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Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

The fraud story is interesting, but something I had hoped would be addressed by the end of the post, wasn't. You wrote:

>Someone out there is probably mentally screaming at me "you fool!" at this point. With hindsight, I agree...

I was hoping the piece would end with what you would do now (or what should you have done) when Alex called you. Did I fail to understand something in the piece, and simply staying on the phone with Alex would have somehow avoided the fraud situation down the line? It doesn't seem so?

If I were to get such a call, today, my instincts would be to engage in the same "I'm fine" get-off-the-phone-fast actions. What is the alternative?

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I would imagine this phone call's primary goal is trying to sell you higher margin financial products/services.

The way you phrase that, it sounds like these services are more advantageous to the bank, but possibly not to the account holder? If so, that goes against the tone of the article, where Mitchell implies (I think?) that he would have benefited more from speaking to Alex than the other way around.

Not really, these are probably mutually beneficial. Having $35 million sitting in a cash account is, as Mitchell recalls in the article, pretty bad -- you're forgoing a lot of benefit for yourself.

What the bank is probably mainly trying to do is not "extract a higher margin" from you, but rather to "maintain your business." While Alex might not have recognized that a startup that took in a bunch of financing and plopped it into a cash account and then didn't do much with it is a customer who might disappear at any time, on some institutional level the bank is aware of it. They want you to regard them not as an interchangeable place that money sits, but as a valued partner who helps you do things with your money, and as a result you feel like it would both be a risk and a bother to extract all your money and go to some other bank.

It can also be to maintain the bank. They don't like it when accounts get several more million dollars in them than expected and sometimes it can be too much to handle.

> but rather to "maintain your business."

If banks want to keep a customer, you might think the most important thing is to just not annoy or screw over their customers.

Why do they continually treat good customers like shit? I'm in New Zealand and my bank just continuously pisses me off. I don't want any upsell (the arseholes tried to upsell insurance when I got a credit card the other day). I've got a six figure facility at risk (US:HELOC?) and my bank's security practices are shockingly bad (we're way too trusting in New Zealand). Little things like access blocked from oversees for a month (phone banking was theoretically available but I couldn't call international so it wasn't). Aside: I would like to block phone banking because it feels so insecure. I've been looking for a better bank, but I wouldn't get the same mortgage facility, soooooooo I'm kinda stuck (maybe that's the reason they don't need to be good to customers).

Mitchell kept getting annoyed by the bank's activities. They wanted him as a customer but their internal systems didn't know how to make it easy for him. Systems with negative impacts are too common even when you're the guy making them money...

Great article on this: https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/every-industry-is-an-ov...

  I hand the cashier my credit card. She looks at me like I’ve just asked her to barter goats for spices. “Can I have your name?” she asks. “No,” I reply. “You can have my money.”

  Then comes the phone number. Then the email. [] Finally, after this interrogation, I’ve spent $300 and she asks if I’d like a bag. Of course I want a fucking bag: “That’s 25 cents,” she says. Why can’t stores just build the damn bag into the price instead of insulting me at checkout? I’m not asking to be hand-fed grapes like Julius Caesar.

  And God forbid I need to call anyone about anything. Changing an airline ticket? Calling my credit card company? Forget it. Every road leads to an automated voice system with the warmth of a Soviet switchboard.

I also find it annoying when retail stores try to sign me up for marketing emails, but I'm not real sure this is a relevant comparison to the effort of banks to engage with a business customer who has deposited multiple tens of millions of dollars with them.

This reminds me of a call I got from Schwab, which is my brokerage and one of my two banks where I keep checking accounts as well. I had a bunch of money that I had transferred in and stupidly, lazily, just left sitting around earning basically nothing. A nice guy called me one time and pointed out that I could be earning a few hundred bucks (maybe $800?) a month just by putting it all into a very safe money market fund. I did do that (and also got around to investing most of it at a later date).

I'm sure Schwab would rather me have my money in a mutual fund than have a bunch of cash, for the reasons the other commenter pointed out (more complex arrangements and a view of the bank as a partner rather than an interchangeable "money box" is 'stickier') but this was a real double win for me and one of the handful of stories I call upon when I am asked why I do most of my financial business with that company.

Do they have anyone charged with security of mailings? Which seem tacky for such an organization.

Perhaps not directly/immediately - banks like others know that “relationships” drive long term repeat sales.

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