Banks and You by Francis Turner

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Banks and You by Francis Turner

Q: What’s the difference between Hunter Biden, Konstantin Kisin and you?

A: Access to banks

Let me explain.

Recently Konstantin Kisin (a UK comedian/commentator) got a message from the company that was acting as his bank for a podcast he does with some other people.

There then followed a certain amount of hilarity as Mr Kisin asked (not unreasonably) for a reason why and received a number of non-answers.

Eventually it seems that negative coverage on twitter caused enough pain to someone in authority so there was a response promising to give an answer. Then after almost a week of silence the bank they replied with a buck-passing excuse.

There are some interesting curlicues to this case though.

Starting with the fact that the “bank” isn’t actually a bank. There’s nothing wrong with that, what they’ve done is partnered with a couple of actual banks to offer a banking service that is more convenient for small businesses than that offered by a traditional bank. This is no doubt one reason why Mr Kisin decided to use them. However it probably gives them rather more flexibility to discriminate that they would have if they were an actual bank.

Mind you in the T&Cs there’s this:

So it would seem that the lack of initial explanation means there’s a “legal, regulatory or security reason” for the decision. Now, as someone who works in cyber-security, I can say that this vagueness is typically there so that the company has a get out when closing an account for a “Nigerian Prince” that offers exciting opportunities to for suckers to work from home while enriching some Eastern European cyber-criminals. BUT short of Mr Kisin running a scam, which seems unlikely given his relatively high public profile in the UK, and given that the account seems to be tied explicitly to a locals account where he and a colleague do video interviews for subscribers the “involved in (cyber)crime” excuse seems highly unlikely.

So the more likely reason is that the “bank” doesn’t like Mr Kisin’s generally unwoke and skeptical viewpoint on matters and is now desperately trying to retcon a reason. Quite possibly the root cause is that some SJW activists figured out that Kisin used Tide as a banker and caused some regulatorily complex work to be done on his account which meant that Tide was spending a lot more money responding to them than it could possibly make from Kisin’s account.

I should note that the excuse about third party payment processors and validation simply doesn’t pass the giggle test. TRIGGERnometry uses Stripe (as part of its locals based subscription service) and Paypal (linked from twitter and youtube for donations and in the shop part of the website) and as far as I can tell that’s it. Lets start with Paypal, which has had its own free speech issues (see this for example), and which seems more likely to be the source of donations. Paypal knows the email address and credit card (or bank account) details (including the address) of everyone using it and there is no effective difference (to the recipient’s bank) to a payment made for a purchase of goods/services and a donation. Moreover it stretches credibility that no other Tide customers are using Paypal to receive payments.

That’s the very slightly more plausible 3PPP. If Tide has problems with Stripe then I guarantee that TRIGGERnometry is far from the only organization that banks with Tide that uses Stripe. Stripe is ubiquitous and one of the reasons for this is that it is very good at reducing fraud, which it does by precisely the sort of validation that Tide says it can’t trust. Now I suppose there’s the vague possibility that somewhere on an older website that I can’t find the TRIGGERnometry people have a different payment processor, but that seems unlikely. Aside from anything else if one particular 3PPP was problematic, the obvious thing for Tide to do is to mention that they have a problem with 3PPP X.

Since, rather than say that, they originally gave notice of closing the account and only a week or so later came up with 3rd Party Payment excuse we can be almost certain that Tide simply don’t want TRIGGERnometry’s custom but aren’t willing to come out and say so.

