I called Chase today and was informed that my account was "locked". I asked why and how I could get it unlocked. They ended forwarding me multiple times and finally sent me to the Chase compliance department. They informed me again that the account was "locked" and said the account will be closed in a couple days. I asked why and they said your account has been flagged, they did a review and there is no way to reverse the decision. In addition, I am no longer allowed to open any new accounts. I asked what the reason was and they said "For compliance reasons we are not allowed to disclose the reason". They mentioned that the only way they could reverse the decision was to speak with a branch manager.
I immediately went to my local branch and spoke with my branch manager. After multiple phone calls by the manager to the Chase compliance department, she informed me there was no way to appeal and my account would be closed. In addition, my other checking and savings account will be closed in the next couple days and I won't be able to open any new accounts with Chase (new info). The bank manager said she has no power in this situation and doesn't even know the reason. If the compliance team decides something, the branch manager can't do anything.
I never even thought this was a possibility and I feel powerless. Anyone have any ideas of what I should do next? The crazy thing is that when they lock an account, it's frozen for 10-15 days and then when it's closed they send a check in the mail. My money is now being held hostage at Chase until they decide to send me a check.
As things are "computer says no" cold responses keep complainants at bay as they have no footing.
It's the natural response to government attempts at clamping down on money laundering. Your individual value as a customer comes no where close to the financial hit from a massive money laundering scandal.
Contact the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_...
Their homepage has a link on the top-right to submit a complaint.
It's possible your state government also has an institution for consumer protection in the finance sector. For example, there's the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Finan...
Navbar at the top of their homepage has the link to file a complaint with them, if California is your state. If it's not, you can search "<your state> financial consumer protection" to find who's responsible for financial consumer protection in your jurisdiction.
I would try one of state or federal first, and not both at once, so they don't step on each other's toes. If one fails, I'd then consider reaching out to the other.
I wouldn't be surprised if they can't do anything in this case though. It sounds like you got flagged related to some law enforcement activities and there's likely some legal action that will come your way. Their financial powers are basically unbridled and even places like the CFPB have basically no recourse.
Don't bank with chase
US citizens have no rights to banking even as we the taxpayers (contray to the feds latest claims ) bear all the risk in insuring and bailing the banks out when they inevitably screw up
FDIC insurance should require banks to open accounts for citizens unless there is clear financial reasons to refuse ( ie fraud, or other criminal acts)
Until then the only thing you can do is
1. Use credit unions. They are member owned and are generally better but not always
2. Spread you money out. Even if you do not have a lot. Have more then 1 account at different place. Have a rent account. A groceries account etc. It sucks but better that then being locked out of all your money
3. Keep some cash on hand
If we taxpayers buy phones from Apple, is Apple now taxpayer funded? Is an antitrust fine on Apple meaningless because it’s “borne by the taxpayer”?
At that point, the term “taxpayer funded” becomes meaningless.
So if the amount of money left in FDIC is less than the amount of money needed to make depositors whole the FDIC gets its money from either the taxpayer or the Fed prints the money
If Apple were to offer some kind of protection plan for the iPhone's and then all of the iPhone blew up and Apple cannot afford to pay to replace them Apple would go under
That is the difference between a federal agency like the FDIC and a private corporation like Apple they are not an the same
At the end of the day the federal government IE the taxpayer 100% backs the FDIC
Because it is correct. In today's world you're pretty much forced to have a bank account open if you want to have a "normal" life, i.e. a life where you own a house (most probably via a mortgage), where you pay your bills (most probably online) and where you receive your salary (most probably via a bank account).
As such, the great majority of tax-payers are also bank customers, and this was not based on their own choosing (meaning they couldn't "afford" to avoid being bank clients). As such, banking customers bailing out failing banks de facto means tax-payers bailing out failing banks.
That wouldn't help OP since his account was crosed due to suspected fraud.
