5 ms·

Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

78 points by dangrossman 2y ago

danso 2y ago
Jesus CHRIST — this article should be taught in writing classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely important. I'd about how this article could be vastly improved if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure what the point of the article was. > A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better. I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report. Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be. edit: one example of how tendentious this article is: > The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history. > Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution. So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim. [0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warr.ants.html#/ https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-magazine-amazon-ftc-cia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-... [2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850477925 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850... [3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/HSG010223 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
- pchristensen 2y ago
  Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group. And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.
  - danso 2y ago
    It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I wanted more words of reflection by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an extravagant amount of time and money in investigating something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag wouldn't also fib to the police?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
      The assertion is addressed by: 1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash 2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this closely.
lxgr 2y ago
Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor: This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor". Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this…
- pchristensen 2y ago
  The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.
  - danso 2y ago
    What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, why would a purported fabricator even bother to give that specific detail at all, which would make it easier for anyone (as Patrick attempted) to narrow down where the fakery did/didn't happen? I mean the NYMag story was incredibly dumb and far-fetched, even compared to most scam stories. But the fact that she didn't write it pseudonymously, and gave the specific date that it happened, and also claimed to have called the police, that felt enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt her story was more or less rooted in reality.
    - BryantD 2y ago
      It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message. I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.
foobarian 2y ago
> Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce like dew in the morning sun. This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?
- cbfrench 2y ago
  Probably meant evanesce, which has the same sense as evaporate and could be easily confused with effervesce.
rufus_foreman 2y ago
It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely get some attention.
- lxgr 2y ago
  For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already withdrawn/spent the funds. In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam described in TFA.
  - jandrese 2y ago
    No bank is going to let you withdraw funds off of that $200k until it actually clears the ACH, plus a couple of days.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      Isn't "clear the ACH" actually something like 90 days? Even if that check is drawn on a reputable bank that has those funds (ie doesn't promptly reply with the ACH equivalent of NACK), that balance could just be another link in a chain of fraudulent transactions. From what I can tell banks generally don't rely on airtight logical guarantees. Rather they have some kind of exposure on every transaction, which they work to reduce. This isn't the most efficient system, but they deal with more types of fraud than just fake checks.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        That's usually the problem of the bank that did not decline a check/ACH debit for insufficient balance in time, though. In other words, "at the time we paid/did not reverse this, we thought the payer account was good for it, but as it turns out it was funded via transactions that ended up being reversed, and now the account is in the red" is not a valid reason to claw back money. And that makes intuitive sense as well: Only the paying bank has a complete picture of all account activities (including out-of-character/potentially suspicious ones), so it makes sense to primarily hold them accountable.
anigbrowl 2y ago
This is so overwritten. tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neighborhood with a lot of rich clients.
- Fade_Dance 2y ago
  I felt like I was giving it a second and third chance, and then I realized it was only a third of the way in. Thank you for confirming my suspicion here.
- emodendroket 2y ago
  When I heard about this story I had assumed she kept the money in her home. How did she get all the way through withdrawing the money without at any point thinking something about the story didn't add up? Mystifying.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    By her account, she did so at least at one point: > As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous. Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win. I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much less likely to be widely publicized.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".
pavel_lishin 2y ago
[flagged]
- thrance 2y ago
  Seriously, I quit any post that begins with a shitty irrelevant AI image. I really wonder what reasoning could possibly lead to one thinking "yeah, this will definitely improve my article".
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  I’m beginning to think the lumpy intelligence theory is true… that if someone is way above average in some area they must also be below average in some other area(s). The only exceptions being literal super-geniuses.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Yeah, but it's so obviously fake that it's not bad :-)
  - o11c 2y ago
    I didn't think it was "obviously fake" (unlike, say, the recent Chicago gambling one) at first glance. I had to zoom in to see the horrors.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Kelvin506 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 2y ago
renewiltord 2y ago
Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash. I only needed $15k but I wanted to keep more in case other vendors were going to be like this too. They asked me why, I told them, and then asked them if they’d make me 100 accounts so I could get around the Zelle limit. They said it wouldn’t work but that they wouldn’t do that anyway.
- RandomBacon 2y ago
  > There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k. I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out). I always read about people being hassled by their banks, but never credit unions.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jagraff 2y ago
    Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.
    - ValentineC 2y ago
      > having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you. Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking relationship, but not prevent other banks from opening new accounts. From what I understand, there are other reporting systems in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this form of information sharing.
ahoy 2y ago
[flagged]
JaakkoP 2y ago
Thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the process of solving the mystery withdrawal, even though the outcome wasn’t what I expected. Consumed through an email client so the AI image didn’t bother me either.
jessekv 2y ago
This one was a bit like reading Sherlock Holmes.
iwanttocomment 2y ago
Encyclopedia Brown and the Case He Created for Himself Based on His Own Misguided Skepticism Where Everyone Turned Out to Be Honest and Accurate and There Was No Actual Mystery at All
Evidlo 2y ago
I've never seen so much literary analysis on HN before.
JohnMakin 2y ago
Everything else aside, I find it very unusual from an amateur journalist's perspective that his intuition led him to doubt the veracity of this story, yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting. Seems like a good way to waste a lot of time or come to a completely wrong conclusion.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting I mean arguably it was such a weird detail that one would not have made it up (and, also, if, as you'd kind of expect, there were no branches at all with upstairs tellers, that would obviously invalidate the whole thing).

