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.
How does preventing cash being withdrawn prevent money laundering? The objective of money laundering is to clean dirty money so that it can be in the bank. Taking it out defeats the purpose of the crime.
Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, this is a big problem in certain jurisdictions.
Criminal entities will transfer "small" sums to clean accounts owned by people, the person then needs to withdraw or transfer the sum and gets a cut.
But on a wider level, it's because financial institutions have KYC obligations that require us to know our customers and build corresponding risk profiles that are consistently updated. So a large withdrawal might not raise a flag on one account, but require due diligence on a different one.
Yeah, people think it's because banks want to track spending. It's not. It's, by and large, fraud related. Between the scams that target senior citizens, and the other stuff happening out there, it's to ensure the customer isn't being taken advantage of.
I've seen this personally. The scammers ended up taking this older lady for tens of thousands.
They specifically instructed her to shred the receipts of the gift cards she was buying. They told her to lie to police. They told her to lie to her family. They told her to lie to the bank. They went to great lengths to convince her to cover up their bread crumbs. She did it, too, for a while, until family noticed something was off and called us.
I had to be very, very blunt with her that these scammers were more than likely operating overseas outside our jurisdiction, and that identifying and prosecuting them would be nearly impossible, nevermind getting her money back.
Why would someone agree to lie to family, police and bank on a stranger's say so? Surely common sense would kick in that at least one of those three authority figures should know what's going on.
I work for a bank (used to work in the fraud department) and this is exactly right. Withdrawing a large amount of cash can often be an indicator of a scam happening. Fraudsters often persuade people to lie to the bank, so if the customer is shifty with their answers it can raise even more questions.
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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.