[HN Gopher] Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
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Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash
Author : dangrossman
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-03-05 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bitsaboutmoney.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bitsaboutmoney.com)
| danso wrote:
| Jesus _CHRIST_ -- this article should be taught in writing
| classes everywhere, specifically, on why editing is absolutely
| important. I 'd about how this article could be vastly improved
| if you cut out x% of its 6,500 words, but I can't even make that
| estimate b/c by the time I reached the end, I was no longer sure
| what the point of the article was.
|
| > _A style magazine published an account of a large cash
| withdrawal that didn 't match my understanding of banking
| reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year
| investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I
| understand the context better._
|
| I'm truly at a loss at understanding how the author spent so much
| time and money to arrive at basically the same conclusion made by
| anyone who had closely read The Cut's essay [0] and the next-day
| NYT followup [1]. The Cut writer's family wealth [2] was already
| tweeted about during the viral discussion. The police report that
| apparently satisfies the author's skepticism was something that
| could have been pursued as soon as he finished reading the
| article, which clearly asserts that she made a police report.
|
| Kudos I guess for detailing this laborious process. But if it
| took author this long to find a police report, then maybe he
| could trim the roughly 2,000 words devoted to exploring how dumb
| the media can be.
|
| edit: one example of how tendentious this article is:
|
| > _The writer's positive home equity, trivially available to the
| bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten years
| of the median household income for New York City. The writer is
| the president of the family charitable foundation, which per its
| annual filings with the IRS has in the recent past held
| approximately $2 million in marketable securities. And the family
| estate in Connecticut (which the writer's parents live at) was
| featured in the local paper, highlighting two hundred years of
| history._
|
| > _Discovering these facts radically changed my impression of
| why, per the writer's written communication with me, she was not
| asked for the purpose of a $50,000 withdrawal by any bank staff.
| It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when
| someone attempted to empty their entire savings account and
| wasn't even half-heartedly counseled about caution._
|
| So the author links to U.S. Census [3], which says the median
| household income is $79k. But it also says the median value of an
| owner-occupied home is $751k. I suppose having $800k in _positive
| home equity_ is different than owning a $750k home...but she 's a
| New York City-based writer at a prestigious magazine. Even if you
| didn't look up her address, it should have been obvious that she
| was obviously a different kind of bank customer than the ones
| that fit Bank of America's profile for scam victim.
|
| [0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-
| arrest-w...
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your-money/scam-new-
| york-...
|
| [2]
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/850...
|
| [3]
| https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
| pchristensen wrote:
| Patrick's audience (for BAM especially) is 1) people who enjoy
| or are professionally interested in nitty gritty details of
| financial regulation, and 2) people who enjoy Patrick's
| personality and writing style. It's ok to not belong to either
| group.
|
| And the point of the article is basically: Patrick can get
| obsessive about details, and here is an example of how that
| plays out in real life.
| danso wrote:
| It's not word-count or details that I'm averse to, but
| _purposeless_ word count. Patrick spends a huge amount of
| words alluding to why he thinks The Cut 's story is total
| horseshit -- and let's be clear, it was a comically
| bewildering story by any standards. But all of those details
| are pointless when the story abruptly concludes with "Well,
| she said it to the police so I guess it's likely not
| bullshit". If anything, I wanted _more_ words of reflection
| by Patrick, explaining what made him so willing to bet an
| extravagant amount of time and money in investigating
| something so trivially affirmed? AFAICT, his skepticism
| starts from the assertion of "Banks just don't let an
| average person take out $50k in cash in a day". How is that
| assertion addressed by the fact that the victim gave the
| police a brief report of events? As if it wasn't possible
| that someone who fabricated this massive story in NYMag
| wouldn't also fib to the police?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The assertion is addressed by:
|
| 1. The discovery of new facts that explain why a bank that
| won't let the _average_ person take out $50k in cash would
| still plausibly let _this_ person take out $50k in cash
|
| 2. The story having (verifiable) details that would be
| unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it, unless they
| went through a massive effort to fabricate a perfect story.
| While it is possible to fabricate a story that would pass
| thorough scrutiny, most fabricated stories would show
| inconsistencies or otherwise fall apart if looked at this
| closely.
| danso wrote:
| Here's the graf that most resembles a thesis statement:
|
| > _Then, I read the article, with a particular attention
| to the paragraph quoted above. I felt that several
| elements of this paragraph were inconsistent with the
| standard practice of banking._
|
| The quoted paragraph that he refers to:
|
| > _When I reached the bank, I told the guard I needed to
| make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs.
