Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

78 points by dangrossman 4 months ago | 66 comments
  • renewiltord 4 months ago
    Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the time in it.

    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.

    • RandomBacon 4 months ago
      > There’s some stuff you have to fill out explaining why

      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.

      • jagraff 4 months ago
        Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.
        • ValentineC 4 months ago
          > having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

          Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking relationship, but not prevent other banks from opening new accounts.

          From what I understand, there are other reporting systems in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this form of information sharing.

          • RandomBacon 3 months ago
            Idk, maybe I heard wrong way back when. When I deposited a large amount of money, at another credit union, they knew who I was, but they asked for my driver license number (which I verbally told them) presumably for some report on their computer. Also when I withdrew the money from the first credit union, it seemed like they were filling out some ling form as well.
          • renewiltord 4 months ago
            Maybe that was it and I misremembered. All I know was that it wasn’t onerous. I walked up to the teller, described things, and asked for the money. Then it struck me I could ask for the many accounts thing. Then it struck me I could just take the $15k and deal with the rest later. It was a while back but there was slightly more friction than when I usually take out smaller amounts like a few thousand.
            • 4 months ago
            • bombcar 4 months ago
              Banks have always worked with me when I needed large cash withdrawals. They always like if you talk about it beforehand (e.g., don't go in and say you need $30k for a car NOW, but tell them you'd like it next week).

              It helps tremendously if the bank manager knows you, or at least recognizes you.

              • renewiltord 4 months ago
                Mine was pretty straightforward. I just walked up to the teller. I might have misremembered the filling in thing but I could have had my $50k in the next few minutes if I hadn’t changed my mind.

                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.

              • brianleb 4 months ago
                >> I had some $115k at the time in it.

                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

                • stetrain 4 months ago
                  That's true but I'm not sure how it's relevant.

                  Most people asking their bank to withdraw $50k+ in cash are by definition going to have above-average assets.

                  • danso 4 months ago
                    Yes, generally the only people who would be able to withdraw $50k from a savings account are people who are well-off enough to have $50k in a non-retirement savings account. Doesn't it follow, then, that such a person would be seen by the bank as a "well-off customer" and thus enjoy higher withdrawal thresholds?
                    • ZeWaka 4 months ago
                      I don't think the OP ever purported to be doing something the 'average American consumer' would be doing, just relating their experiences to the linked article.
                      • ty6853 4 months ago
                        They don't have access to an account with 100k in it because that would generally be pointless for a normal person. A great deal of people have 100k in clear real estate or stocks. Only a moron leaves 100k sitting doing nothing but wait for it to get inflated to oblivion.
                        • renewiltord 4 months ago
                          Haha, a bit snide but not inaccurate. Over the year I had that money in there gaining nothing, I lost thousands of dollars of value. Even just putting it into a HYSA would have been better.
                    • JohnMakin 4 months ago
                      Everything else aside, I find it very unusual from an amateur journalist's perspective that his intuition led him to doubt the veracity of this story, yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting. Seems like a good way to waste a lot of time or come to a completely wrong conclusion.
                      • rsynnott 3 months ago
                        > yet, his biggest clue he went on was supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting

                        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).

                      • iwanttocomment 4 months ago
                        Encyclopedia Brown and the Case He Created for Himself Based on His Own Misguided Skepticism Where Everyone Turned Out to Be Honest and Accurate and There Was No Actual Mystery at All
                        • JaakkoP 4 months ago
                          Thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the process of solving the mystery withdrawal, even though the outcome wasn’t what I expected. Consumed through an email client so the AI image didn’t bother me either.
                          • anigbrowl 4 months ago
                            This is so overwritten.

                            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.

                            • MostlyStable 4 months ago
                              That's because the point of this article isn't really investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not it actually happened (or at least, it's not only that). It's using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that, then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".
                              • danso 4 months ago
                                But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't really inform us about the ways bank actually operates, because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly assume that a New York branch of America's 2nd-largest bank operated similarly to any small-town independent bank, and if so, why would he do that?
                                • jldugger 4 months ago
                                  My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks operate differently for a select few, and his primary error was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the error.

                                  For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter corrections column than an HN worthy post:

                                  > 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. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.

                              • Fade_Dance 4 months ago
                                I felt like I was giving it a second and third chance, and then I realized it was only a third of the way in. Thank you for confirming my suspicion here.
                                • emodendroket 4 months ago
                                  When I heard about this story I had assumed she kept the money in her home. How did she get all the way through withdrawing the money without at any point thinking something about the story didn't add up? Mystifying.
                                  • lxgr 4 months ago
                                    By her account, she did so at least at one point:

                                    > 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.