Anyway, moving on. In one of the threads on twitter discussing this there was reference to an excellent, but older, thread by Patrick McKenzie (of Bits About Money):

You should read the whole thread, but one key point is that banks dislike having to put expensive legal/financial expert time into managing a particular account and will typically decide to stop doing business with a customer if the customer’s business results in too much of them. What is worse since banks will share information about such things, if bank A decides that you are too much effort to provide service to then it is likely that banks B,C, D… X will also decline your business leaving you at the mercy of a couple of exceedingly shady and expensive providers Y & Z and running the risk that your new bank will be unable to find correspondent banks for some transactions.
This is a problem that has worsened as governments (and particularly the US government) have passed more and more regulations to prevent money laundering, sanctions busting (and increased massively the number of entities sanctioned) and so on. What this means is that banks have to employ office buildings full of expensive lawyers, compliance officers and the like and they can track what accounts they work on and how much money they earn from those account holders. Since most checking/savings accounts earn the bank a few dozen dollars a year, the handling cost of generating a single Suspicious Acitivity Report (SAR) can wipe out a decade or more of income. Effectively if your bank has to do anything manual and out of the ordinary because of a possible problem with your account they will put a strike on it and, unlike baseball, in banking it’s usually two strikes and you’re out.
Unless, it seems, your name is Biden
Hunter Biden, or a combination of Hunter, Joe and James and their various associated companies, has accumulated 150 SARs most (all?) since 2008 – so an average of about 10 a year. Now it is undoubtedly true that some of these are simply because the amounts being transferred are in the $millions range from foreign entities and are somewhat routine but others almost certainly are not. And the fact is that not all $million transactions from places like Romania or China generate SARs in the first place – or at least they used not to. But one might wonder why banks seemed willing to continue to allow the Biden family to do business with them when random gentlemen called Mohammed (name per McKenzie – one suspects that the problem is limited to people with such names) are invited to take their business elsewhere after just one or two such interactions.
Of course actually we don’t wonder at all. We know why. It’s because not doing business with a Biden would result in even more expensive legal work as Biden and his fellow democrat and deep state allies would cause banks to appear before congressional committees, respond to regulatory questions from the SEC and so on. This is not the case if you are some random Tom, Konstantin or Mohammed who lacks the connections to the government and bureaucracy.
In these days of ubiquitous electronic payments, not having a bank account and/or credit/debit card is a big problem. In Kisin’s case it seems other banks have stepped forward who are quite willing to accept his business but that may not always be the case. As people like the FSU found out with Paypal, or the Canadian truckers found out with various platforms, if any part of the payment process decides they don’t like you then you can be out a lot of money. Worse the byzantine T&Cs that you have to accept to get any kind of money may allow the company to keep the money in limbo for a few months and even levy a fine for doing/saying something they disagree with.
In many cases getting a satisfactory resolution or even any kind of answer requires the glare of publicity rather than calling someone to find out what the problem is. Indeed many internet companies make it extremey difficult to talk to an actual human. let alone one who can give you a straight answer. Effectively, unless you happen to have a senior politician like an MP or US senator who can ask questions for you, your money can be arbitrarily withheld and you will be unable to get anyone to tell you why or give you your money back in a timely manner. On the other hand if you do have friends in high political places you can get a pass on transfers that do in fact raise precisely the sorts of questions that the vague “validation” phrases refer to.
The financial system has become, in effect, weaponized against people who rock the boat and in favor of people who are well connected. This is a problem. Possibly Musk’s X corp will include payment processing that is not limited to particular points of view and the like, but it’s dangerous to rely on a single billionaire to keep the world free, even if he is probably the richest man in the world.  

93 thoughts on “Banks and You by Francis Turner”

  1. I don’t have a huge problem with a bank closing an account and returning all the money (including accumulated interest, if any.) The ones that seize the account I have a big problem with. Sue them into returning the money, plus all legal fees to get it, plus damages to you and your business; and if that’s not feasible, or there is no legal means to get it back, then take it to the next level and begin destroying the bank’s material and personnel assets. There’s probably a psychological reason why I went into the military for 22 years.

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    1. If the bank closes the account and returns the money in cash, the police can impound it on suspicion of trafficking. And the minimum threshold is at the discretion of the police.

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      1. Honestly, I think any one is going to have a major issue if the majority of banks won’t bank them.

        Pretty much everything requires at least checks. And with cash being legally seizeable, I’d be extremely paranoid of trying to run off of it.

