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Completely agree that banks should provide prescriptive guides. IME they really don’t like when you work around their eg 50k/day ACH transfer limit by initiati
by opportune 3y ago
Completely agree that banks should provide prescriptive guides.
IME they really don’t like when you work around their eg 50k/day ACH transfer limit by initiating 50k ACH transfers on 4 consecutive days to move an account of 200k. But they don’t tell you what they actually want you to do if you want to move 200k - and for obvious reasons they probably don’t want to make these transfers fully frictionless. They just assume you’ll know to show up at a branch in person or get on a phone to ask about it and treat you like a criminal if you don’t.
- dmurray 3y agoIs that even "working around" the restriction? Surely moving 50k on each of 4 days is what you're expected to do in that case. It still means the maximum a fraudster can get away with is 50k if the fraud is discovered in one day. My last bank had limits like 20k/day and 50k/week, so it seems like yours could have 50k/day and 60k/week if they "really don't like" you using it like this.
- patmcc 3y agoNo, you're expected to call and set up an appointment with a banker who can sell you on some kind of business account that has appropriate services for moving money in that way. And yes, this will cost more and take more time than the spreading-it-out method.
- alright2565 3y agono, this is too cynical. just give them a call, authenticate yourself, and they'll happily raise the limit for you. maybe if you're moving 50k/week they'll try and get you on a business account, but at that point you're already not using the account for the purposed you claimed when you opened the account.
- opportune 3y agoOne of the reasons banks have these restrictions (besides the obvious thing of making it difficult to take large sums of money out because it hurts their business) is to prevent fraud. They want to prevent the case where some criminal gets physical access to my computer, or my login credentials, and drains my account without my knowledge. So they want you to initiate a manual verification that you really do intend to move such a large sum to prevent that fraud. If you do what I did, you usually get a temporary hold on your account and some very skeptical bank employee calling you to grill you on what you’re doing. On one hand I get it. For every story like mine, where this is just a temporary frustrating inconvenience, there’s probably a story where grandma lost her life savings after talking to the nice man from Microsoft on the phone. But also they don’t make it clear at all what you are supposed to do as non-criminal to work around their restrictions, which is just bad for customers.
- someplaceguy 3y ago> So they want you to initiate a manual verification that you really do intend to move such a large sum to prevent that fraud. Yes, it's hilarious. One of my banks requires me to do the transaction over the phone if it's above a certain limit. At which point, you talk to someone in a call center, and they proceed to ask you exactly the same information which you needed to introduce in their web interface to make the wire transfer yourself, and nothing else. This includes giving your web interface credentials over the phone, which could be heard by someone inadvertently or even phished if you happened to have misdialed accidentally. Or stolen by the call center employee. It's also great fun to have to spell out 20+ account digits, the names of the other people/companies, phone numbers and email addresses to receive confirmations and even a description of the transaction (fortunately I don't always buy sex toys). Gosh, how I love to spell out all this information, digit by digit, letter by letter, over a phone call! But since it's for my protection it makes it OK, right? Right? Hello?
- sidewndr46 3y agoworking around a restriction is called "Structuring" in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
- dmurray 3y agoThis is not true. Structuring is much more narrowly defined, including in that Wikipedia article. It requires you to be working around a legal or regulatory reporting requirement.
- xeckr 3y agoBanks have an incentive to create as many roadblocks as possible to prevent you from transferring out large sums of money.
- dan-robertson 3y agoIn particular in the US, they are on the hook for almost all of it if the money was fraudulently moved out.
- xeckr 3y agoThey'll try to dissuade you even if they know the transaction is legitimate.
- tonyarkles 3y agoNot the banking industry but I had an issue with a leaked Twilio key once and it was a funny conversation like that. They kept telling me that I had been a victim of fraud (long story, a contractor pushed a key to a public GitHub repo). It only took about 7 repetitions for them to finally acknowledge that it was in fact Twilio who had been the victim of fraud: someone, pretending to be me, had asked them to send $1000 worth of Netflix spam and they obliged. It wasn’t ever really resolved in a satisfactory way but it got to the point where I was so frustrated and tired that I said “fine, we can settle on $200” because it wasn’t really worth pursuing further (based on my hourly rate and how much wasted time I’d already sunk into it)
- astrange 3y agoIf you're the largest customer at a small bank they'll be happy to see you move it out because that much money can make them nervous.