| Michael [a member of the scamming team] was on
| speakerphone in my pocket. I asked the teller for
| $50,000. The woman behind the thick glass window raised
| her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back
| with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them
| out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills
| through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me
| against scams. I thanked her and left._
|
| How does "The Bank of America branch that she named by
| address (in the police report) has a second-floor teller
| window" a meaningful verification of the NYMag's
| problematic paragraph? Unless you think that literally
| the main problem with the NYMag graf is the first
| sentence: _I told the guard I needed to make a large cash
| withdrawal and she sent me upstairs_
|
| > _The story having (verifiable) details that would be
| unlikely to exist if someone fabricated it_
|
| She knows there's a Bank of America on 1 Flatbush Avenue.
| You really think that someone who spent months writing
| and working with an editor to publish a massive
| fabrication is too lazy to actually visit that actual
| location, especially when it's a short subway stop from
| her home?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I generally _hate_ long form articles. Something about this one
| was sufficiently different that I enjoyed reading it from start
| to end.
|
| I think a big part of it is that there isn't any actual
| bullshit filler, and a lot of interesting information (even
| though it may not be critical for the TL;DR of the story). Most
| long form articles end up describing irrelevant details like
| the weather on the day of the interview, or the interior
| decoration of someone's house. Here, it's immediately clear why
| every piece of information is included, the article shares a
| lot of background information but tells something interesting
| with every paragraph.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| > > The writer's positive home equity, trivially available to
| the bank which wrote their mortgage, is well in excess of ten
| years of the median household income for New York City. The
| writer is the president of the family charitable foundation,
| which per its annual filings with the IRS has in the recent
| past held approximately $2 million in marketable securities.
| And the family estate in Connecticut (which the writer's
| parents live at) was featured in the local paper, highlighting
| two hundred years of history.
|
| Agreed. The author could have written, "it turns out the writer
| was from a wealthy family, grew up in a 200 year old home, and
| is president of the family's $2 million charity."
| lxgr wrote:
| Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due
| respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing
| about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational
| endeavor:
|
| This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that
| one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor".
|
| Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part
| of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this...
| pchristensen wrote:
| The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window
| was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the
| branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness
| for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more
| than his other, more informative ones.
| danso wrote:
| What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the
| NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough
| to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k
| transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already
| going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to
| fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the
| intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look
| like? Or actually, why would a purported fabricator even
| bother to give that specific detail at all, which would make
| it easier for anyone (as Patrick attempted) to narrow down
| where the fakery did/didn't happen?
|
| I mean the NYMag story was _incredibly_ dumb and far-fetched,
| even compared to most scam stories. But the fact that she
| didn 't write it pseudonymously, and gave the specific date
| that it happened, and also claimed to have called the police,
| that felt enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt
| her story was more or less rooted in reality.
| BryantD wrote:
| It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that
| $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her
| socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye
| originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't
| get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds
| together" message.
|
| I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason
| why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of
| information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the
| original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I
| would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't
| blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.
| danso wrote:
| > _The core piece of information is that she
| misrepresented her wealth in the original article._
|
| She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At
| no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states
| upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a
| child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed
| away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been
| a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag for around a
| decade.
|
| Is it possible that such a New Yorker could have all
| those things while barely making in the middle-class?
| Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even
| Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means
| beyond their job income, e.g. maybe she or her husband
| worked at Goldman Sachs before their current careers, or
| come from rich families.
|
| I too assumed that $50k was too big of a cash draw for
| any non-business account, but it didn't seem like a
| stretch to imagine that she fit the bank's profile of a
| wealthy customer (esp. at her young age). Patrick knows
| far more about the financial system than I do, so I have
| to assume his skepticism was founded in what he thought
| were widely applicable hard-coded rules and policy. I
| wish he would have spent a fraction of his word count
| telling us the assumptions/knowledge about bank rules
| that he had been misinformed on. Because this year-long
| multi-thousand dollar fraud investigation of his couldn't
| have just been because he didn't imagine a NYMag
| financial columnist might be wealthy?
| jldugger wrote:
| > Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even
| Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means
| beyond their job income
|
| Probably the biggest giveaway in the article was the
| $50,000 inheritance from a grandparent. When my
| grandparents died, they left the grandchildren a small
| amount ($500 each, IIRC), and the vast majority to their
| direct children. This seems standard to me, and if the
| ratios hold then she presumably stands to inherit far,
| far more in the future.
