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Comment by Krypto26 | Hacker News Reader

My question is , why don't these people have bank accounts?

Depends. Why can't banks offer more debit cards to more people and, I don't know, stop honoring overdrafts? Transactions should decline, not overdraft, even with overdraft off.

We've built lots of traps for people that have balances near-zero that keep them near zero, and one little mistake snowballs into blacklists from Telecheck, ChexSystems, and other fun companies.

Meanwhile once you can keep your balance with at least three significant zeros in it, the bank will be happy to shower you back in rewards and cashback, ripped away from the fees and interest levied to the poor.

Bank of America had a class action against them because they would reorder transactions to make you overdraft.

For example, when I was relatively poor and near 0 balance in like 2009 era I’d wait for my direct deposit to come so I could grocery shop and pay bills.

When it deposited, the funds would become available to use even though the transaction wasn’t cleared, pretty normal so far.

So say you pay 2 bills and grocery shop, come back on Monday and you’d see that your pending deposit vanished, 3 transactions cleared for 3 overdrafts, then your deposit cleared afterward.

This is just one that I know about because it happened to me. I wonder how many less blatant scams like this exist that most people aren’t even aware of.

This is 100% true and also a tactic used by PNC when I was a near zero person. The hack around it was to try to withdraw cash, then use that. They wouldn't let you overdraft cash withdrawal. That's one anecdotal likely stale trick to avoid the traps they set.

The problem is then you have the card number sitting in some online card wallet, set for Autopay or something, and suddenly it's just... allowed to charge you next month even though the card's got nothing.

Hell no, that shit should have bounced. Now you're in the hole $80 because your phone payment took an autopay from your Visa number.

Blindly allowing recurring auths to bypass the overdraft rules is utterly insane. Whoops, let's just autobill a few extra zeros!

Interesting, PNC has never once done anything like this to me. In fact I feel that they are pretty up front about telling you what you have available and what your actual balance is.

It’s generally not something you’d notice if you’re not living on the edge of $0 balance. I’d be surprised if any banks are still doing it after the bofa settlement.

They were supposed to stop doing it 10 or so years ago. No clue if that's true. Haven't been the zero person for a while.

When we had to juggle overdraft fees, our trick was to get a large money order. We would take one big overdraft with one fee and save ourselves from multiple fees while still paying multiple bills.

TD Bank was slapped for the exact same process. Transactions would be reordered to ensure you incurred hundreds in overdraft fees even though you had just deposited a check.

It's a bit of reverse check kiting: The bank changing when your check clears so that you actually don't have the money you think you do.

Now, there were fine print that stated only X dollars worth of your deposit would be "Available immediately", but even that was a lie.

Yes. It's a little sad to see other comments assume that people have something to hide for doing something as basic as wanting to send money back to family.

Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.

> With the changes, people became reluctant to make these transactions, Ornelas said, because they worry it will open them up for government surveillance or targeting by immigration authorities in the current intensified enforcement.

Presumably, because it's hard to get a bank account in a country you aren't supposed to be in.

What about bank accounts from the country they're from?

You can't practically use foreign institutions for your day-to-day banking.

Someone writes you a check. Can you easily cash that with your bank in another country? Best scenario: they have a check cashing app for your phone, so you don't have to mail anything off or present in person; but will that take an American check?

I keep forgetting that Americans still use checks. Cashing checks is a non-issue in many countries, and I have no problem accessing or using my bank account from any country. But I have never in my 52 years cashed a check. That's something from my parents' time.

Unbanked folks are a large, legal population in the country. And immigration authorities recently have been less concerned about status vs if you look like you belong.

Economists keep track of the number of "unbanked" people. At the lower end of the spectrum the % of "unbanked" individuals is quite high and they live almost exclusively in an all-cash economy. Particularly in immigrant communities. There are a number of problems with being "unbanked", in particular if your house is burglarized you can lose your entire life savings, and you have little to no access to formal credit, which in the US at least, is the primary path to accruing wealth or at least savings.

Because then you’d have to pay taxes

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