- xeckr 3y agoUnless they're so small that you taking out your money results in them experiencing liquidity issues.
- quartz 3y agoCouldn't you just send a wire?
- opportune 3y agoYes, but that involves talking to someone and waiting on hold. If there’s no rush, doing 4x ACH is easier, if you don’t know it’ll get you flagged. All I’m saying is banks need to be more prescriptive about telling you “we’ll put a hold on your account if you move large sums without telling us” rather than giving you some fake limit that actually utilizing will raise red flags. This is a common failure mode
- VBprogrammer 3y agoI presume the argument some middle management type makes is that exposing their security protocols makes it trivial for a fraudster to work around. Obviously this is a fallacy because any genuine fraudsters has the incentive to work this all out by trial and error, if the information isn't freely available to them on some dark corner of the internet.
- Kalium 3y agoTrial and error takes time. Potentially a great deal of time. A motivated fraudster will likely get caught and stopped several times along the way if they're attacking a particular bank. It's worth bearing in mind that most financially motivated criminals are after easy marks. If you're too hard or expensive to hit, they'll find another target. If you're seeing like a bank, that's a victory and the protocols are doing their job by reducing fraud.
- callalex 3y agoThose typically have huge fees.
- gosub100 3y ago$25 to move $50k in an atomic, irreversible way isn't a huge fee IMO. when you're dealing with that amount of money, the risk of it getting frozen or flagged for fraud is > $25. A lot of banks will let you send wires for free if you have a large enough balance.
- nick222226 3y agoYou do a wire transfer.
- opportune 3y agoYes, my point is that banks don’t make it clear that maxing out their ACH quotas will get your account frozen and that you should do a wire transfer. You shouldn’t have to learn this the hard way by getting your account frozen (which is very stressful when it happens to you for the first time), and banks should make it clear what you should do, which is my point
- ska 3y agoIt's a pretty niche problem though, so I guess not surprising they aren't great about communicating it (it probably was communicated, on page 30 of your agreement in small confusing text).
- Scoundreller 3y agoprobably not communicated. Banks usually don't like to say: "your account will totally get frozen if you do this thing up to the limit of what we said you're allowed to do". They like to keep the impression that account freezes are discretionary not automatic.
- JohnFen 3y agoWhenever I've been moving amounts at that scale, I've already had a close working relationship with my bank as a natural side-effect of my business activities. As a result, I'd be doing those sorts of transfers by talking to my account manager at the bank. I suspect that's the norm that banks are expecting.
- nick222226 3y agoOk with this context I understand what you are getting at.
- sib 3y agoFor which they kindly charge you a fee
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hef19898 3y agoThere are some systems, banking for example, where "hacking" them and trying to be smarter than others can, and actually does, backfire.
- creer 3y agoPart of the problem is a bank training you on recognizing that they have countless silly obscure rules for their own purposes - for example in what your password may be and how messages to their employees might be (mine limits the messages to be very short - no space to explain anything.) So you are quickly trained to make do with the silly rules. I.E. multiple ACH over several days and move on with your life... Or in the case of messages, I just continue my explanation in multiple messages. Either way, the bank has trained the customer to work around limits. They can't have it both ways.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I.E. multiple ACH over several days and move on with your life... Surely, just picking up the phone and speaking to them is faster and easier than engaging in structural transactions like that.
- creer 3y agoIs it? Usually no, it's not. At one bank, they want me to always talk to the same person - who is generally competent but also usually not available and sometimes outright on vacation with no warning. At another bank, they want me to go through the basic 800 number - where the person who answers usually knows much less than I do. Picking up the phone is usually not a good solution.
- opportune 3y agoOne, this isn’t structuring. Just because you read what structuring is 5m before you read my post doesn’t make this structuring. 50k is way over reporting limits. And also no it isn’t faster to pick up the phone, even if I don’t get out on hold at all. An ACH transfer takes seconds, it’s like writing a digital check. Doing it 4 times takes very little time.
- JohnFen 3y agoI didn't mean "structuring" in the legal sense, I meant it in the technical sense (arranging transactions in order to avoid something). I find it's much easier to engage in a 15 minute phone call than to do multiple transactions over a number of days. You may find it different, of course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slavboj 3y ago"But they don’t tell you what they actually want you to do if you want to move 200k" They will tell you to use a wire transfer.
- darkwater 3y agoDon't know where you live but where I leave this thing is pretty common when you are buying some property. The goal in this case should be pretty obvious.