        Honestly, this sort of thing is what I would expect people to go pop over, since you can go from comfortable nest egg to nothing with almost no recourse.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. That is exactly the point of this post. Banks and bank-like entities in the payment process for you getting money can decide to not take your business for no good reason. This is a potential major problem

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          2. Personally, I’ve never figured out how the same “public accommodation” standards that force bakers to bake cakes don’t force the banks, tech companies, etc. to offer their normal services to whoever walks through the door unless they have been convicted of an actual crime.

            Liked by 1 person

    3. I remember “Operation Chokepoint,” and saw it as an attempt to inflict a “then they came for…” in parallel rather than in series. Some of the badwrong businesses looked as if they were targeted as sops for the conservatives, to try to get them to quibble, “well, they have a point about those businesses” rather than opposing the whole project on principle.

      And the government regulators have promised promised promised that Operation Chokepoint has been totally totally shut down, and have pinkie-sworn that it will never ever be restarted ever again. (Insert derisive laughter here.)

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      1. OC was just the latest version of stuff that conservatives had been in favor of when it was targeting icky-people-not-them.

        Because apparently the hardest lesson for humans to learn — after “Economics is real and will not be cheated” — is “your government tools will be used against you in the worst possible way”.

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        1. Or, for a different angle: we know there are certain legal/cultural principles which are absolutely necessary to not have tyranny.

          And the last century or so have mostly consisted of chopping down those trees to chase after one devil or another. Followed by widespread pikachu-faces when the devils start chasing them across the howling wasteland.

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  2. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Banks and You

  3. I – briefly, between houses – had more than the FDIC limit in an account, so I looked into splitting it between banks. I ended up doing it not for insurance reasons but for this reason: If anything goes sideways at one bank, I already have accounts at others.

    Yes, they do talk to each other. I’m in Telecheck because I closed an account, then A YEAR LATER received a “you owe us $200” letter. I wrote them back that they could take their $200 and, well, you can guess. That’s been haunting me for almost a decade, now.

    After the Canadian Trucker fiasco, I have a non-trivial amount of cash on hand. Go ahead, ask me to get it for you. It’s in the gun safe.

    Does anyone know how to keep gold from melting in a house fire? Or a good material to use for a make-shift crucible? “Buried in the back yard” seems a bit too paranoid.

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    1. Re: house fire, try one of the fire-boxes as used for paperwork. Assuming the FD gets there fairly quickly, it shouldn’t fail to the point where the gold goes melty.

      With respect to crucibles, look up “clay crucible” on the ‘zon. A #2 Chinesium crucible is about $20, and with other suppliers of various quality levels. Graphite ingot molds are also available. There’s enough home-foundry people out there that a market exists for such. Not sure if an expedient crucible would be a good idea; gold has a pretty high melting point and inadvertent alloying would not be much fun.

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    2. I struggled a little with the problem of where to store gold and silver myself. I finally decided to keep only a relatively small amount at home. The problem then became what to do with the rest of it.

      Safety deposit boxes were right out. I read too many stories of beneficiaries arriving to open a deceased relative’s box to find an IRS agent there waiting to check on the contents.

      What I did was to find (hopefully) reliable places to vault the rest. You do have to pay fees for that. My precious metal IRA charges me about $130 per year but that does include other services. The other charges me 0.05% monthly which amounts to about $1.00/oz at current exchange rates.

      If you do go the bury it in the backyard route, be sure your family or other beneficiaries will be able to find it if you die unexpectedly. I don’t know about you but I find the thought of death bad enough without the added worry that my family might end up destitute.

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      1. PLEASE? My family (not me. I ain’t got any) has a bad habit of burying hordes somewhere, including hollow spaces on the wall, then forgetting as their memory degenerates.
        By our estimation we’ve lost as a family at least three such hordes in my life time, though I grant you metal detectors are not a thing in Portugal.
        And the habit must be old, because when grandma refloored her house we found a cache of 18th century coins.

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        1. A month before Mom passed away of cancer she told me she had 30k hidden. I asked her to tell me where and she said “No! I’m going to beat this thing!”

