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Comment by creer | Hacker News Reader

Part of the problem is a bank training you on recognizing that they have countless silly obscure rules for their own purposes - for example in what your password may be and how messages to their employees might be (mine limits the messages to be very short - no space to explain anything.) So you are quickly trained to make do with the silly rules. I.E. multiple ACH over several days and move on with your life... Or in the case of messages, I just continue my explanation in multiple messages.

Either way, the bank has trained the customer to work around limits. They can't have it both ways.

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And people are surprised why so many were excited to use cryptocurrencies. The current banking system is broken to the root.

And getting progressively more broken, due to increasingly stricter and more numerous laws, and more effective enforcement.

Hell, in Spain you can't even legally pay anything in cash if it costs more than 1,000 EUR. In Greece, the limit is 500 EUR.

> I.E. multiple ACH over several days and move on with your life...

Surely, just picking up the phone and speaking to them is faster and easier than engaging in structural transactions like that.

Is it? Usually no, it's not. At one bank, they want me to always talk to the same person - who is generally competent but also usually not available and sometimes outright on vacation with no warning. At another bank, they want me to go through the basic 800 number - where the person who answers usually knows much less than I do. Picking up the phone is usually not a good solution.

One, this isn’t structuring. Just because you read what structuring is 5m before you read my post doesn’t make this structuring. 50k is way over reporting limits.

And also no it isn’t faster to pick up the phone, even if I don’t get out on hold at all. An ACH transfer takes seconds, it’s like writing a digital check. Doing it 4 times takes very little time.

I didn't mean "structuring" in the legal sense, I meant it in the technical sense (arranging transactions in order to avoid something).

I find it's much easier to engage in a 15 minute phone call than to do multiple transactions over a number of days. You may find it different, of course.

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