'Security reviews' are reportedly locking up Apple Savings users' accounts for weeks on end. It’s just one way blunt-force anti-money laundering protocols undermine retail banking, davidzmorris writes. Opinion.
The explanation for the delays is reasonable – at least, by the bizarre standards of the traditional finance system. In many cases the frozen funds were under “security review” – that is, Goldman is making sure its depositors aren’t engaged in criminal money laundering.
This is an excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most pivotal crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can subscribe to get the full The absurdity of this is layered and nuanced, like a souffle of clumsy, anti-customer banking practices. One trigger for such a bank security review, you see, is making a large deposit into a new account. But Apple has been heavily marketing the above-average interest rate on its savings service , so it shouldn’t be a surprise people are depositing large amounts – which is also kind of what normal people do with a savings account already? And the savings service was only launched a few weeks ago, so all of the accounts are new. In other words, if you followed Apple’s marketing cues and opened a big new savings account managed by Goldman, the default assumption baked into the system appears to be that you are a money launderer whose funds must be frozen immediately and indefinitely. This becomes even more of a dystopian nightmare when you look at the specific people targeted by Goldman’s hamfisted anti-money laundering effort. One victim who spoke to the Journal was Antonio Sanchez, a Grammy-winning musician who has collaborated with. This is a person who a quick Google search and phone call could easily have determined is unlikely to be a money launderer. But instead Sanchez, like the other customers profiled, wound up fighting through a Kafkaesque customer service maze for weeks, trying to pry loose a frozen $100,000 intended for a down payment on a house. Sanchez wound up having to borrow money from his mother-in-law: truly, a nightmare beyond nightmares. And if you’re not a Grammy winner? Well, that’s certainly not going to improve how you’re treated. The one solution that worked for a few of the profiled customers was ... getting theto call Goldman about their issues. That customer service solution is not available to most of us.
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