          We never found it.

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          1. Sigh. My mom is convinced my nephew knows where she hid everything. My nephew is deaf and has ADD. He has no clue, if he ever did. And he can’t tell her that, because she doesn’t believe him.

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        2. My da went around Ireland in the 60’s and 70’s buying Gold Sovereigns and silver coinage for face value. Several had been de monetized and no one wanted them, they thought he was mad.

          They used to keep them tucked up on the moulding or, my favorite, weighting curtains. It’s was a very poor house indeed that hadn’t put something by.

          Where to put it was always a problem, what with Government confiscation and all — and they say the US has never defaulted,. Pfui — alas, they were on the boat when we had that tragic accident, on two continents yet.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. well, the very little we did have — wedding gifts and gifts for the kids and the like — was stolen somewhere between Colorado and here. It’s complicated by my forgetting it in my purse (it wasn’t MUCH) for a few months then putting away without verifying, so we don’t even know if it was workers here, or someone at the hotels we stayed while moving, or someone in CO who was working on the house.
            I can’t believe this happened, and I’m very disheartened. Part of it was all my childhood jewelry I was saving for potential grandchilren.
            Fair gutted me. I also owe the kids about 10k each. Sigh. We were keeping their stuff because they’re in the age of moving around…. I feel like a right berk.

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        3. Argh. Metal detectors are just OSCILLATORS with an exposed tank circuit (really, just the inductor). Change the inductance, change the frequency. The FANCY ones say if iron-ish or not (ferrous vs. nonferrous moves things different directions). If you can RADIO, you can metal detect!

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        4. You probably bury hoards. If you buried a horde, the people in it might object. ;-D

          Seriously — this is what always happens when regulation of a business is imposed. Regulators always pretend that they’re there to protect consumers but it’s never true. They’re protecting the incumbents by making it difficult or impossible for new competitors to enter the marketplace.

          It’s easy to tell that the banking industry in the US is an extreme example, because no new bank has opened its doors since the 1970’s savings-and-loan crisis, which ended with the FSLIC closing its doors.

          There is one existing bank I can recommend, which is an old bank with a new name: Old Glory Bank (.com). They say they won’t engage in political discrimination, and I’m sure they would allow Kisin to open an account, if authorities in his country permit it. But that may not put him back in business, because PayPal, Stripe, and Venmo are all very much woke companies. He may very well be reduced to having donors mail him checks and taking them to a check cashing place (which charge high fees since their customer base is people who’ve been “debanked” and have no alternative).

          The non-woke companies I know about who’ve been debanked and gotten past it have all wound up using services outside their home countries. That’s about the only good alternative left, until we can get “debanking” outlawed.

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          1. A lot of hordes could stand burying – FBI, ATF, CCP, DPRK, BLM, SPLC, DNC, NRSC, etc.

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      2. Regarding safe deposit boxes, there’s also the incident from several years ago (here in LA County, IIRC) where the FBI searched the safe deposit boxes of a bank looking for money related to criminal proceeds (drug sales, IIRC)… and then seized all of the valuables from the boxes that had no evidence of wrongdoing. No reason was given, IIRC. They just took all of it.

        A court subsequently smackef them down, though I don’t remember hearing about any punishment for the agents involved.

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        1. Yes, you’re absolutely right. It was in Beverly Hills, I believe. And it took years (and a lawsuit) for the innocent box holders to get their assets back.

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          1. A search on “southern california safe deposit seizure” indicates that the innocents are still trying to get their goods and money. Seems the FBI didn’t bother to mention it wanted to seize all the contents, but implied a limited search. (The company Private Vaults got busted for money laundering, but lots of non-launderers were storing stuff.)

            Where it gets really maddening is the court’s decision (as of 9/30/22. Not sure of appeals.) as follows:

            https://reason.com/2022/09/30/federal-judge-decides-safe-deposit-boxes-arent-safe-from-fbi/

            Some innocent people had cash seized “due to drug dealing” without any evidence of guilt. Some got their money back. Not sure of the current status, but it looks ugly.