|
| I find it hard to fault anyone for assuming people are
| like themselves in most ways. But maybe don't follow his
| twitter hot takes. Or twitter in general?
| patio11 wrote:
| You can put theses in the third paragraph but you can't force
| everyone to actually read them.
| lxgr wrote:
| Well, the phrase "I now doubt that account less" didn't evoke
| "this article outlines the non-refutation of a null
| hypothesis" for me when I initially read it.
|
| After reading the article, sure, I can see that that's what
| was implied, but I can only say that it wasn't clear enough
| for me. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but I think I
| could have enjoyed it more if primed differently.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Mandating a cooling-off period causes some scams to effervesce
| like dew in the morning sun.
|
| This had me scratching my head a bit. Perhaps they meant to say
| "evaporate" instead of effervesce?
| cbfrench wrote:
| Probably meant _evanesce_ , which has the same sense as
| _evaporate_ and could be easily confused with _effervesce._
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| It's not just withdrawing money. Walk into a bank and try to
| deposit a check for $200,000 into your checking account that
| typically never has more than $2,000 in it and you will likely
| get some attention.
| lxgr wrote:
| For very different reasons, though: If the check bounces, the
| bank potentially takes the loss if the depositor has already
| withdrawn/spent the funds.
|
| In other words, this is a direct credit risk to the bank, not
| the more indirect reputational or relationship risk of
| potentially unwittingly or negligently facilitating a scam
| described in TFA.
| jandrese wrote:
| No bank is going to let you withdraw funds off of that $200k
| until it actually clears the ACH, plus a couple of days.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is so overwritten.
|
| tl;dr author was skeptical of a famous story about a writer who
| got scammed out of $50k cash she withdrew from her bank, because
| it's actually very hard to get any bank to just hand you $50k of
| your own money in cash. After months of diligent investigation,
| author established that writer was well off and was treated
| differently from regular people because her bank branch is in an
| upscale neighborhood with a lot of rich clients.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| I felt like I was giving it a second and third chance, and then
| I realized it was only a third of the way in. Thank you for
| confirming my suspicion here.
| emodendroket wrote:
| When I heard about this story I had assumed she kept the money
| in her home. How did she get all the way through withdrawing
| the money without at any point thinking something about the
| story didn't add up? Mystifying.
| lxgr wrote:
| By her account, she did so at least at one point:
|
| > As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out
| of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency
| would establish this as "protocol." It was preposterous.
|
| Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win.
|
| I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A
| successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly
| right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much
| less likely to be widely publicized.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| That's because the point of this article isn't really
| investigative journalism about this one case and whether or not
| it actually happened (or at least, it's not _only_ that). It 's
| using that as a jumping off point to inform someone about some
| of the ways banks operate. If you are not interested in that,
| then the article isn't for you, but it's not "overwritten".
| danso wrote:
| But that's what's infuriating about this article: it doesn't
| really inform us about the ways bank actually operates,
| because it seems clear Patrick had made some massively
| misinformed assumptions about how banks actually operate. He
| goes into many words about how $50k is such an unwieldly
| amount for the average bank to have on hand. So is that
| assumption about the average bank wrong? Or did he wrongly
| assume that a New York branch of America's 2nd-largest bank
| operated similarly to any small-town independent bank, and if
| so, why would he do that?
| jldugger wrote:
| My read on patrick's article is that he knows that banks
| operate differently for a select few, and his primary error
| was assuming the author was not in that elite class. And
| the Vox article sends a mixed message that encourages the
| error.
|
| For Patrick's part, he does preface this entire article
| with a "file drawer effect" caveat. It's more of a Twitter
| corrections column than an HN worthy post:
|
| > It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure,
| when someone attempted to empty their entire savings
| account and wasn't even half-heartedly counseled about
| caution. It looks like trivial cash management of a well-
| off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household,
| resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly
| known to the bank.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Going to pivot away from piling on the author for their writing
| style, to instead pile on the author for using one of the
| shittiest AI-generated images I've seen in awhile. Nightmare fuel
| faces.
| thrance wrote:
| Seriously, I quit any post that begins with a shitty irrelevant
| AI image. I really wonder what reasoning could possibly lead to
| one thinking "yeah, this will definitely improve my article".
