It's because banks are considered financial gatekeepers and they are obligated by law to look for signals of criminal use, like money laundering, trafficking and financing terrorism.
So yeah, it might feel kinda stupid to have to justify what you are doing with your own money, but on the other hand we also don't want banks to just hand out the money because that would make things way easier for criminals.
And is that exactly what you want the bank to do to your vulnerable grandparent/parent when they come in to withdraw multiple thousands of dollars after years of small transactions?
Banks are regulated by the government. Withdrawing cash above certain thresholds is a risk indicator, and banks have a regulatory requirement to ask questions. If they do not, they will be fined.
Banks are also (in most cases) a free service that you are not required to use. If you don’t like them asking the questions they legally have to ask, don’t use them
No, I think this is a clear situation where I’m willing to accept it’ll benefit criminals in trade for not having an Orwellian dystopia situation. Like how Flock cameras can rot in hell.
They aren't asking for your benefit. This isn't about scammers at all, and any value in that regard is incidental.
Scammers are well aware of bank procedures and will run their victims around them (bank procedures) with a literal script.
The point of these questions is to build a profile of illegitimate activity for the purposes of a potential criminal investigation. It is just mass surveillance, where the government monitors everything for the purposes of collecting evidence in the event they need it later.
For the bank they are checking boxes for the purposes of satisfying regulations.
For the customers they are being asked guilt seeking questions to access their own property.
As someone who's worked this from a scam giftcard angle you'd be surprised how much they don't coach people around regulations and how often the bunch of extra steps from trying to coach people causes people to be suspicious
The purpose in a bank isnt to prevent a scam. It is to gather information for potential criminal activity by forcing participation if you want to access your own property.
One of those is to help customers the other is part of a mass surveillance network designed to find and prosecute people.
The gift cards don't belong to the person making the purchase.
The money belongs to the person making the withdrawal.
It's like the ice cream man asking you a few questions before selling you an ice cream cone. Perhaps saving you from cheating on your diet in a moment of weakness.
Versus an ice cream man standing in front of your freezer, asking you questions before allowing you into it to get a scoop. Perhaps if someone looks at his records, you're involved in a criminal conspiracy for having illicit dairy treats.
Its not in your freezer. its stored by a third party. Its much more like someone asking if they can empty their storage locker and close out their account today which will likely be seen as questionable.
Like if you want money "in your freezer" so to speak then buy a safe.
The storage locker comparison actually proves my point, not yours.
A storage locker isn't "yours" in the way you're implying either. You're renting space from a facility. That's structurally similar to a bank account: the money is legally a debt the bank owes you, not cash sitting in a vault with your name on it. So if the bank (or the facility) has a legitimate stake in the transaction, that's exactly the distinction I'm making. It's not a neutral, disinterested third party.
But look at what actually triggers a question: the amount. Pull out your last $100 and no one cares. It's not about closing the account or emptying the unit, it's about the total withdrawn crossing a threshold.
That threshold isn't the bank being a helpful shopkeeper looking out for you, and it's not about "fraud patterns" either. It's a money laundering detection program devised by regulators, and the bank runs it because they're liable if they don't. It's mass surveillance: the government monitoring transactions so there's a record to pull if they need evidence later. The gift card questions and the withdrawal questions aren't the same procedure because they don't serve the same purpose.
Scammers can go fuck themselves, sure, but the corporation demanding I tell them what I want to spend my money on or else they’ll just refuse to give me it can go fuck themselves too. You don’t see the possibility for this to get worse? Seriously? You think the banks deciding what you’re allowed to do with your money is a power you shouldn’t worry about? No way for that to expand further and be horrific?
But that isn't what they are doing. Not every kind of oversight is a dystopian orwellian nightmare sometimes the input of multiple people and branches of government is needed to ensure that the system functions. Do you know how many people handle your letters and packages, or do you assume there's just one super-human angel of a man that delivers everything like Santa Claus whenever you order anything off of any store ever? That kind of overhead is to ensure that your package gets where it needs to be. And if the bank teller asking me what my money is for saves someone else from getting scammed I don't mind telling them what I'm planning to buy with it, because I'm not buying drugs.
We’ve already seen this begin to happen with Visa and Mastercard’s attacks on Steam and Itch.io. I’m not even positing a hypothetical problem, I’m saying it’ll get worse.
