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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Fraud is fraud, but I'm happy JPMorgan got caught up in this mess. Buying a promising startup for its technology or product is one thing, but the bank literally only cared about the personal data of its supposed 4 million high school and college aged users. Good riddance the whole thing imploded and there weren't real teenagers being spammed credit card and car loan offers.

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One funny aspect is that Javice had an employment contract with JPM that stated JPM would pay for legal defense related to her official duties. Her lawyer argued that means JPM has to pay for her civil and criminal defense lawyers, and the court agreed!

It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer. When I worked at a Neobank, our valuations were based on that number multiplied by the number of customers we had and people believed our valuations. Never had problems raising money.

I will never forget the situation of a friend whose father committed check fraud in her name when she was still a child meaning she was never able to have a bank account in her name her whole life (without sending her father back to jail).

I suspect the high valuation is because there are a lot of people like my friend or her dad who can't be on that list of possible banking customers because they can't have a bank account at all.

I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.

> zero interest

this mean that you are losing anything between 1% and 10% of your money per year (aka inflation). I am not advocating for big banks (which had put food on my table for most of my life) but you only need a (zero-interest) checking account with a debit card for your spending money. Everything else (imho) is most beneficial if you keep them spread out/hidden away, and serving your other purposes (a balance of growth x availability x speed_of_withdrawing).

I remember watching this vid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ) many years (it feels like it was way before the 6y YT says its age is). I do a combination of this video and the Dave Ramsey 'envelope system' (but with different banks and with different accounts). Now, she speaks about the "US way of life" but I like the principle/discipline of this.

The federal reserve doesn't want zero risk banking where end customer is effectively 100% on their books, and will deny accounts to any bank that functions the way your service would would work ( see the denial of account to The Narrow Bank ). It's against their monetary policies as it destroys the mechanism by which credit expansion happens.

> “pose undue risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and would adversely affect the Federal Reserve’s ability to implement monetary policy"

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-san...

The US Treasury has one, though. Not sure if that satisfies the above criteria.

>I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.

This might be a great business ideas, starting a bank that caters to criminals. Of course, the fees should be pretty high to offset the risks.

>It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer.

Those were app users, not bank customers. I think that is less valuable.

The social media and other app users have long crossed $100/user price, like a decade ago.

So, their app isn't just an app, it is a financial app. Those users can be valued at several hundred each - thus 300 000 real user they had could really be valued at $100M+, no need to fake.

Meta makes $200+ for each US/Canada active user per year.

I feel like an overlooked aspect of "you can't fool an honest man" is that the honest man probably isn't in your vicinity to begin with.

If Diogenes couldn't find an honest man after all his time spent searching, I question if honest men are anything more than an old wive's tale.

No one who is one ever claims to be one, and vice versa. Easy to miss the existence of anything else, maybe, when the streetlamps insist so loudly on being looked exclusively under.

That sounds a lot like much of Big Tech, too.

Given JPM's complicity in a number of obvious pump and dump frauds, particularly in sell-side "analysis" if you can call it that, I think its somewhat churlish and clearly unfair to allow it access to the legal system to defend fraud against itself. But I suppose rules are for the little people (any non-Trump friends at least.)

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