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Others replying here are jumping to conclusions. A frozen account could be due to any number of things. The customer service person may or may not have access
by jagged-chisel 5y ago
Others replying here are jumping to conclusions.
A frozen account could be due to any number of things. The customer service person may or may not have access to the reasons. In any case, it might be money laundering (from the bank’s perspective), therefore they can’t tell you anything.
Of course this is ridiculous. Due process should exist, even when a private organization “accuses” someone of illegal activity.
- physicsguy 5y agoThe law is really strict. If you look on reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance there's loads of people complaining that Monzo have frozen accounts and won't tell you way. In pretty much every circumstance, the person involved has been moving large amounts of money around through Crypto, so it's fairly obvious why they might flag that up as potential fraud/money laundering and cause an investigation.
- dmje 5y agoI'm in the process of trying to open a UK business bank account for myself and two other directors. The hoops we have to jump through are insane.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoGenerally when your account is locked any complaint against that doesn't even touch customer service, but compliance department.
- xyst 5y agoIt’s definitely their anti money laundering (AML) detection system kicking in. However it’s clearly getting false positives and their internal AML team is getting hit with a high amount of them thus causing the delays in resolving them. This is why you don’t build your own solutions to well solved problems.
- Nextgrid 5y agoI wonder if their system, by virtue of being modern, is too good and catches a lot of fraud that would otherwise remain undetected by legacy banks' systems? Not to mention, opening a Monzo account is much easier and can be done remotely, thus it could be attracting a lot of malicious activity that just wouldn't even reach the legacy banks because the laborious account opening process would filter those out?
- dalyons 5y agoI work for a different fintech and both of your points are spot on. Much higher baseline fraud attempts due to online/remote accounts, but much more sophisticated real-time ML/detection systems.
- avianlyric 5y agoMonzo’s system is a little unique in that it runs fraud and AML checks in real-time while the transaction is being processed, and thus able to block a high risk transaction before it completes. As a result Monzo is frequently able to return stolen funds to victims. Other banks run their AML systems in batch at the end of the day, and will only freeze an account after the money has left. So yeah, you’ll see a lot more people complaining about Monzo, because their money will be frozen while they’re trying to exfiltrate it. That doesn’t mean Monzo has an unusually high false positive rate, it just means that people are used to being able to get away with fraudulent behaviour, and have their accounts frozen empty. Rather than being stopped mid-act and having their accounts frozen while they still contain illegitimate funds.
- dylan604 5y ago>getting false positive <snip> delays in resolving them. There should be a penalty for this. When "innocent" users are denied access to their money, those actions are much more felt by the user than the bank. That user's money is a rounding error to a bank, but to the user it is everything. An incorrectly frozen account should come with some sort of "oops we're sorry" type of something that a bank can understand: monetary reward for the user. I would rather criminals get away with a laundering transaction than me not being able to buy/pay for something in my day to day because of some dumbass AI algo.