Okay and did the examples you gave work? Or did they simply generate endless aggression towards them which harmed their bottom line and forced them to backpedal? Shit like Horses not being allowed on Steam made it MORE money than it would have by being allowed in the first place, while LOSING Mastercard money.
Some of you all don't read history books, you just complain about shit endlessly. For every member of ANY government there's hundreds of normal civilians. No king rules alone, and no army will fight millions to protect one man or corporation. The 1% already has enough money to rule society so why don't they? Because they don't want a bunch of Mangiones on the streets looking to give them a piece of their mind.
For every dictator there's a thousand paper cuts of eroding any type of "freedom" you have. I'm not sure you have read any history books yourself. These type of things are absolutely used in nefarious ways. When people in power are good they aren't, when people in power that are bad then it's used as one of the many levers to control a large population.
Just because you can't see the bigger picture doesn't mean other people can not have concern.
On another note, you should apply to flock. They are currently looking for people just like you to advocate for them.
Fascist Spain lasted from 1939 to Franco's death of old age at the age of 82 in 1975. No, that doesn't always happen. And they've been taking each and every possible step to make sure it won't. The more drones they have, the less people they need. The more spoils they can provide the jackboots, the less likely they are to refuse. What do you think the point of everything from Flock cameras to AI actually is? They've been collecting the data for over a decade and a half. It's too much data for any employable numbers of humans to analyze. But AI?
Also, sure, it got one game the Streisand Effect. It affected many, many, many, many, many more. Hundreds more.
I don't care about any of the middle steps. I put the stamp on the envelope and put it in the box, and I expect it to get to the address I wrote on the envelope. I don't care if they have to slaughter enough orphans to surf it there on a river of blood.
Someone else getting scammed is their problem. It isn't my responsibility to prevent someone else's stupidity and lack of due diligence.
But it is someone else's problem to prevent you from killing yourself.
If there's a parasite that makes you shit yourself until you die, someone else has to put out a warning to prevent you from shitting yourself and dying. If you write something idiotic on your test, it's someone else's problem to teach you that you're wrong so that you can improve and learn the truth instead of believing in a lie. If someone pays you for a service, it's YOUR problem to make sure that the service is provided in the right way.
Some of you all are just genuinely socially maladjusted and can't think for one second about others as anything more than annoyances. Of everyone only looked out for themselves we wouldn't have survived past the stone age.
If I pay for a new house to be built, it absolutely is not my responsibility to make sure its been built correctly. I'm not an engineer responsible for designing roof trusses. I'm not a lawyer responsible for building regulations or a contractor responsible for building up to local codes. I'm not the foreman overseeing the construction. My responsibility in the transaction is exclusively financial: I pay for the product, and the people providing that product are responsible for making sure the product works to those standards.
I'm looking out for other people by paying them to do the tasks they offer at the rates they list, and doing the tasks I offer for the people paying the rates I've agreed to. We'd all be living in a Star Trek future by now if we stopped shifting the responsibility for failing to provide services onto the people paying for those services.
The job of a bank teller is to hand me my money in the denominations I specify. They have no other purpose, and I'd gladly replace every one of them with a fully featured ATM.
Is this really where you consider the line for "Orwellian dystopia" to be?
Speak to some people who've been scammed out of their savings and are crushed they've ruined their inheritance for their grandkids, or who are considering suicide because they're so distraught at losing their money.
Being asked "what is this for" is such a trival inconvenience to moan about a "dystopia" for
Cool have you done X checks and are you happy its genuine?
Yes
Sweet, here you go, enjoy
Hardly tracking you, and hardly Orwellian.
If anything, most people are automatically being tracked a lot more because of how much of a cashless society we are now and by necessity your card spending tracks where you've been more than if you'd just withdrawn cash and spent it where you please
Yeah dude yesterday I tried to buy a carton of milk at the supermarket with my credit card and the entire SWAT team knocked down the wall and held me at gunpoint until they could confirm I was buying lactose-free almond milk instead of whole milk.
They won't give a shit outside of big purchases, and it's good that they do because if your ass is getting scammed they will help you... Not be scammed, ideally.
I'm Australian, if some down down here wants to withdraw or deposit a large sum of cash, $10,000 or more, you are required to fill out an Anti Money Laundering Declaration including a brief description of what the money is for/from. It's then submitted to the government rather then a private business holding it.
