Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
bitsaboutmoney.com
bitsaboutmoney.com
In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work.
In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash. I only needed $15k but I wanted to keep more in case other vendors were going to be like this too.
They asked me why, I told them, and then asked them if they’d make me 100 accounts so I could get around the Zelle limit. They said it wouldn’t work but that they wouldn’t do that anyway.
I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k.
I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out).
I always read about people being hassled by their banks, but never credit unions.
Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking relationship, but not prevent other banks from opening new accounts.
From what I understand, there are other reporting systems in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this form of information sharing.
It helps tremendously if the bank manager knows you, or at least recognizes you.
I’m in SF so this isn’t a big amount and I’d been to this branch once before. So it wasn’t like I was Al Pacino in Scarface pulling up shaking hands or anything.
I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.
Never.
Not one day in their life.
Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.
[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-savings-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28... [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate
Most people asking their bank to withdraw $50k+ in cash are by definition going to have above-average assets.
I mean arguably it was such a weird detail that one would not have made it up (and, also, if, as you'd kind of expect, there were no branches at all with upstairs tellers, that would obviously invalidate the whole thing).
tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neighborhood with a lot of rich clients.
> As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous.
Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win.
I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much less likely to be widely publicized.
For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post:
> It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.
I had some doubts that the story, as presented, was true. I did what I hear journalists do, and went out and reported the story. Some people apparently believe this was an aggressive action, and some people believe that the original story was strictly true, and I can understand either of those beliefs separately but holding both at the same time seems tricky.
I did not believe that New York Magazine was complicit. I harbored the suspicion that they might be incompetent. This suspicion was exacerbated by unambiguous evidence of them being incompetent, in failing to detect that a 17 year old claiming to have made $72 million trading stocks, and then doubling down on that story because their fact-checker had passed it.
You have made, in this thread, several claims that I am wildly miscalibrated with respect to banking procedure. I do not believe I am. For example, I seem to be able to make confident predictions like "Oh, if the teller window is on the second floor, that narrows the selection of bank branches sufficiently to be probably uniquely identifying given any other piece of information" and be proven retrospectively right on those predictions.
If you would like to take issue with my other claims about banking procedure, pick the one that looks fishiest to you, and then propose odds.
C'mon, what scenario do you have in mind where New York magazine "materially disavows the article" [0] but the writer, Cowles, is not guilty of fabulism (presenting a creative writing exercise as non-fiction would count as that level of deception)?
> You have made, in this thread, several claims that I am wildly miscalibrated with respect to banking procedure.
I am very confident that you know far more about banking policy and conventions than I do. So when you assert that the facts of NYMag do not seem reconcilable with the reality of American banking, I'm happy to take your word for it. Now that you've essentially retracted that doubt, a doubt so strong that you were willing to spend thousands of dollars to investigate it over a year, I'm very confused about your priors. Was Cowles being richer than you had thought possible your only flawed assumption? Like if she had only written "btw I'm from a rich family and I live in an owner-occupied home in Brooklyn", that alone would have been enough to resolve the many issues you raise about the unlikeliness of a $50k cash withdrawal? What's the threshold of wealth in which that $50k transfer is given cursory approval? Is the $50k easy because she's a one-percenter? Would it be easy if she is/were merely in the top 5% or 10% of household wealth
One of my main frustrations about your writeup is that it sets up these questions and then fails to answer them, as if the fact of Cowles' unspecified wealth is alone the self-evident answer? Speaking as a layperson, I assume that being a 30-something living in New York who had $80,000 in savings and checkings alone -- which she explicitly states in her article -- would be enough to qualify for a no-hold-up same day $50k withdrawal from a New York bank. Is that not the case?
> I had some doubts that the story, as presented, was true. I did what I hear journalists do, and went out and reported the story
And genuine kudos to you, the world would be a better place if "trust, but verify" were our default modes of operation. I guess what bugs me is that your article opens with a detailed examination of how NYMag fumbled that 2014 profile of a teenage millionaire, but you end your own investigation after being apparently satisfied with a fact-check that seems almost as facile as the one purportedly done for their retracted 2014 profile.