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            1. And yet we’ve been repeatedly assured by various Stasi defenders that this doesn’t happen. Horseshit. No confiscation until conviction.

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                1. “I vas only folloving orders” died at Nuremburg. We can always bring that back; of course we’ll need to issue a lot of apologies to some unsavory people who thought that was a defense, there and other times and places since.

                  They were individually entrusted with authority, and took an INDIVIDUAL oath to uphold it.

                  “Though we called your friend from his bed this night, he could not speak for you,
                  For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.” — St Peter to Tomlinson.

                  “Though we whistled your love from her bed to-night, I trow she would not run,
                  For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!” — Satan to Tomlinson.

                  They seem to agree on where responsibility lies, no?

                  https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tomlinson.html

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              2. There was a case where a couple sold property to pay for their lawyer and the money got seized, meaning they couldn’t get so good a lawyer — and this was upheld.

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              3. Doing these in the wrong order isn’t an accident. The Stasi wants to make sure you don’t have any money to pay your lawyer before they railroad^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H offer you a plea bargain.

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            2. Interesting. Based on that article, it appears that the vault company itself was suspected of illegal actions regarding those safe deposit boxes.

              If so, that puts a different twist on the situation.

              If that is the case, procedures were not followed regardless of intent. As innocent parties in possible illegalities, that warrant should have required that a representative of each box owner be present to verify the contents and sign for anything taken.

              Sloppy.

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              1. As innocent parties in possible illegalities, that warrant should have required that a representative of each box owner be present to verify the contents and sign for anything taken.

                Yeah but that would take work. And there is nothing the functionaries of the legal system hates more than actually doing their jobs the way they are supposed to be done.

                see also: the reliance on plea bargains

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      1. The Utah Legal Tender Act inspired the “goldback” A composite bill with a small amount of gold (1 GB = 1/1000 troy oz of gold) protected by vapor deposited polymer. Whether it is a good solution to the small transaction problem only the future will tell. Personally, I liked the idea well enough to buy a few. I figure, if nothing else, they are pretty enough I can give them away as Christmas presents.

        It does seem to be catching on, though. New Hampshire, Nevada, and Wyoming all have their own versions. I’ve also read that some merchants in Nevada and Utah accept them as payment. So who knows?

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        1. There was a concept of rolling your own using gold/silver wire or foil and a laminator.

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      2. Also, if it’s been confiscated once by the government, it can be confiscated twice by the government…

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        1. Jewelry, not bullion or coins, avoids that issue, mostly. No one objects to taking gold coins from Scrooge McDuck, but taking grandma’s wedding ring makes people angry.

          The problem then becomes one of assaying, but Archimedes solved that quite some time back. To be fair, I haven’t tried it, so I have no idea how it works in practice.

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  4. Note, I’m a mediator in the United States, and can only speak on legal policey in the United States, and have no knowledge of, nor am attempting to speak on UK suit policey in regards to the UK, other than what happens there often eventually comes here and what happens here comes over there.. There are other reasons why the not bank partnered with banks might want to eject a customer:
    1. The bank’s management team, or shareholders — depending — don’t want to be associated with anyone that is holding onto the finances of a certain customer. Kind of common if the person is noticable in the public eye, and they don’t agree with said person, or there’s allot of negative publicity surrounding said person. This is by no means new. Let me add emphasis, it predates the birth of everyone reading this put together. If you lost favor with the King, in days of old, then here’s the money we were holding onto, for you to do business in forign shores back.
    2. A particular large, or influental client, who’s money that don’t want to lose says get rid of so and so, or get rid of me, and I’ll make it public. Yes, this is arguably blackmail, but hey, it happens.
    3. There’s a suit where this is being added on as icing on the cake. allowable, but to describe it as being in poor taste, well, doesn’t really do it justice — pun intended — yet it still happens.

    This is not to say the reason given in the original posting isn’t correct, but its hardly the only one. Thank you, that is all.