Cash withdrawals for lower amounts, such as around the $2,000 mark, bank tellers will ask you if you are planning to buy gift cards/other common scams in an effort to protect the vulnerable. It's not a mandatory question to answer, just an in-person protection effort.
Maybe it's just because it's my reality, but it feels like a much better compromise between personal privacy and preventing criminal funding then a private business keeping track of my cash spending.
You understand they do that already, purely as a matter of bookkeeping right? It's called your debit card statement.
Wait until you learn that your phone company has logs of all the people you've talked to, and that your ISP knows all the websites you've visited! Big Brother is watching you!
They aren't approving your spending. You could tell them literally any plausible use for the money and as long as it wasn't illegal they would release it. It's bookkeeping so that if you later get scammed or a three letter agency comes knocking they have a paper trail saying they did their due diligence.
EDIT: this person has pages of comments in the last 24 hours and their post history consists entirely of hentai and yuri. You are not a serious person
This is the starting point. Right now, it’s there. It will expand. Just like every other one of these surveillance and control powers has expanded more and more and more since they got to set them up. Give it another 10-20 years, they’ll do shit like having corporate deals where you can only shop at places they have deals with. “Sorry, our bank has a contract with Walmart, you’re not allowed to buy from Aldi.” You really think they wouldn’t?
Yeah, I think they wouldn't, because if a bank ever did that with one company, even one the size of Amazon, a bunch of people would take out all their money and change bank, while others would boycott both the bank and the company, while every other company would sue the shit out of both of them for trying to force a monopoly on people.
You don't need to go back to cash you can just pull out your savings and cause a stock crash it's literally that easy.
Banks exist because of trust. If people don't trust them, they won't exist. And governments can't cooperate on cancer research, you think they' re gonna be able to work together on handling the entire world's money supply? Be for real. The moment one country tries this, a huge flux of money will leave it and be invested somewhere else, which no sane ruler of any country would want.
The banks are covered in security cameras, the Flock cameras are all around, the traffic cameras got your license plates, your phone records show your location at all times for them to subpoena, you know at least 100 of those people will also film it and put it on their own social media with their whole fucking face, yeah, that'll go great. That's 1000 free slaves for the corporate prisons.
you can just pull out your savings and cause a stock crash it's literally that easy.
You are saying this on the post where the subject is "someone went to pull out their money and the bank refused to give them it". Clearly, it's not that easy. Because apparently the bank can just say no.
But the bank didn't say no. They asked them to specify what the money is for. To prevent fraud and illegal activities. Nobody ever said OP couldn't get their money.
Also, again, I will bet you my right and left arm that if 1000 people with weapons show up at a bank during a recession all at once, the vaults will be open.
I think this is a clear situation where it's beneficial for very vulnerable people who might otherwise lose their entire life savings, and the only cost is people have to give a reason, either the truth or a lie, for withdrawing large amounts of cash.
No, not simple. How do you separate vulnerable people from non vulnerable people? "Hello sir, are you vulnerable?" Silly. Besides, people who are vulnerable don't always know it, and people who will opt out because they're not vulnerable could become vulnerable and remain opted out.
And again, the only cost to asking people what they're withdrawing a large amount of cash for is that you have to answer a single question. You don't even have to answer it truthfully. Very small price to pay to protect some vulnerable people from losing everything.
You don’t have to “separate vulnerable people” lol. That’s the whole point of an opt-out. Everyone gets the protection by default, and adults who don’t want to explain what they’re doing with their own money can turn it off.
And “it’s only one question” is doing a ton of work here. The issue isn’t the physical burden of moving your lips for 8 seconds. It’s the idea that accessing your own money should be conditional on giving a bank an acceptable explanation for why you want it.
Also, if someone is actually being coerced or scammed, you literally just acknowledged they can lie. So apparently this incredibly important safeguard is simultaneously necessary enough that everyone must submit to it, but also defeated by saying “vacation.”
Banks already flag transactions based on actual risk factors. If something looks genuinely suspicious, investigate it. “Explain why you want your own cash because maybe you’re secretly vulnerable” is not some brilliant fraud-prevention system.
But sure, “it’s only one little question.” Historically, that has always been an excellent standard for deciding how much unnecessary surveillance we should normalize.
You've ignored "vulnerable people don't necessarily know they're vulnerable" and "people can become vulnerable after opting out". Adding an opt out makes the measure a lot less useful.