Presume a universe in which Cowles did indeed publish a fabrication; it would require an extreme motivation for her to risk torching her career and in such a highly public and scrutinized fashion. Such a motivated person could easily put in the work to make sure that the bank they allude to vaguely fits the description they choose to publish (tbh, we should ask ourselves why would an ostensible fabricator would even choose to publish that "upstairs" detail, when they can easily formulate a description that vaguely applies to a dozen New York banks?). The fact that it's in a police report is, as you say, not a big deal given the light consequences of a false police report (and not a big deal, especially compared to the consequences of career suicide).
> This would be a very different piece if that police report, or any other documentation at a trusted institution, named e.g. 266 Broadway instead.
Why exactly would it be different? What if she had named 266 Broadway to the police, and omitted literally just a single word from her published article ("upstairs"); how would that change the thrust of your dogged investigation, which seems so premised on your knowledge and assumptions of the banking system? So many words and so much effort (again, kudos to putting in the infuriating work needed to get the NYPD to respond) are devoted to this one detail that one can't help but think it was a significant factor in quelling your doubt. Ironically, it reminds me of the strategy that Cowles' alleged scammers used: provide her with seemingly hard-to-know real world information (her SSN, her physical address, that her "2-year-old son was playing in [her] living room") to lull her into believing something much more significant (that the scammer is a CIA agent about to arrest her husband).
You aren't scamming us of course (hey it's not your fault for us choosing to read your article). But asserting that this second-story bank detail is worth attention, implying that a fabulising Cowles wouldn't have put that much thought into her lie, feels like a disservice to the rigorous investigation that your article promises. And without an equally significant number of words dedicated to how you may or may not have had miscalibrated assumptions wrt banking procedure, this is why your article feels incredibly frustrating.
[0] https://manifold.markets/patio11/will-new-york-magazine-walk...
I'm no banking expert, but I'm pretty sure no-hold same day withdrawals of that size need much more than that. I wouldn't be surprised if her family has contracted with Bank of America for private banking and family office services, which is usually economical around the $10M assets under management mark (wikipedia says 50M[1] but I've seen lower numbers cited in FatFIRE). In which case the savings and checking figure is essentially nominal, as the wealth is there, but tied up for estate planning (read: tax minimization) purposes; if someone needs money, family offices can set up credit lines. I imagine in that scenario they're basically paying themselves interest.
In any case I doubt any bank is willing to publicly state what the thresholds are in a way anyone could cite, for fear of scammers using that info against them or their clients.
The reason why I think the threshold may be much lower than what Patrick insinuates it to be, is because similar big cash scams have been reported by people seemingly much poorer than the NYMag columnist:
https://www.wate.com/news/top-stories/knoxville-woman-loses-...
> What happened next is tragic for Colleen as she went to her bank. “I told him how much I had in there and he told me to withdraw everything but the $700. I told the lady I need to withdraw $19,000. I said I needed it cash.” Colleen said.
$19,000 is of course less than $50k, but it's still well above the $10k anti-laundering reporting threshold, and it involves a victim in Knoxville for whom that $19k represented her "life savings", yet it seems the bank didn't stop her from a same-day total withdrawal.
(note: this Knoxville incident happened in Dec. 2024, so it's of course possible the victim is perpetrating a copycat fabrication after reading the NYMag article)
This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor".
Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this…
I mean the NYMag story was incredibly dumb and far-fetched, even compared to most scam stories. But the fact that she didn't write it pseudonymously, and gave the specific date that it happened, and also claimed to have called the police, that felt enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt her story was more or less rooted in reality.
I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.
She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag for around a decade.
Is it possible that such a New Yorker could have all those things while barely making in the middle-class? Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income, e.g. maybe she or her husband worked at Goldman Sachs before their current careers, or come from rich families.
