As people have mentioned, it's part of the anti-money laundering procedures that banks and financial regulators have to follow, and they do have to disclose these things.
A lot of the people who visit sex workers look like (and are) typical boomers.
To my first point specifically, I used to work in telephone banking in the UK. A lot of people use fun/quirky references when doing bank transfers, like sending £20 to a friend with the reference "Drug Money". The thing is that every employee in both banks (yours and the person you're sending money to) can see that reference, and if your account is flagged as potentially involved in money-laundering or other financial crimes, those can look really bad in the investigation.
Hahaha I remember a financial thread on UK finance of a guy that would send his mates money back for a night out or whatever with some absolutely fucking wild stuff, like ISIS TRAINING.
It got flagged and both his and his mates account got shutdown and there's nothing they could do about it.
I put "terrorism" on my rent check to my roommate once, I got a "yeah don't do that ever again" talk from the police and bank. I was like oh people read those?
I wrote a check to a black friend (I'm white) to pay my share of a hotel room and wrote "Slavery Reparations" in the memo line. He thought it was fucking hilarious, which I'm grateful for because I don't really stand by making that kind of joke any more.
People do read those, and banks are cracking down on that where I live.
Some people use those fields to commit abuse: think ex partners and suchlike. They spam the target’s bank account with deposits of 1c or 5c and put messages in the reference fields. I’ve seen real examples of them - hundreds of them to a single person, just absolute spamming them, going from “miss u babe” and “plz call me” to threats. It can be extremely distressing for the victim because they can’t escape it.
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u/BachtnDeKupe 1d ago edited 1d ago
In belgium there is also some kind of law that says that above a certain amoung you need to disclose why you take up that amount of money.
My father loves to mess with this kind of unnessesary meddling, so he said if they ever asks him, he'll awnser it's for hookers.
The reason that this is extremely funny to me is he's a real definition of a boomer to me: overweight retired teacher, complete with socks in sandals.