[pavlov]

Well, I agree about PayPal. But their whole business is predicated on being extremely vigilant against scammers, to the detriment of ordinary customers.

But regular American bank accounts are pretty different from PayPal or European bank accounts. (The original poster is talking about Chase so I assume the account in question was a regular checking account.)

I lived in the US for a couple of years, and the oddities of banking were a bit of a shock to me. In Europe we're used to bank transfers just working and costing nothing, but there isn't really an equivalent in the American system at all!

You can send a "wire" which usually costs $15-30 depending on the bank, and is meant for larger amounts and business transactions. Or, there's something called ACH which you can use to pay bills and businesses can use to send you money (e.g. paycheck deposits), but ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other.

To address this obvious deficiency, banks have cooked up their own system called Zelle which is like a weird proprietary hybrid of PayPal and a European-style bank transfer. (Apparently it's so confusing to US bank customers that Zelle is widely used by fraudsters.)

So, when the OP wrote that they've been receiving deposits in the account that was closed, I'm curious to know what kind of deposits those were. Wires? ACH from businesses? Zelle? This could be a major factor in why the account triggered a red light at the compliance department.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

> Or, there's something called ACH which you can use to pay bills and businesses can use to send you money (e.g. paycheck deposits), but ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other.

This is possible with some bill payment systems with some banks. You can send anyone money and it is either transferred via ACH or they send a physical check. The big banks generally don't support this.

I agree that ACH is broken because you can't use it to transfer money to anyone.

[wiredfool]

It's not broken, _tons_ of money goes over it every day.

It just has basically no internal security once you get past the gatekeeper (your bank), and optimistic concurrency, and it's reversible.

[cowsandmilk]

> ordinary banking customers can't use ACH to send money to each other.

This is just because you chose a crappy bank. My bank supports it via online banking, but I admit not all do.

https://www.navyfederal.org/services/transfers/ach.html

[pavlov]

I don't think any of the top 5 largest banks in the US support consumer ACH sending. So you can't really expect it to be available when you want to receive money from someone.

In Europe, free bank transfers are mandatory. You literally can't be a consumer bank and not offer this functionality. The transfers have also become immediate and 24/7 with the latest SEPA upgrade within the Euro zone.

(Also it seems to me that US bank account numbers are unsafe in a way that European accounts are not. I have no qualms about sharing my Finnish bank account number with anyone, even in public, since there's no way to use just the number to extract money. But the US system seems to be full of leaky access points that makes this a bad idea.)

[martin_a]

That is some crazy mess people are dealing with over there. I'm just happy for free SEPA-transfers...

[pavlov]

People still use paper checks in the USA! I managed to live for 40 years without writing a check, but in America these 20th century relics remain unavoidable.

For example, when leaving my NYC rental, the management company required I send them two paper checks: one to cover the move-out fee (use of the building elevator), another check as insurance which they’d only cash if my movers broke something. The first checks I wrote were lost in the mail, so then I made a trip downtown to deliver these pieces of paper in person… An absurdly retro payment experience.