[anigbrowl]

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.

[MostlyStable]

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]

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]

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.

[danso]

For sure, good on Patrick for going in-depth on "well my hot take was wrong". But his accusation was more than a twitter hot take; he accused the NYMag writer (and basically, everyone who worked with her) as brazenly committing the most unforgivable crime in journalism. If I were to shoot off my mouth and say "Based on what I know about software engineering, Patio11's [insert one of his ventures here] is almost certainly the Theranos of code" — I would most certainly give a thorough reflection on how my priors and knowledge about software engineering seem to be deeply flawed. Not just "I read 1000 of his blog posts and published articles, and turns out Patrick is a more experienced engineer than I assumed he was. Guess I could've googled more before going off on him."

[patio11]

I seem to have set you off somehow, and I do not understand precisely how, but I feel this is important: I did not publicly accuse the writer of anything. (I did heavily imply publicly that I thought that the publication had no real fact checking; when they told me otherwise, after I requested a statement, I swiftly corrected that publicly.)

I had some doubts that the story, as presented, was true. I did what I hear journalists do, and went out and reported the story. Some people apparently believe this was an aggressive action, and some people believe that the original story was strictly true, and I can understand either of those beliefs separately but holding both at the same time seems tricky.

I did not believe that New York Magazine was complicit. I harbored the suspicion that they might be incompetent. This suspicion was exacerbated by unambiguous evidence of them being incompetent, in failing to detect that a 17 year old claiming to have made $72 million trading stocks, and then doubling down on that story because their fact-checker had passed it.

You have made, in this thread, several claims that I am wildly miscalibrated with respect to banking procedure. I do not believe I am. For example, I seem to be able to make confident predictions like "Oh, if the teller window is on the second floor, that narrows the selection of bank branches sufficiently to be probably uniquely identifying given any other piece of information" and be proven retrospectively right on those predictions.

If you would like to take issue with my other claims about banking procedure, pick the one that looks fishiest to you, and then propose odds.

[danso]

> I did not publicly accuse the writer of anything

C'mon, what scenario do you have in mind where New York magazine "materially disavows the article" [0] but the writer, Cowles, is not guilty of fabulism (presenting a creative writing exercise as non-fiction would count as that level of deception)?

> You have made, in this thread, several claims that I am wildly miscalibrated with respect to banking procedure.

I am very confident that you know far more about banking policy and conventions than I do. So when you assert that the facts of NYMag do not seem reconcilable with the reality of American banking, I'm happy to take your word for it. Now that you've essentially retracted that doubt, a doubt so strong that you were willing to spend thousands of dollars to investigate it over a year, I'm very confused about your priors. Was Cowles being richer than you had thought possible your only flawed assumption? Like if she had only written "btw I'm from a rich family and I live in an owner-occupied home in Brooklyn", that alone would have been enough to resolve the many issues you raise about the unlikeliness of a $50k cash withdrawal? What's the threshold of wealth in which that $50k transfer is given cursory approval? Is the $50k easy because she's a one-percenter? Would it be easy if she is/were merely in the top 5% or 10% of household wealth

One of my main frustrations about your writeup is that it sets up these questions and then fails to answer them, as if the fact of Cowles' unspecified wealth is alone the self-evident answer? Speaking as a layperson, I assume that being a 30-something living in New York who had $80,000 in savings and checkings alone -- which she explicitly states in her article -- would be enough to qualify for a no-hold-up same day $50k withdrawal from a New York bank. Is that not the case?

> I had some doubts that the story, as presented, was true. I did what I hear journalists do, and went out and reported the story

And genuine kudos to you, the world would be a better place if "trust, but verify" were our default modes of operation. I guess what bugs me is that your article opens with a detailed examination of how NYMag fumbled that 2014 profile of a teenage millionaire, but you end your own investigation after being apparently satisfied with a fact-check that seems almost as facile as the one purportedly done for their retracted 2014 profile.

Presume a universe in which Cowles did indeed publish a fabrication; it would require an extreme motivation for her to risk torching her career and in such a highly public and scrutinized fashion. Such a motivated person could easily put in the work to make sure that the bank they allude to vaguely fits the description they choose to publish (tbh, we should ask ourselves why would an ostensible fabricator would even choose to publish that "upstairs" detail, when they can easily formulate a description that vaguely applies to a dozen New York banks?). The fact that it's in a police report is, as you say, not a big deal given the light consequences of a false police report (and not a big deal, especially compared to the consequences of career suicide).

> This would be a very different piece if that police report, or any other documentation at a trusted institution, named e.g. 266 Broadway instead.

Why exactly would it be different? What if she had named 266 Broadway to the police, and omitted literally just a single word from her published article ("upstairs"); how would that change the thrust of your dogged investigation, which seems so premised on your knowledge and assumptions of the banking system? So many words and so much effort (again, kudos to putting in the infuriating work needed to get the NYPD to respond) are devoted to this one detail that one can't help but think it was a significant factor in quelling your doubt. Ironically, it reminds me of the strategy that Cowles' alleged scammers used: provide her with seemingly hard-to-know real world information (her SSN, her physical address, that her "2-year-old son was playing in [her] living room") to lull her into believing something much more significant (that the scammer is a CIA agent about to arrest her husband).

You aren't scamming us of course (hey it's not your fault for us choosing to read your article). But asserting that this second-story bank detail is worth attention, implying that a fabulising Cowles wouldn't have put that much thought into her lie, feels like a disservice to the rigorous investigation that your article promises. And without an equally significant number of words dedicated to how you may or may not have had miscalibrated assumptions wrt banking procedure, this is why your article feels incredibly frustrating.

[0] https://manifold.markets/patio11/will-new-york-magazine-walk...

[Fade_Dance]

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]

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]

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.