for what they do. They aren't your only option, but all options have tradeoffs.
As I said, there is a range of cost/risk/PITA options available. This is niche enough I don't think it's particularly worrying the banks don't support it easier.
They like to keep the impression that account freezes are discretionary not automatic.
I suspect that's the norm that banks are expecting.
I'm gonna sound like a shill, but 99% of the problems people are writing about in this thread would be solved by opening an account at schwab. unless you routinely deposit/withdraw large amounts of cash, there's no reason to waste time with other banks.
Either way, the bank has trained the customer to work around limits. They can't have it both ways.
Surely, just picking up the phone and speaking to them is faster and easier than engaging in structural transactions like that.
And also no it isn’t faster to pick up the phone, even if I don’t get out on hold at all. An ACH transfer takes seconds, it’s like writing a digital check. Doing it 4 times takes very little time.
I find it's much easier to engage in a 15 minute phone call than to do multiple transactions over a number of days. You may find it different, of course.
Hell, in Spain you can't even legally pay anything in cash if it costs more than 1,000 EUR. In Greece, the limit is 500 EUR.
They will tell you to use a wire transfer.
Don't do everything online. Do the big or unusual stuff person-to-person. It doesn't even have to be an in-person visit. Give them a call.
I wouldn't ever ask whether or not I'll get an SAR, though. That sort of question is pointless. Instead, I just treat my bank as a core partner to my business and include them in my plans. The side-effect is that nothing I do looks suspicious to them.
Lithuania has worked hard to become a fintech hub for Europe, and that isn’t based on a poor regulatory regime.
If you can bring actual facts to the table as to why the Lithuania banking license is inferior, we can have a discussion. Now you are just spouting baseless “Lithuania banking license is bad because of Lithuania” nonsense.
I only do this on the occasional Wednesday though when things are quiet at work
There's no shortage of people who found their accounts closed for "fraud" who did nothing wrong, but instead were victimized by the algo and the general incompetence of banking tech.
Personal financial experts often tell people to carry a credit card from a bank that isn't yours or have a checking account at a separate bank because this is so common.
Lastly, the people moving money to blacklisted places aren't opening Bank of America checking accounts. There's entire cottage industries and crypto and shady international banks, etc ready to cater to them. They're not getting banned because they use services that don't ban them for moving money around like this. But everyday working class people get banned randomly for moving gifts or tuition money around, etc.
My understanding of money laundering, and the laws designed to catch it, wasn’t that it’s used to get money into illegal places. Laundering is used to get money back out of illegal places in a way they can spend as legal money - exactly a Bank of America account.