from Hacker News

Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash

by dangrossman on 3/5/25, 6:08 PM with 66 comments

• by renewiltord on 3/5/25, 8:44 PM

  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.

• by JohnMakin on 3/5/25, 10:07 PM

  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.

• by iwanttocomment on 3/5/25, 9:43 PM

  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

• by JaakkoP on 3/5/25, 9:18 PM

  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.

• by anigbrowl on 3/5/25, 8:22 PM

  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.

• by lxgr on 3/5/25, 8:10 PM

  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…

• by rufus_foreman on 3/5/25, 8:19 PM

  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.

• by foobarian on 3/5/25, 8:15 PM

  > 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?

• by Evidlo on 3/5/25, 9:54 PM

  I've never seen so much literary analysis on HN before.

• by jessekv on 3/5/25, 9:24 PM

  This one was a bit like reading Sherlock Holmes.

• by danso on 3/5/25, 7:55 PM

  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...