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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 a

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".
- danso 2y ago
  But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't really inform us about the ways bank actually operates, because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly assume that a New York branch of America's 2nd-largest bank operated similarly to any small-town independent bank, and if so, why would he do that?
  - jldugger 2y ago
    My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks operate differently for a select few, and his primary error was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the error. For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post: > 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. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.
    - danso 2y ago
      For sure, good on Patrick for going in-depth on "well my hot take was wrong". But his accusation was more than a twitter hot take; he accused the NYMag writer (and basically, everyone who worked with her) as brazenly committing the most unforgivable crime in journalism. If I were to shoot off my mouth and say "Based on what I know about software engineering, Patio11's [insert one of his ventures here] is almost certainly the Theranos of code" — I would most certainly give a thorough reflection on how my priors and knowledge about software engineering seem to be deeply flawed. Not just "I read 1000 of his blog posts and published articles, and turns out Patrick is a more experienced engineer than I assumed he was. Guess I could've googled more before going off on him."

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".

danso 2y ago
But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't really inform us about the ways bank actually operates, because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly assume that a New York branch of America's 2nd-largest bank operated similarly to any small-town independent bank, and if so, why would he do that?
- jldugger 2y ago
  My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks operate differently for a select few, and his primary error was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the error. For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post: > 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. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.
  - danso 2y ago
    For sure, good on Patrick for going in-depth on "well my hot take was wrong". But his accusation was more than a twitter hot take; he accused the NYMag writer (and basically, everyone who worked with her) as brazenly committing the most unforgivable crime in journalism. If I were to shoot off my mouth and say "Based on what I know about software engineering, Patio11's [insert one of his ventures here] is almost certainly the Theranos of code" — I would most certainly give a thorough reflection on how my priors and knowledge about software engineering seem to be deeply flawed. Not just "I read 1000 of his blog posts and published articles, and turns out Patrick is a more experienced engineer than I assumed he was. Guess I could've googled more before going off on him."