Hint compliance department, != Only fraud
compliance department is also their political and Religious hit squad
If other banks also start closing your accounts, it may be time to find a lawyer.
"serious enough" can literally be buying crypto at a legitimate, regulated exchange.
The AML regulations are vague enough that banks do everything possible to cover their ass, and when they've got millions of customers, the few that have even slight indicators of risky activity are cheaper to ban than to investigate appropriately.
Edit: why disagree?
Stripe employees have commented on HN about this behavior as it occurs frequently. That behavior being an account with no history whining about how some big evil bank attacked them, a poor powerless innocent victim, for absolutely no reason. Almost always the account is closed due to fraud only after several rounds of correspondence and whining about it on HN is some last ditch effort to garner sympathy or shame the financial institution while the financial institution is legally prevented from public comment.
Would love to know all of the unbiased information whenever this type of post happens.
@op the obvious question - what were you doing with the account?
Geez... Let's let the guy have some privacy. Whatever happened to presuming innocence?
If OP is in the wrong, no advice we give is going to get them out of it, but if they're in the right, we might be able to help them. Trying to find fault in OP seems pointless.
I am tired of banks and other companies hiding behind this excuse. The banks lobbied for that, they want that gag order. They want to be able to hide behind that regulation so they do not ever have to provide actual answers to why they banned someone or closed an account
You could always do what Patio11 mentioned in his latest newsletter and buy a share in Chase and then call investor relations.
No bank would just refuse to accept money, without [in their eyes] a good reason.
Is the OP running any particular type of business that may be fraught with integrity issues? Is this one of those ever-shifting Amazon storefronts?
etc.
> Anyone have any ideas of what I should do next? I'd hire a chartered Accountant with some experience in AML, to quickly go through your transactions and see if there're any hints/suggestions as to what may've triggered it
Sounds like their compliance team has concluded you’re in breach. Pretty sure that 10-15 days is there because it allows for the 7-14 days of forensic accounting / legal investigation to conclude whether you have committed a crime and will forfeit the money. You would know better than us why Chase might think this.
One of my ex managers even told me in a 1-to-1 that it’s one of the best ways to handle problems. They were in a tech lead role in a tech company.
Any org like that is rotten and might be rotten more than what’s publicly known. I’d put my money in some smaller bank or with some broker that cares. Maybe spread it out over a few banks if I’d use fintech startups. Not financial advice, just thoughts.
Just to give an example of how this could be handled with a better bank: my bank sent me a letter a few years ago that they’d close my account because of crypto TXs. I went to their branch and asked them to close it there and then because I, too, wanted to bank somewhere where crypto is fine. We shook hands and moved on. No secrecy, no hot-potatoing, no freezes, no holding anyone’s money hostage.
I was never involved in any shady business, the only money went in from payroll at a reputable company, and I only ever made normal purchases.
I also learned that you have no right to any money in your bank account, the bank doesn’t owe you an explanation for denying access, nothing. They also don’t owe you any damages from denying access. I had a rent check bounce because this. It’s pretty crazy. After this experience, I learned it’s increasingly common.
Do not ever keep money in a single account, you may be denied access without reason at any time.
Luckily for me, after two weeks, they “unlocked” it. Again, with no notification or explanation.
I knew this of PayPal. Didn't think it'd be the case with regular banks as well.
Monzo in the UK had this issue and put out quite a convincing defence if I remember correctly, though I cannot find the statement right now.
I thought closing the account would actually be tipping off? i.e. if Mr Money Launderer suddenly sees an account of his closed with no reason given, would he not think he was being investigated?
How are these deposits sent? Do you receive them regularly? Is it business or personal?
Just trying to understand if this could have been the trigger.
I've got a PayPal account for my small side business. I did not receive any money on that so far, only paid with that account for whatever I needed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Euro over the last 3 years.
Last week I received something like 12,30 € and PayPal locked the money and the account somewhat down, because of "unusual behaviour" that needed investigation.
