Pay off debt become a suspect
If you engage in unusual financial transactions (as loosely defined), your financial institution freezes your funds until the .gov gives the OK. You’re put on the list. Example:
They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.
And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.
And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.
They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.
After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed.
So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.
“When you mess with my money, I want to know why,” he said.
They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.
So, pull out some cash to remodel the kitchen, you could be on the list. Deposit a bonus check, you could be on the list.
And this nonsense is likely to continue with the pending renewal of the PATRIOT Act.
As I was typing this, Michael Silence beat me to it. He discusses some more security issues.
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:10 am
With the pending sale of some properties in Detroit, I will be paying off huge amounts of debt I’ve accumulated.
I’ll let you know if I encounter any issues.
I’ve shuffled $10k around two or three times in a week (playing the “pay Discover with Visa” game) and never encountered a delay or problem. Heck, I’ve had some transfers complete in less than 48 hours.
But, if you read about some guy in Detroit going ballistic and I stop commenting, you’ll know they messed with me. 🙂
March 3rd, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Go read the “Bank Secrecy Act” sometime. It’s been around a long time, since the Reagan years, I think.
March 3rd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
[…] Pay your bills. How disgusting, and how indicative of how little financial privacy you have, and how ridiculously paranoid the state has become in the war on terror.They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522. And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable. And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs. They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast. […] They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.Of course, actions such as these on the part of the “everyone is a suspect” state security types are not really a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past few years. Nonetheless, a real-life report of this type of Orwellian surveillance is still chilling. (Via Say Uncle) […]
March 3rd, 2006 at 2:54 pm
This is nothing new. There’s a limit to how many automated withdrawals you can make from a savings account within a given statement period (six per month, IIRC). I occasionally get fined for exceeding this, because some beuracrat decided that frequently moving money from a savings account to a checking account at the same bank is obviously some devious attempt at money laundering.
March 3rd, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Stormy,
Do you have some law cite for this? Sounds more like a stupid bank policy rule and a good reason to switch banks. I have never heard of any federal limit or fine for withdrawls from a savings account.
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Guy, did you move blogs again? you’re hard to keep up with.
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Uncle,
I still have the slashdot one, but began a new effort so I sort of moved. Kind of like real life, I have more than one home 🙂
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:08 pm
I’d given up on the /. one. Hadn’t updated in months last i checked.
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Yea, I got busy with better jobs, less free time at work, moving residences, buying a place, empty nest badness and stuff.
Should be posting to the new journal every few days or so. Check the new link to my IMDB entry.
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Stormy, that’s just bank policy to minimize the number of transactions and keep people from using savings accounts like checking accounts. There are stricter FDIC imposed limits if it’s a money market account. It all has to do with their asset/liability management and FDIC insurance reserves. And generating fees, of course.
March 3rd, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Upon reflection, the article mentions “percentage increase” in payment.
If they were paying $60 a month and paid $6,000 – that’s what … a 1000% increase? That would catch anyone’s attention.
But there had to be more.
The customers may have been checking *really* quickly after the payment had been made. The clears on my payments (in excess of $10,000) have rarely been over 4 days – and that’s a banking “standard”. (It’s a standard that burns the crap out of me. I use ACH transfers that are instantaneous, yet I can’t access the funds for 48 – 96 hours. WTF?) So they may have just been really anxious and pestered the CC company.
But there may be other reasons. All of my transactions have electronic “histories” (well, _most_ of them do). So if a payment throws up a flag, it’s a pretty easy check for a fed to look at the source account and see that the amount of money isn’t significantly out of range for what I usually do. On the other hand, if my normal transactions were $6,000 and I sent in a check for $600,000, I’m sure it would get someone’s attention. I’m not so sure it should, but I’m sure it would. If – setting aside whether a Fed _should_ be looking at these transactions – if a transaction throws a flag and a Fed looks at it, if there is no clear source of the funds other than a matching “cash” deposit the day before, there would be another flag. Beyond that, I’m sure an aggressive Fed would look up asset transfers (e.g. sale of home, car, insured asset) to determine a possible source of the funds – or an inheritance or insurance payment (although those are usually checks). The only other likely (legal) source is a gambling win – which will probably cause an audit flag to be set on that SSN for the next year.
(Side note – Casinos don’t like it when you keep their high-value chips and use them as convenient replacements for large sums of cash. It’s a lot easier to carry 10 $1,000 chips in your pocket and use them to pay of “private” debts. But the next time you visit, the casino has a “polite, yet firm” conversation with you. They consider those chips *their property*. They represent money, but they aren’t really money. Just take my word for it on this.)
Try bringing a few thousand dollars worth of $20 bills to a casino. They only take $500 worth (25 of them). “We don’t perform money exchange sir, you’ll have to take those to a bank to have them exchanged.” Even though I explained that the cash came from rental property income that I had accumulated throughout the year with the specific intent of bringing there, they were not interested. Have you noticed there are no banks near casinos? Catching a cab with $5k in $20’s in Vegas would have been a bit unsettling. My solution was to create a line of credit at the casino, put the cash back in the vault and deposit into the bank at home. Oh, and never stay there again.
(Which brings up yet another tangent rant – why would someone who has to pay $500 in monthly rent put 25 $20 bills in an envelope? Is asking the bank that cashed their check for $100 bills so f-ing tough? Month after month after month. Don’t *even* get me started on why they don’t write checks. Well, OK, I am – they can’t spell, add, or subtract – obviously.)
/rant
🙂
March 4th, 2006 at 1:30 am
You have to admit that someone actually paying off debt in this country is pretty damn unusual.
On an unrelated note, GuyMontag put me on his slashdot “enemies” list so that I couldn’t comment on his blog a long time ago. I think that’s pretty funny.
March 5th, 2006 at 1:47 am
With all the wire-transfers bouncing around the world (Nigeria?), and a variety of money- laundering schemes, there have been a lot of changes. Friends with an insurance- annuities-pension firm said they have had to take courses in what to look for as amounts of money pass into and out of the company – some calsses required by the Feds, some by the company. That check you’re depositing may look good, but two or three checks back the money might not have been there. So when you make a fast withdrawal on a “good” account, when the records catch up (no, everything is not instatanious) the company is out the money. One friend said they were puting limits on how much could come in at once and in a 12-month period, and were refusing to take certain forms of payment. My bank will honor only the first $5,000 of deposit; you have to wait 15 days to access the rest of the money. This way they’ll only be out $5,000 if you’re running a scam on them.
March 6th, 2006 at 3:46 am
_Jon,
After having written some software for pawnshops, I can tell you that way more people than you suspect don’t even have checking accounts.