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Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

Counterparty was a family member, also on the phone line, and who provided their permission to both Schwab and their bank to do it. My point still stands. It was highly unconventional and Schwab didn't have to do it, but they did in order to help me out. I'm sure it's not standard practice, and I wouldn't count on another banker doing the same, though Schwab has a knack for being customer-friendly.

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Jesus F Christ.. that's even worse than my original scenarios! Now you have a family member whose personal information has been compromised to a random Schwab agent and even to you..

To me this would be a huge red flag.. the fact that Schwab apparently allows their customer service agents to play loose and fast with sensitive financial PII.

Source: I worked at a Global Top 20 bank for many years and this would absolutely be a fireable offence and the employee would be lucky not to be dragged into court by the bank and the government.

Why wouldn’t this require just the info on the check (routing + account #), which everyone involved probably already had/needed to answer the query?

It’s a balance of funds inquiry. Before you can discuss that kind of information about an account you need to identify the person as the account holder. I can’t call your bank and ask if you have enough funds to cover a cheque you wrote.

This doesn’t seem to be the case from the article [1] linked in a grandchild of your original post.

[1]: https://www.consumerismcommentary.com/verify-funds-on-that-c...

I totally understand where you're coming from, and it gives me pause when I think about it now, but I will say that in the moment it came across as a good faith effort and really did save the situation.

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