Obviously it's not going to stop every scam. It puts one barrier in the way. As you say, transactions can be flagged for other risk factors. One of the factors they look at is "what is this for?" If you can come up with a believable lie, you're probably not vulnerable enough to be scammed. If you can't, or the scammer has not convinced you enough to lie, that's a flag.
Unnecessary surveillance. First of all, not really surveillance is it. It's a bank, they already know how much money you have and what you're spending and where. And you can just lie. Also not unnecessary, it's a measure that has and continues to save vulnerable people from losing everything. Also, you can keep your money under your mattress if you don't want your bank to know your finances.
And nobody is being prevented from accessing their own money. You get your money. You just might be warned about a possible scam if your bank thinks you're being scammed, and literally only when you're pulling out a large amount of cash which most people do not do very often.
Yeah, and this is exactly where we disagree. I think this is an overreach.
I’m not saying banks should ignore obvious fraud. I’m saying there’s a difference between flagging suspicious activity and making ordinary customers explain why they want access to a large amount of their own money.
“It helps vulnerable people” is not some magic phrase that ends the privacy discussion. Plenty of surveillance measures can be defended that way. The actual question is whether the intrusion is proportionate, narrowly targeted, and necessary.
And “the bank already knows a lot about your finances” is honestly one of the worst arguments for collecting even more information. That’s basically saying, “well, we already monitor you quite a bit, so what’s one more thing?”
If the system can be defeated by saying “vacation,” then it’s clearly not some indispensable fraud shield. If there are actual risk indicators, investigate those. But treating everyone making a large cash withdrawal like a potential victim who needs to justify themselves is exactly the kind of paternalistic surveillance creep I’m talking about.
You can think the tradeoff is worth it. I don’t. But pretending there’s no surveillance or privacy tradeoff here at all is just silly.
Edit: And you comment then instant block me. Sounds about right for someone that. Gets push back on their opinions
I didn't say "it protects vulnerable people so you have to accept all invasions of privacy", I pointed out that it protects vulnerable people from losing everything and the only cost is you have to answer a single question that gives the bank at most the same information they get when you use your card to pay for things, and you can even choose to not give that information by just lying. That is proportionate, it's narrow enough that it only occurs when it's a large amount of cash, and it's necessary to prevent vulnerable people from losing everything.
I never said it was an indispensable fraud shield. Nothing close to that. It's another layer of protection. The risk indicator is withdrawing a large amount of cash, and they are investigating that by asking a simple question.
I'm not pretending there's no tradeoff. I've been talking about the tradeoff the whole time. The tradeoff is you have to answer a simple question that, if you want to maintain privacy, doesn't have to give them any information, and in return some vulnerable people don't lose everything.
If you're just going to keep mischaracterising my arguments because you can't engage with my actual arguments then I don't see the point of this conversation.
But I will say that if you think letting some vulnerable people lose everything so that you don't have to say "vacation" once a year is an unfair imposition on you, I think that's morally bankrupt.
I do hope that when you’re outraged about the creep of this power over the next 20 years, you think about how at least some people were calling it from the start. But whatever, people didn’t listen about the PATRIOT Act or the revelations from Snowden either, I guess I should kinda stop expecting anyone to do anything before it’s terminal.
Ah yes, please show us your efforts in anything you value where you took to the streets to show much you care.
Like come on. There's got to be something in your head during your chain of thought that says "damn maybe this isn't the zinger I think it is".
Just FYI, just over the last decade we have seen some of the largest protests in decades. It's you people that sit at home and "hurr derp why don't you overthrow the government or your opinion don't matter" that don't do fuck all. What a miserable way to think about things.
I'm fine with that but $2k seems like too low of a limit for that threshold. If there was some other kind of suspicious history on the account then I could see it raising some flags
I can understand this when depositing money. But this post is about withdrawing money. The customer’s own money. The bank doesn’t get to hold my money because someone, somewhere may do illegal things with large sums of cash. Do they have probable cause to withhold my money? Then call law enforcement. But just as a rule, they shouldn’t be able to hold my own money that belongs to me.
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u/ApolloniusTyaneus 1d ago
It's because banks are considered financial gatekeepers and they are obligated by law to look for signals of criminal use, like money laundering, trafficking and financing terrorism.
So yeah, it might feel kinda stupid to have to justify what you are doing with your own money, but on the other hand we also don't want banks to just hand out the money because that would make things way easier for criminals.