I too assumed that $50k was too big of a cash draw for any non-business account, but it didn't seem like a stretch to imagine that she fit the bank's profile of a wealthy customer (esp. at her young age). Patrick knows far more about the financial system than I do, so I have to assume his skepticism was founded in what he thought were widely applicable hard-coded rules and policy. I wish he would have spent a fraction of his word count telling us the assumptions/knowledge about bank rules that he had been misinformed on. Because this year-long multi-thousand dollar fraud investigation of his couldn't have just been because he didn't imagine a NYMag financial columnist might be wealthy?
Probably the biggest giveaway in the article was the $50,000 inheritance from a grandparent. When my grandparents died, they left the grandchildren a small amount ($500 each, IIRC), and the vast majority to their direct children. This seems standard to me, and if the ratios hold then she presumably stands to inherit far, far more in the future.
I find it hard to fault anyone for assuming people are like themselves in most ways. But maybe don't follow his twitter hot takes. Or twitter in general?
A direct quote:
> Initially, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford my taxes this year, but then my accountant told me I could write off losses due to theft. So from a financial standpoint, I’ll survive, as long as I don’t have another emergency — a real one — anytime soon.
I quote several more bits from the piece verbatim.
A much better signal is that when she reflects on how the stolen $50k could have been used, she imagines: "I could have paid for over a year’s worth of child care up front. I could have put it toward the master’s degree I’ve always wanted. I could have housed multiple families for months." Sure, just because she didn't say "I could have paid off my mortgage/student/car loans" doesn't mean she doesn't have those. But it's a far stretch to assert that her written viewpoint sounds like a typical middle-class/upper-middle-class American, nevermind definitively excludes her from being rich (or at least belonging to one of the hundreds of thousands of millionaire households in New York).
From the article:
> When recounted these same statements, my friend Byrne Hobart, who has actually lived among this social milieu before, laughed knowingly and said “Ah, family money.”
It wasn't a misrepresentation; it was just vague, and the author read it wrong.
After reading the article, sure, I can see that that's what was implied, but I can only say that it wasn't clear enough for me. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but I think I could have enjoyed it more if primed differently.
In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam described in TFA.
From what I can tell banks generally don't rely on airtight logical guarantees. Rather they have some kind of exposure on every transaction, which they work to reduce. This isn't the most efficient system, but they deal with more types of fraud than just fake checks.
In other words, "at the time we paid/did not reverse this, we thought the payer account was good for it, but as it turns out it was funded via transactions that ended up being reversed, and now the account is in the red" is not a valid reason to claw back money.
And that makes intuitive sense as well: Only the paying bank has a complete picture of all account activities (including out-of-character/potentially suspicious ones), so it makes sense to primarily hold them accountable.
This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?
> A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better.
I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report.
Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be.
edit: one example of how tendentious this article is:
> The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history.
> Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution.
So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim.
[0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-...
[2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.
1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash
2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this closely.
> Then, I read the article, with a particular attention to the paragraph quoted above. I felt that several elements of this paragraph were inconsistent with the standard practice of banking.
The quoted paragraph that he refers to:
> When I reached the bank, I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs. Michael [a member of the scamming team] was on speakerphone in my pocket. I asked the teller for $50,000. The woman behind the thick glass window raised her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams. I thanked her and left.
How does "The Bank of America branch that she named by address (in the police report) has a second-floor teller window" a meaningful verification of the NYMag's problematic paragraph? Unless you think that literally the main problem with the NYMag graf is the first sentence: I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs
> The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it
She knows there's a Bank of America on 1 Flatbush Avenue. You really think that someone who spent months writing and working with an editor to publish a massive fabrication is too lazy to actually visit that actual location, especially when it's a short subway stop from her home?
I think a big part of it is that there isn't any actual bullshit filler, and a lot of interesting information (even though it may not be critical for the TL;DR of the story). Most long form articles end up describing irrelevant details like the weather on the day of the interview, or the interior decoration of someone's house. Here, it's immediately clear why every piece of information is included, the article shares a lot of background information but tells something interesting with every paragraph.
Agreed. The author could have written, "it turns out the writer was from a wealthy family, grew up in a 200 year old home, and is president of the family's $2 million charity."