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.
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.
It helps tremendously if the bank manager knows you, or at least recognizes you.
I’m in SF so this isn’t a big amount and I’d been to this branch once before. So it wasn’t like I was Al Pacino in Scarface pulling up shaking hands or anything.
I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with the average American consumer. Average savings balance under the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k. Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.
Never.
Not one day in their life.
Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are two Americas.
[1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-savings-... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28... [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate
Most people asking their bank to withdraw $50k+ in cash are by definition going to have above-average assets.
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).
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.
> 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.
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…
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.
After reading the article, sure, I can see that that's what was implied, but I can only say that it wasn't clear enough for me. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but I think I could have enjoyed it more if primed differently.
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.
This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?
> 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-w...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-york-...
[2] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
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.
Agreed. The author could have written, "it turns out the writer was from a wealthy family, grew up in a 200 year old home, and is president of the family's $2 million charity."
I think a big part of it is that there isn't any actual bullshit filler, and a lot of interesting information (even though it may not be critical for the TL;DR of the story). Most long form articles end up describing irrelevant details like the weather on the day of the interview, or the interior decoration of someone's house. Here, it's immediately clear why every piece of information is included, the article shares a lot of background information but tells something interesting with every paragraph.
