Why would a customer need to know anything about banking at all? Imagine if you were stopped in a supermarket because you beeped on the way out, and then they leave you to wait for hours before someone finally comes to tell you it's well-known that their door gates' sensors are just too sensitive and you can go. You'd probably sue them or at least never go there again, certainly no one would tell you that you don't understand how shoplifting is a complex problem.
If a fraud detection system is known to detect false positives (and they're designed that way on purpose, to provide a better protection to the institution), then there should be measures in place to contain the possible damage to clients, and also an easy procedure for clients to resolve these issues quickly and painlessly. That's a bare minimum. One of the main reason why people moved to Stripe from PayPal and similar services in the first place (beside an api that works) is exactly this type of problems where payment gateways would block your money in the name of some arbitrary "fraud risk" and you couldn't do anything about it. Fraud is their business problem, not mine as a customer. If I'm doing business legally why would I need to care or know anything about it?
The government requires banks to do some of these things. Not just to prevent fraud, but to prevent money laundering, funding terrorists, giving money to entities controlled by sanctioned countries and other criminal activity.
If you don't understand any of these issues, the bank's behavior will seem willfully incompetent and spiteful, and raises some of the feelings expressed in the SP. But you won't find it different at "new tech" bank.
> If you don't understand any of these issues, the bank's behavior will seem willfully incompetent and spiteful, and raises some of the feelings expressed in the SP.
Yeah it will. Unless the bank communicated with you or could tell you what's going on, which apparently they are unable to. As this article illustrates perfectly, the problem is exacerbated by how frustratingly difficult it is to find out what's happening or the fact that seemingly no employee of the bank that you can talk to has any idea of what the issue is.
Please back extraordinary claims with evidence. From where I live, there is nothing in the law that says the bank must leave you hanging dry in case they detect fraud. If it’s different elsewhere, I sure would like to see concrete proof of it.
If you make a large cash transaction, the teller is not supposed to tell you they are filing a Currency Transaction Report (CTR). If you ask about the CTR threshold and then change your transaction size, the teller is then obligated to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). Both CTRs and SARs are reported to Treasury.
It's not about fraud, it's about money laundering. They often look like the same thing.
Issue is not if there should be fraud screenings - of course, they're required both by law and a common sense. Question is do you treat your own system's false positives like customers' problem, or you actually do something pro-active to help them? In my experience most banks and payments services just don't care. It's up to customer to complain and push repeatedly for it to be resolved, and banks make it harder, rather than easier. To get access to your own money you have to go through tones of bureaucracy to prove you didn't do anything wrong. Exactly because of the sums in question the treatment should be different, bank is using that money while it's locked and pays you no interest on that.
If a fraud detection system is known to detect false positives (and they're designed that way on purpose, to provide a better protection to the institution), then there should be measures in place to contain the possible damage to clients, and also an easy procedure for clients to resolve these issues quickly and painlessly. That's a bare minimum. One of the main reason why people moved to Stripe from PayPal and similar services in the first place (beside an api that works) is exactly this type of problems where payment gateways would block your money in the name of some arbitrary "fraud risk" and you couldn't do anything about it. Fraud is their business problem, not mine as a customer. If I'm doing business legally why would I need to care or know anything about it?