                                • lxgr 4 months ago
                                  Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor:

                                  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…

                                  • pchristensen 4 months ago
                                    The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.
                                    • danso 4 months ago
                                      What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, why would a purported fabricator even bother to give that specific detail at all, which would make it easier for anyone (as Patrick attempted) to narrow down where the fakery did/didn't happen?

                                      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.

                                      • BryantD 4 months ago
                                        It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message.

                                        I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.

                                    • patio11 4 months ago
                                      You can put theses in the third paragraph but you can't force everyone to actually read them.
                                      • lxgr 4 months ago
                                        Well, the phrase "I now doubt that account less" didn't evoke "this article outlines the non-refutation of a null hypothesis" for me when I initially read it.

                                        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.

                                    • rufus_foreman 4 months ago
                                      It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely get some attention.
                                      • lxgr 4 months ago
                                        For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already withdrawn/spent the funds.

                                        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.

                                        • jandrese 4 months ago
                                          No bank is going to let you withdraw funds off of that $200k until it actually clears the ACH, plus a couple of days.
                                          • mindslight 3 months ago
                                            Isn't "clear the ACH" actually something like 90 days? Even if that check is drawn on a reputable bank that has those funds (ie doesn't promptly reply with the ACH equivalent of NACK), that balance could just be another link in a chain of fraudulent transactions.

                                            From what I can tell banks generally don't rely on airtight logical guarantees. Rather they have some kind of exposure on every transaction, which they work to reduce. This isn't the most efficient system, but they deal with more types of fraud than just fake checks.

                                          • nradov 4 months ago
                                            This is why banks limit funds availability after deposits, especially for paper checks. Most banks will only allow you to immediately withdraw a small amount and hold the rest until the check clears so their exposure is very limited.
                                            • 4 months ago
                                          • foobarian 4 months ago
                                            > Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce like dew in the morning sun.

                                            This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say "evaporate" instead of effervesce?

                                            • cbfrench 4 months ago
                                              Probably meant evanesce, which has the same sense as evaporate and could be easily confused with effervesce.
                                            • Evidlo 4 months ago
                                              I've never seen so much literary analysis on HN before.
                                              • jessekv 4 months ago
                                                This one was a bit like reading Sherlock Holmes.
                                                • danso 4 months ago
                                                  Jesus CHRIST — this article should be taught in writing classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely important. I'd about how this article could be vastly improved if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure what the point of the article was.

                                                  > 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...

                                                  • pchristensen 4 months ago
                                                    Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either group.

                                                    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.

                                                    • danso 4 months ago
                                                      It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but purposeless word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of words alluding to why he thinks The Cut's story is total horseshit — and let's be clear, it was a comically bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well, she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not bullshit". If anything, I wanted more words of reflection by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an extravagant amount of time and money in investigating something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag wouldn't also fib to the police?
                                                      • tgsovlerkhgsel 4 months ago
                                                        The assertion is addressed by:

                                                        1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that won't let the average person take out $50k in cash would still plausibly let this person take out $50k in cash

                                                        2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story. While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this closely.

                                                        • 4 months ago
                                                      • jccalhoun 4 months ago
                                                        > > 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.

                                                        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."

                                                        • tgsovlerkhgsel 4 months ago
                                                          I generally hate long form articles. Something about this one was sufficiently different that I enjoyed reading it from start to end.

                                                          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.

                                                        • pavel_lishin 4 months ago
                                                          [flagged]
                                                          • tptacek 4 months ago
                                                            Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

                                                            https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

                                                            • joe8756438 4 months ago
                                                              idk, i think it’s as worth mentioning as the writing style, which a lot of the comments are about. and i think they’re fair — don’t mind the style myself
                                                              • Kelvin506 4 months ago
                                                                [flagged]
                                                            • HeyLaughingBoy 4 months ago
                                                              Yeah, but it's so obviously fake that it's not bad :-)
                                                              • o11c 4 months ago
                                                                I didn't think it was "obviously fake" (unlike, say, the recent Chicago gambling one) at first glance. I had to zoom in to see the horrors.
                                                              • MichaelZuo 4 months ago
                                                                I’m beginning to think the lumpy intelligence theory is true… that if someone is way above average in some area they must also be below average in some other area(s).

                                                                The only exceptions being literal super-geniuses.

                                                                • thrance 4 months ago
                                                                  Seriously, I quit any post that begins with a shitty irrelevant AI image. I really wonder what reasoning could possibly lead to one thinking "yeah, this will definitely improve my article".
                                                                • ahoy 4 months ago
                                                                  [flagged]