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  5. It is a small, very exclusive club, and we ain’t in it.

    And I wouldn’t even care as I have no interest at all in being in whatever club Brandon and his criminal cohorts are in…. if they would just leave me alone.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. This sort of nonsense often makes it hard to open overseas bank accounts if you’re a US citizen. The US government has even muscled the Swiss into cooperating.

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    1. That’s one of the things in the MacKenzie thread IIRC. FATCA was a sledgehammer to deal with a peanut and it impacted thousands of entirely innocent American taxpayers living abroad.

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    2. The Swiss banks (UBS in particular) handed themselves to the Feds on a silver platter by opening branches in the US.

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      1. For the Pu-239, that brings a whole new meaning to “money burning a hole in your pocket” once it gets close to critical… :-)

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        1. I recall a “Probability Zero” based on this. “There are no millionaires on $WORLD” and the story a fellow slowly stashing away the coins… until The Event… “There are no millionaires of $WORLD.” Rather silly for physics and economics, but it WAS Probability Zero.

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          1. Missed that. My comment was WRT the fact that you cannot build a Pu-239 fission bomb the same way as a U-235 (Hiroshima gun-type) bomb, because you cannot assemble the two pieces fast enough; they melt before reaching criticality. You have to use the implosion technique on a sub-critical mass.

            A-a-a-a-nd considering the number of glowies probably salivating while reading this, that’s enough of that subject… ;-)

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  8. Gosh, I wonder why there is the “big push” to do away with cash?? Please note the sarcastic tone in the above.

    We’re running a cash household as best we can. Being retired I’ve got some flexibility and use it to our advantage. Each month when the money comes in I write a few checks (so I have a proof of payment and I won’t give any direct billing info out) and the rest of each monthly expense is in good old cash. Every month there is only a couple of hundred dollars in our working accounts at any time leaving not much to mess with by anyone. We also have a chunk of change hidden in our at home cookie jar so there is a substantial cash amount for an emergency if needed. Don’t and won’t trust any big banks so the business we do is with a local small credit union and a small regional bank owned by employees. It ain’t foolproof but I’m trying.

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  9. One of the things that’s going to happen when we get to the Summervale series is that a bunch of bankers decide to play games like this.

    What does the Empress Theodora do? Open up the Imperial Credit Union to the public. All of those annoying people? Have they committed a crime, proven in court? No? Bueller? Then, they can have a credit union account. Backed by the sheer fiscal size of the Throne.

    And since all of these banks and clients are interacting with an Imperial Institution…fraud just isn’t a civil tort but a criminal tort. Let’s not even talk about credit card fraud (“I think it’s time for you to handle all of these low-hanging frauds before the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Finance start checking to make sure you’re not skimming…”).

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    1. Please note that the optimal level of fraud is not zero. Even in your hypothetical world where the government owns a bank and can impose capital punishment on fraudsters that remains the case. Sure the incentives to commit fraud are lower but you can never stamp it out and you should not expect to.

      See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ and lots of other similar financial writing available on the Internet

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Well, the Empress understands that people are people.

        She just doesn’t feel like feeding the worst angels of human nature. And, keeping the criminal class busy trying to figure out new ways to commit crimes is always a good thing.

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  10. YMMV but there is a bank called Old Glory Bank that has started in Oklahoma. They promise to cater to the non woke. I intend to put some money there to support the cause.

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  11. Maybe I can get some help here?

    I’ve been using Yahoo! E-mail for…ever, pretty much. It’s been giving me trouble lately, like wanting to send text messages to verify the account. I have no way to receive text messages. You have to enter a phone number, so I’ve been using a landline phone.

    Today it entirely stopped working. Clicking on ‘Take me to my account’ cycles back to the login screen, again and again. I’m finally DONE with Yahoo and AT&T.

    Is there an E-mail service that doesn’t play f*k-f*k games, doesn’t cater to left-wing causes, just quietly handles the mail and stays out of your business? That’s what I need.