If we were talking 10k € I would understand that, but I'm not sure what kind of money laundering/terrorist operation will send 12,30 on PayPal...
But regular American bank accounts are pretty different from PayPal or European bank accounts. (The original poster is talking about Chase so I assume the account in question was a regular checking account.)
I lived in the US for a couple of years, and the oddities of banking were a bit of a shock to me. In Europe we're used to bank transfers just working and costing nothing, but there isn't really an equivalent in the American system at all!
You can send a "wire" which usually costs $15-30 depending on the bank, and is meant for larger amounts and business transactions. Or, there's something called ACH which you can use to pay bills and businesses can use to send you money (e.g. paycheck deposits), but ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other.
To address this obvious deficiency, banks have cooked up their own system called Zelle which is like a weird proprietary hybrid of PayPal and a European-style bank transfer. (Apparently it's so confusing to US bank customers that Zelle is widely used by fraudsters.)
So, when the OP wrote that they've been receiving deposits in the account that was closed, I'm curious to know what kind of deposits those were. Wires? ACH from businesses? Zelle? This could be a major factor in why the account triggered a red light at the compliance department.
I'm so happy I don't need to use Paypal. I hope I never run into issues like this with my bank.
You opened your post with what is almost certainly the reason for this, especially if this is a frequent occurrence.
Banks are increasingly wary of people other than the account holder depositing into KYC accounts. You probably aren't laundering money, and the bank's compliance department probably doesn't think you are either, but they're still not going to risk having to explain your activity at a KYC audit.
Is it right? No. But this is almost certainly the reason. Chase is one of the more trigger-happy banks at this, but they all do it. If you need to be mad at someone, be mad at the government, not the banks that are required to comply with anti-privacy and anti-freedom regulations.
Banks fail closed without notice or recourse or any burden of proof.
Plan accordingly.
This is frightening. Considering just buying and storing metals instead of putting anything in the bank.
Liquidity is king. If you have access to large amounts of money, you want to ensure the liquidity of a certain amount of that in various forms of crisis. Don't put it all in the same bank, don't put it all in banks, don't keep all of it digital. Having enough cash to bridge a temporary loss of access to your funds is probably a good idea the same way having enough potable water and non-perishable food at home to bridge a temporary infrastructure failure is a good idea.
The rest of the article however feels like a deepity[0]. Yes, your money isn't yours. But that's because there's no such a thing as "your money", or even "your anything" to begin with. Private property is a social construct, a mutually acknowledged fiction we turn into reality by abiding by it, under the threat of violence. Even gold has no intrinsic value, its value is entirely determined by what others are willing to give you in exchange and your ability to coerce them into doing so rather than simply taking it from you.
In other words, money is no different from any other "liberty" afforded to you by the state. Yes, the state can shut down your bank account but the state can also confiscate your physical cash (especially easily so in the US[1]). The state can even raid your home, put you under arrest or even kill you[2]. The Federal Reserve Bank may be a separate entity from the US government but it exists as the whim of the US government, as does CEDE and Company, which ultimately owns all stocks in the US.
If you think this is bad, you don't object banks, you object the state. And if you want to be ideologically consistent you should also object all corporations (which without the monopoly on violence of the state could only exist through private security, i.e. private militias, no different from feudal lordships in Europe prior to nationalism). This ultimately boils down to libertarian socialism ("free association"[3] being a key concept), though you strike me more as a right-libertarian type so Egoism[4] (not to be confused with "Egoismus" in German, which translated to "egotism" in English, i.e. self-obsession) might be an easier onramp to those ideas for you.
If you think that's going too far, I think you need to think more about the systems you exist within. The state can eradicate you at any moment and it doesn't even have to do so intentionally. There's no way to curtail the power of the state as any rights protected by it are only granted by itself unless there's a more powerful entity ruling over it (e.g. state vs federal law in the US).
