Bonum Certa Men Certa

U.S. Banks, Including Chase and Synchrony, File Suspicious Activity Reports and Shut Down Accounts for ‘Logging in From Another Country’ and Transferring Retirement Funds; May Also Affect VPN Users



Reprinted with permission from Ryan

U.S. Banks, Including Chase and Synchrony, File Suspicious Activity Reports and Shut Down Accounts for ‘Logging in From Another Country’ and Transferring Retirement Funds; May Also Affect VPN Users





American banks are closing customer accounts without warning and many are refusing to say why.





The ones named, according to the article, are Chase and Synchrony Bank.





(Two of the worst banks in the country to bank with, I might add. Chase was ripping my ex blind with $11 monthly “checking account fees” until I switched him to an online bank with no fees and put an end to that.)





Synchrony is an underlying bank for “PayPal Savings” and “PayPal Checking.





Synchrony also runs some store cards. They have a possibly illegal practice (under Illinois BIPA) of collecting biometric data to open an Amazon Card.





If you use a VPN, you may want to use “split tunneling” for a Web browser session to do your online banking.





In at least one instance, according to the article, Chase Bank violated the Bank Secrecy Act, first by telling a man who had his accounts frozen in the middle of dinner and was left unable to pay the bill as a result, that it had filed a SAR (which is illegal….you cannot tell a customer you did that), and then violated the BSA again by telling him why (he had logged on to their online banking system from a foreign country while he was on vacation).





There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the US banking industry right now, including an explosion of SARs. Ironically, the article says the explosion of SARs came “after the pandemic”, which was a pandemic of a SARS virus. 🙂





In all seriousness, the banks are reporting anything that looks even kind of dodgy, apparently, because there’s no penalty to the bank to close accounts and file them, even though only 4% are possibly criminal activity, according to the New York Times article.





MinceR on #TechRights IRC channel raised a very good point.





Isn’t losing clients a penalty?





Chase Bank has $4 trillion in assets. With that much and with the “Systemically Important Bank” regulators breathing down their necks, it’s not so serious if they start cutting some “risky” clients loose even if they’re not actually all that risky.





Smaller banks that need the deposits more (like $100-200 billion in assets) and don’t have the intense SIB regulations are probably more likely to look the other way on some of this, but I don’t know that.





Besides, there are risks at banking with one where less eyes are on them, like all those California Tesla “loaners” who came to bang on the window of the failed SVB thinking you can go to a failed bank and walk out with a briefcase and a million dollars cash. They found this out.





Big banks treat you like shit, because they’re huge and they don’t need your weekly paycheck from cleaning the hospital that much, and small banks, well…. Who even knows what’s going on in there?





You takes your chances… As the saying goes.





The man who banked at Synchrony (super sketchy bank) had another problem.





He dumped out his 401(k) into Synchrony and then tried to open another IRA at TD, which is not suspicious or illegal….people close retirement accounts and transfer the money into a new one all the time….the IRS even says you HAVE TO within the same tax year to avoid penalties!





When he went to open the new IRA at TD and fund it, again, perfectly legal, people do it every day, Synchrony froze his account, took his money, wouldn’t tell him why, and said “We’ll get back to you within 60 days.”





Uh huh….

Recent Techrights' Posts

GNU/Linux Distributions as "Appliances" and DRM Platforms (the Case of ChromeOS and SteamOS)
Is this what we envisioned in the 1980s and 90s?
Fulfilling the Site's Full Potential
We remain devoted to the aforementioned goal of posting more original material
Over at Tux Machines...
2 days' worth
Microsoft's Demise in the Global News Cycle is Rather Telling
It should be noted that Microsoft is, in general, no longer prominent or dominant in news headlines
 