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I'm beginning to think the lumpy intelligence theory is true...
| that if someone is way above average in some area they must
| also be below average in some other area(s).
|
| The only exceptions being literal super-geniuses.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yeah, but it's so obviously fake that it's not bad :-)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha patio11 is great but he sometimes does things slowly that I
| can do fast. I went to Chase and needed to withdraw $50k from my
| account and they were willing to do it. I had some $115k at the
| time in it.
|
| In the end I only needed $15k. There's some stuff you have to
| fill out explaining why but it's not something that requires too
| much work.
|
| In my case, I was paying a wedding vendor and they only took
| Zelle or cash. I only needed $15k but I wanted to keep more in
| case other vendors were going to be like this too.
|
| They asked me why, I told them, and then asked them if they'd
| make me 100 accounts so I could get around the Zelle limit. They
| said it wouldn't work but that they wouldn't do that anyway.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| > There's some stuff you have to fill out explaining why
|
| I have never had to fill out anything. My credit union didn't
| even ask why I wanted the cash, they just asked for a second
| form of identification due to the amount being over 10k.
|
| I know they fill out a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) as
| required by law, but it's seemless on my end (besides waiting
| while they fill it out).
|
| I always read about people being hassled by their banks, but
| never credit unions.
| jagraff wrote:
| Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you
| withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to
| report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed
| can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely
| cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed
| about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open
| accounts for you._
|
| Aren't SARs private? I thought having too many filed
| against a person would cause a bank to terminate a banking
| relationship, but not prevent _other_ banks from opening
| new accounts.
|
| From what I understand, there are other reporting systems
| in the US like ChexSystems and EWS that do facilitate this
| form of information sharing.
| bombcar wrote:
| Banks have always worked with me when I needed large cash
| withdrawals. They always like if you talk about it beforehand
| (e.g., don't go in and say you need $30k for a car NOW, but
| tell them you'd like it next week).
|
| It helps tremendously if the bank manager knows you, or at
| least recognizes you.
| brianleb wrote:
| >> I had some $115k at the time in it.
|
| I'm sorry, but you are an order of magnitude out of touch with
| the average American consumer. Average savings balance under
| the age of 64 is below $73k.[1] Median savings is below $9k.
| Most people will, outside of their retirement savings, never
| have access to an account that has over $100,000 in it.
|
| Never.
|
| Not one day in their life.
|
| Median household income is $80k/yr.[2] Personal savings rate is
| under 5%.[3] As is noted in the title of the article, there are
| two Americas.
|
| [1] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-
| savings-... [2]
| https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
| [3] https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate
| stetrain wrote:
| That's true but I'm not sure how it's relevant.
|
| Most people asking their bank to withdraw $50k+ in cash are
| by definition going to have above-average assets.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I don't think the OP ever purported to be doing something the
| 'average American consumer' would be doing, just relating
| their experiences to the linked article.
| danso wrote:
| Yes, generally the only people who would be able to withdraw
| $50k from a savings account are people who are well-off
| enough to have $50k in a non-retirement savings account.
| Doesn't it follow, then, that such a person would be seen by
| the bank as a "well-off customer" and thus enjoy higher
| withdrawal thresholds?
| ty6853 wrote:
| They don't have access to an account with 100k in it because
| that would generally be pointless for a normal person. A
| great deal of people have 100k in clear real estate or
| stocks. Only a moron leaves 100k sitting doing nothing but
| wait for it to get inflated to oblivion.
| ahoy wrote:
| I closed this (and any!) article because it opens with an AI
| image. It makes me think the author doesn't value authenticity
| and thinks very little of their readers.
| JaakkoP wrote:
| Thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the process of solving
| the mystery withdrawal, even though the outcome wasn't what I
| expected. Consumed through an email client so the AI image didn't
| bother me either.
| jessekv wrote:
| This one was a bit like reading Sherlock Holmes.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| Encyclopedia Brown and the Case He Created for Himself Based on
| His Own Misguided Skepticism Where Everyone Turned Out to Be
| Honest and Accurate and There Was No Actual Mystery at All
| Evidlo wrote:
| I've never seen so much literary analysis on HN before.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Everything else aside, I find it very unusual from an amateur
| journalist's perspective that his intuition led him to doubt the
| veracity of this story, yet, his biggest clue he went on was
| supplied by the writer themselves, who he was doubting. Seems
| like a good way to waste a lot of time or come to a completely
| wrong conclusion.
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