No Cash: Banks Refusing to Release Funds
By Cindy Glover, MoneyWise 411 staff writer
Americans are reporting problems with taking their own money out of U.S. banks.
Disturbing stories have been trickling in from around the country – different banks, different tellers, different amounts – but the same runaround.
Customers trying to withdraw sums as low as $2,000 have been stalled, denied their money, or even threatened with legal action…
What’s going on?
Patricia F. was treated like a criminal for trying to take out $5,000 from her account at a major national bank.
She was told that the bank considers anything over $1,500 suspicious, and her withdrawal would be reported to the federal government. “Afterward, I received several notices regarding structured money laundering, pointing out the high fines and jail times involved,” she said.
David B. has had an account for 30 years at a San Francisco branch of one of America’s largest banks.
“I presented my bank card, my state-of-the-art California driver’s license, and entered my PIN. There was no issue as to who I was or my account,” he said. “I told the teller the amount I wished to withdraw. It was in the five figures, but not even close to six figures.”
The teller told him that she would need to speak to the manager.
“She came back and then the stories started to flow,” he recalled. “This branch has low security and doesn’t carry that amount of cash… You can try another branch…”
He couldn’t get a straight answer. Eventually, the manager said the best they could do was $10K. And he’d have to go to a different office to get it.
Ordinary citizens are baffled by these alarming new policies.
But financial publishing mogul Bill Bonner – who’s been studying and writing about the U.S. economy for over 40 years – reveals that it’s actually part of a much larger effort by the federal government to conceal a fatal flaw in our financial system.
To keep a lid on it, the federal government has drastically increased rules related to cash withdrawals. The buzzwords are “structured transactions” and “suspicious activity reports” (SARs).
Today, banks don’t just report withdrawals over $10,000… They have to drop a dime on customers taking out smaller amounts if there’s even a possibility of impropriety.
In the past decade, the number of SARs filed by banks has skyrocketed.