Upcoming Talk by Dr. Richard Stallman: Large Language Models Are Not Artificial Intelligence
LLMs aren't truly intelligent and cannot quite grasp what they spew out
GulagTube is a Burning Platform (Exit YouTube, Invidious Won't Save Us From Google/Alphabet in the Long Run)
Alphabet Agency (Google) sees the future of video as a "skinnerbox" (running Android) that indoctrinates you like TikTok does
Gemini Migration and Backup Capsule (Archive)
At the end we'll end up with something a lot better than before and latency should be massively reduced
Links 01/10/2023: Science, Education, and pro-Russia Slovakia Leadership
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 01, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, October 01, 2023
Links 01/10/2023: Climate, Patents, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Apple and Microsoft Problems
half a dozen links
Malware in the Ubuntu Snap Store, Thanks to Canonical Bloatware Mindset
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Gemini Rising
There are 3523 capsules
Richard Stallman Gave a Talk Yesterday, Will Give Another Talk Today, and Will Give Two More Talks in Germany Later This Week
Those cover at least 2 different topics
Beware the Microsoft Sharks
We won't forgive and forget
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 30, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, September 30, 2023
Don't be Afraid of the Command Line, It Might Even be a Friend
There's a tendency to think that only graphical interfaces were made to simplify usage, and any declarative interface is by design raw, inherently unfit for usage
One Positive Note About GNU/Linux Coverage in 2023 (Less Microsoft)
GNU/Linux users do not want this, with very rare exceptions
Snaps Were Never Good at Security, But the Media Coverage is Just Appalling
The media should focus on culling Windows, not making a huge fuss over minor things wrongly attributed to "Linux"
Better Footage of Richard Stallman's Talk Last Week: “Freedom in computing, forty years after starting to really protect it”
Richard Stallman speaks about the cancer situation early in his speech
Links 30/09/2023: A Government Shutdown and More Blizzard Layoffs
Links for the day
Links 30/09/2023: Bing Almost Offloaded Due to Failure/Losses, Nvidia Raided
Links for the day
A Lot of Technological 'Progress' Has Been Nothing But Buzzwords
Free software does not try to excite people people over nothing
Community is the Lifeblood of Freedom in the GNU/Linux World
Removing or undoing the "cancerd" (systemd) is feasible but increasingly difficult
Proprietary Software: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Proprietary software has an entirely different mindset, revolving around business models rather than science
Web Hostnames Down to Lowest Number in More Than 7 Years!
the number of hostnames is falling rapidly (they hide this by choosing logarithmic scale)
Over at Tux Machines...
2 days' worth
Richard Stallman Says He Will Probably Live Many More Years
"Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19."
Quitting 'Clown Computing' and GAFAM is Only the Start
The Web and the Net at large became far too centralised
Stop Begging Companies That Don't Value Your Freedom to Stop Pushing You Around
That's not freedom
They Say Free Software is Like Communism When They, the Proprietary Software Giants, Constantly Pursue Government Bailouts (Subsidies From Taxpayers)
At the moment Ukraine is at most risk due to its dependence on Microsoft (inside its infrastructure)
Social Control Media Has No Future, It Was Always Doomed to Fail (Also Promoted Based on Lies)
Recent events, including developments at Twitter, meant that they lost a lot of their audience and then, in turn, sponsors/advertisers
The forbidden topics
There are forbidden topics in the hacker community
They're Been Trying to 'Kill' Richard Stallman for Years (by Mentally Tormenting Him)
Malicious tongue wanted to do him what had been done to Julian Assange
We Temporarily Have Two Gemini Capsules
They're both authentic and secure, but they're not the same
Consumerism is Lying and Revisionism
We need to reject these liars and charlatans
Links 30/09/2023: Open VFS Framework, CrossOver 23.5, Dianne Feinstein Dies
Links for the day
Security Leftovers
GNU/Linux, Microsoft, and more
Microsoft Down on the World Wide Web, Shows Survey
down by a lot in this category
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 29, 2023
IRC logs for Friday, September 29, 2023
A Society That Fails Journalists Does Not Deserve Journalism
It's probably too later to save Julian Assange as a working publisher (he might never recover from the mental torture), but as a person and a father we can wish and work towards his release
Almost Nothing To Go With Your Morning's Cup Of Coffee
Newspaper? What newspaper?