On a more practical note, the situation you describe in your article seems to entirely boil down to not following the rules and then finding out there are consequences to that. There's a Process™ and you opted not to follow it out of willful ignorance. You clearly took the time to find out how to register a company but then opted not to find out what the steps to undo that are and offloaded your responsibility to the company handling payroll for you. Yes, this is hard to do yourself and yes, it's unfair that those millionaires you know can probably easily afford to just hire lawyers to take care of all these details without having to know of any of them, but that's pointing at a larger issue of structural preference for people who are already very wealthy. I'm with you on these legal tripwires being unfair because you're just supposed to know them or have the time to look them up (or even know what to look up) but it's just one of many ways in which the system punishes those who are not already in positions of wealth/power, even if it does so entirely without malice.
[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
[2]: Death penalty aside, law enforcement officers are rarely tried and found guilty for deaths, even in Germany. Infamously a Black immigrant died (either by being set on fire or prior to being set on fire) in a police holding cell in Germany a few years back. The original internal investigation was dropped and while the follow-up investigation in 2020 found evidence for "illegal" behavior from police officers, it found no justification to investigate any of the officers for murder or attempted murder.
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_of_producers
So well... Anything can potentially happen, but if you have the law on your side and you use it with fierce legal force anyone will both be kind and effective on you AND management learn the lesson: customers are not puppet and might bite.
I had this happen and contacted the relevant financial ombudsman, and got nothing.
Not all the banks I have/have had so far in Italy or France, yes they can impromptu lock an account in case of suspicious activities BUT they can't avoid providing evidence. Without evidence AND a formal opening of a justice procedure locking an account means stealing money.
> I had this happen and contacted the relevant financial ombudsman, and got nothing.
For certain complaint, like expenses charged that are deemed illegitimate yes, I'll go for the ombudsman, in case of a blind lock without answers I just go to the local finance police station filing a theft accusation complaint. In just few hours the local bank director would be formally summoned to answer the allegations and if the lock was unmotivated he/she is formally incriminated while an agreement might settle the process.
In EU in general TOO MANY do ignore the law and it's power, but we still have laws and judiciary procedures, if used properly they tend to work properly.
you have provided absolutely zero details on what kind of transactions you are doing in this account
The transactions in the account are rental payments from a tenant and bills paid related to the rental. The account has had the same types of transactions for 4-5 years. It is a shared account with someone else (because I only own part of the rental), so it's possible I am being caught up in something related to them. They are closing that shared account and my personal accounts.
Speculation: Possibly a rolling bail in? I wonder what Chase's financials look like. Perhaps they are letting go of unprofitable customers while keeping their money on the books as some banks are having solvency issues; to hedge against the impacts to the credit market.
By what law?
They do not need to tell you why. I know it sounds bad & counter-intuitive, but if they revealed lots of little parts of their risk model, fraudsters could use it to their advantage.
There are some really good articles about AML/KYC on the patio11 blog: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/
Lastly, this is not a support forum. I don't like the whole "create a new HN account to post about an experience" thing, but that might just be me. Post on your main account.
This is a commonly stated argument, but I don't think it holds water.
I once worked with a company that did grey area SEA stuff where they'd bid on one thing and then show another thing to the users to get around regulatory issues. Of course, Ad-Networks don't like that for all kinds of reasons and shut down their accounts. So they hired people who previously worked at those networks on compliance, enforcement, or in customer support. Those people gave them all the info they needed to make their accounts not get flagged, not look suspicious when someone glances at them etc.
The fraudsters and manipulators are making money, and they're happy to pay money, and will usually find an ex-employee (or current, large corps don't have super-loyal employees) to spill the beans.
The legitimate customers will not, and they'll be harmed and annoyed because of the secrecy (which I think is more to cover corporate asses anyhow, because corporate knows all of this, obviously).
Of course Chase will stop doing business with you.
Why cant the bank say we are closing your account because of X reason