78 points by dangrossman 2y ago

Jesus CHRIST — this article should be taught in writing classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely important. I'd about how this article could be vastly improved if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure what the point of the article was. > A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better. I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report. Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb the media can be. edit: one example of how tendentious this article is: > The writer’s positive home equity, trivially available to the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years of the median household income for New York City. The writer is the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer’s parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of history. > Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of why, per the writer’s written communication with me, she was not asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff. It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and wasn’t even half-heartedly counseled about caution. So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in positive home equity is different than owning a $750k home...but she's a New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim. [0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warr.ants.html#/ https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-magazine-amazon-ftc-cia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-... [2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850477925 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850... [3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/HSG010223 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...

pchristensen 2y ago
Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group. And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that plays out in real life.
- danso 2y ago
  It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I wanted more words of reflection by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an extravagant amount of time and money in investigating something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag wouldn't also fib to the police?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    The assertion is addressed by: 1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash 2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this closely.

lxgr 2y ago

Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor: This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor". Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this…

pchristensen 2y ago
The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.
- danso 2y ago
  What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, why would a purported fabricator even bother to give that specific detail at all, which would make it easier for anyone (as Patrick attempted) to narrow down where the fakery did/didn't happen? I mean the NYMag story was incredibly dumb and far-fetched, even compared to most scam stories. But the fact that she didn't write it pseudonymously, and gave the specific date that it happened, and also claimed to have called the police, that felt enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt her story was more or less rooted in reality.
  - BryantD 2y ago
    It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message. I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.

foobarian 2y ago

> Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce like dew in the morning sun. This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?

cbfrench 2y ago
Probably meant evanesce, which has the same sense as evaporate and could be easily confused with effervesce.

rufus_foreman 2y ago

It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely get some attention.

lxgr 2y ago
For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already withdrawn/spent the funds. In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam described in TFA.
- jandrese 2y ago
  No bank is going to let you withdraw funds off of that $200k until it actually clears the ACH, plus a couple of days.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Isn't "clear the ACH" actually something like 90 days? Even if that check is drawn on a reputable bank that has those funds (ie doesn't promptly reply with the ACH equivalent of NACK), that balance could just be another link in a chain of fraudulent transactions. From what I can tell banks generally don't rely on airtight logical guarantees. Rather they have some kind of exposure on every transaction, which they work to reduce. This isn't the most efficient system, but they deal with more types of fraud than just fake checks.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      That's usually the problem of the bank that did not decline a check/ACH debit for insufficient balance in time, though. In other words, "at the time we paid/did not reverse this, we thought the payer account was good for it, but as it turns out it was funded via transactions that ended up being reversed, and now the account is in the red" is not a valid reason to claw back money. And that makes intuitive sense as well: Only the paying bank has a complete picture of all account activities (including out-of-character/potentially suspicious ones), so it makes sense to primarily hold them accountable.

anigbrowl 2y ago

This is so overwritten. tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation, author established that writer was well off and was treated differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an upscale neighborhood with a lot of rich clients.

Fade_Dance 2y ago
I felt like I was giving it a second and third chance, and then I realized it was only a third of the way in. Thank you for confirming my suspicion here.
emodendroket 2y ago
When I heard about this story I had assumed she kept the money in her home. How did she get all the way through withdrawing the money without at any point thinking something about the story didn't add up? Mystifying.
- lxgr 2y ago
  By her account, she did so at least at one point: > As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous. Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win. I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much less likely to be widely publicized.
MostlyStable 2y ago
That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".

pavel_lishin 2y ago

[flagged]

thrance 2y ago
Seriously, I quit any post that begins with a shitty irrelevant AI image. I really wonder what reasoning could possibly lead to one thinking "yeah, this will definitely improve my article".
MichaelZuo 2y ago
I’m beginning to think the lumpy intelligence theory is true… that if someone is way above average in some area they must also be below average in some other area(s). The only exceptions being literal super-geniuses.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Yeah, but it's so obviously fake that it's not bad :-)
- o11c 2y ago
  I didn't think it was "obviously fake" (unlike, say, the recent Chicago gambling one) at first glance. I had to zoom in to see the horrors.
tptacek 2y ago
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Kelvin506 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 2y ago

renewiltord 2y ago

Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it. In the end I only needed $15k. There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why but it’s not something that requires too much work. In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took Zelle or cash. I only needed $15k but I wanted to keep more in case other vendors were going to be like this too. They asked me why, I told them, and then asked them if they’d make me 100 accounts so I could get around the Zelle limit. They said it wouldn’t work but that they wouldn’t do that anyway.

RandomBacon 2y ago
> There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second form of identification due to the amount being over 10k. I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting while they fill it out). I always read about people being hassled by their banks, but never credit unions.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jagraff 2y ago
  Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.
  - ValentineC 2y ago
    > having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you. Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking relationship, but not prevent other banks from opening new accounts. From what I understand, there are other reporting systems in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this form of information sharing.

ahoy 2y ago

[flagged]

JaakkoP 2y ago

Thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the process of solving the mystery withdrawal, even though the outcome wasn’t what I expected. Consumed through an email client so the AI image didn’t bother me either.

jessekv 2y ago

This one was a bit like reading Sherlock Holmes.

iwanttocomment 2y ago

Encyclopedia Brown and the Case He Created for Himself Based on His Own Misguided Skepticism Where Everyone Turned Out to Be Honest and Accurate and There Was No Actual Mystery at All

Evidlo 2y ago

I've never seen so much literary analysis on HN before.

JohnMakin 2y ago

Everything else aside, I find it very unusual from an amateur journalist's perspective that his intuition led him to doubt the veracity of this story, yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting. Seems like a good way to waste a lot of time or come to a completely wrong conclusion.

rsynnott 2y ago
> yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting I mean arguably it was such a weird detail that one would not have made it up (and, also, if, as you'd kind of expect, there were no branches at all with upstairs tellers, that would obviously invalidate the whole thing).