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    1. ProtonMail, though they do like two-factor authentication (like sending a text to confrim, though there are other ways, like with an app on the smartphone you don’t have. I think there are desktop apps, too.

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      1. I’ve been using Panix.com for my mail provider for the last three decades. Their big service is Unix shell accounts, but they do offer straight mailbox services. The base mailbox service is $5/month (with a Unix shell account, it’s $10/month).

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Thanks. I’m going through setting up an E-mail account direct with the service provider although something is screwy right now – I can get to the E-mail page on a Raspberry Pi computer, but going through the exact same steps on my main desktop computer produces a blank screen, an error, and a message to contact the site administrator.

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      1. It might be a permission issue on the system. I’m getting that for twitter pages on my normal login with Pale Moon. Switching to Firefox (which I don’t like nor trust much) or using Pale Moon from a root login eliminates the problem. I just have to figure out which permission problem is screwing things up for me…

        (It worked well on my standard login until PM did a major update last month. Sigh.)

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    3. Back in the dialup days (dsl wasn’t an option here, since living 3 miles past the end of the earth makes life interesting), I got an account with copper.net. When the budget said yes to satellite broadband-ish service, I kept copper for the email.

      They now have an email-only service for $29.95 a year. They actually use everyone dot net for the email, and there’s a web mail interface that copper has. I tried it, and that was a huge mess. OTOH, copper published the information necessary to let a third-party email reader (in my case, Thunderbird) do the work. The setup wasn’t hard, and it Just Works. I have no idea of the politics of the copper people, and that’s a green flag for me. :)

      I’ve had my email address since the late Aughts and really don’t want to change. It’s Good Enough.

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      1. Also, be aware that a lot of ISPs (such as Frontier) have subcontracted their e-mail to Yahoo. Frontier paint job, Yahoo engine.

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        1. Had FrontierDSL. HAD. There is a Very Good Reason for that verb tense.
          “Frontier, get thee behind me – for I know thou art UNABLE to push.”

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  12. Oh, and get a load of their wording on that ‘terms’ page: “Reasonably suspect” — “Reasonably believe” — “Reasonably think”

    Who decides what is “Reasonably”, pray tell? They do! And if you disagree, you are being “Unreasonable”.

    On the one hand, banks should have some right to decide who they do business with. On the other hand, you should have a right to expect that your account won’t be suspended arbitrarily. On the gripping hand, if all the banks ‘freely decide’ not to do business with you, you are F*’d.

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    1. Legal “reasonable” means a functionary somewhere has written down a reason.

      Whether this corresponds to any human understanding of “reasonable” or is possessed of logical coherence is irrelevant.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. Pingback: Must-read: “Banks and you” by Francis Turner — why banks can close you down for “suspicious activity” while real major crooks | Spin, strangeness, and charm

  16. Fun Thought Time: Imagine Trump (or uber-Trump) getting in and aiming the excess IRA (er, IRS) hires at the wokists & the ratfinks that hired them.

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  17. Has the good Mr. Kisin suggested anyone and everyone with anyone with those finks pull their fund and go elsewhere? And ALL HELL is they are not allowed? Hello BANK RUN. The bastard EARNED it. If it kills them, it’s SUICIDE. NO PITY.

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  18. We either need to massively deregulate the banking industry so that it’s trivial to set up a new bank catering to the unpersoned or we need to make banking a “common carrier” type industry where banks cannot refuse to do legal business with anyone. If Mr. Banks suspects one of his customers is doing something illegal then he can take his suspicions and his evidence to law enforcement.

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    1. “we need to make banking a “common carrier” type industry where banks cannot refuse to do legal business with anyone. If Mr. Banks suspects one of his customers is doing something illegal then he can take his suspicions and his evidence to law enforcement.”

      And the cops cannot force him to do their snooping for them by threatening to prosecute him as an assessory if he doesn’t monitor their activity. The Gambino crime family might plan a caper over the phone, but the cops have to get a warrant to wiretap them, and they can’t prosecute the phone company as an assessory to the caper because the phone company required they get a warrant FIRST.

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