Backstory: Fidelity Investments has some account called a Cash Management Account. It's a hybrid of a brokerage account (account you buy stocks) and a checking account (can write checks, debit card, bill pay). It's been around for a while, but it became a pretty popular tool in the internet personal finance sector because the setup let you earn ~5% of your money at all times. But it's not a real checking account (important).
A few weeks ago, the Chase glitch occurred. But a glitch allowed to deposit a check (stolen or just their own), and instead of putting a hold and clearing it over a few days they got access to the funds immediately. So they would deposit a check for let's say $5,000, and then instantly withdraw the money. Obviously a super r-slurred thing to do with your account, but .
This was quickly fixed, but it caused some to wonder. What if other institutions did the same? Well they do. Banks have been operating on the clear first and ask questions later premise for a while, and brokerages even more so. This has brought to the limelight a type of fraud that's been around for a while. It's apparently coordinated through Telegram, and abuses mobile deposits not ATMs.
This leads into the Fidelity boyz:
It be rainin'
Fidelity was a nice target too since their mobile deposit limit was $100,000. Fidelity last week caught onto this and then decided to implement some combination of these measures onto most of the accounts:
Reducing mobile deposit to $1,000
Put 15 business day holds on mobile deposits and ACHs
Cancel peoples billpays
Randomly locking accounts
As with most things like this, it's hard to get the true story because you'll see a lot of posts where someone is depositing 30 checks a week and needs to transfer all the money instantly to 5 different bank accounts and then ghost
you when you ask what could they possibly be doing to justify it.
/r/fidelityinvestments mods setup a megathread addressing this and pinned it in the sub. They then answered basically no questions, and then unpinned it
Yep. I hope people look at these post before they think about opening an account with Fidelity. In my case they are holding my funds till 9th Oct (for deposits made on 16th Sept) . I had to make alternative arrangement to take care of my expenses.
The the worst part is that reddit is allowing Fidelity's moderators to delete posts on this issues and redirect us to this "megathread" which is more like a trash bin. Sorry if I sound frustrated as I really am.....
I recently transferred about $3000 into my Fidelity Cash Management account from US Bank on 9/15, and after 4 days, the funds were still unavailable. When I called to ask why, they explained that it was because I had pulled the funds from Fidelity rather than pushed them from US Bank.
They gave me a vague excuse about "industry trends" and "protecting Fidelity accounts" supposedly justifying the excessive hold. What makes this even more frustrating is that customer support admitted they never informed me about this extended hold upfront, and after reviewing Fidelity's terms, I wasn't able to find mention of such a long hold for this type of transaction.
Now, they've told me the funds will be held until at least 10/8. Even after verifying my identity, they won't release the money. While I can still use the money for things like buying stocks and bonds within Fidelity, the lack of transparency and delay in giving me full access is infuriating.
The more I see on this subreddit the more I become convinced the MegaThead is nothing more than a Catch & Kill effort
Nah you're just mad
Happened last week to me. In my case I deposited a large personal check. The funds had cleared but they still restricted my account as they thought the check was fraudulent or that I wrote it (it was from my mother) they called my mother separately to confirm she wrote the check.
All very absurd but once they lifted the restrictions bill pay returned that same day.
Doctorofcredit thread. A lot of these people were locked since what they do looks pretty similar to money laundering anyway.
With all this backlash, it does make sense that Fidelity is losing some valuable customers.
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No, you anthropomorphic gorilla, everyone responsible is going to be incarcerated and normal people are inconvenienced by all of this because now we need to lock down our financial institutions to prevent 85-IQ dipshits from destroying their own lives.
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Checks are fricking rslurred and the more painfully the American financial system learns that, the better.
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I love checks. You just write the person's name and say have a nice day. Eurotrash be like, "yoo what's your IBAN, give me your Venmo, what's your Ca$hApp, do you have any iTunes gift cards?"
Okay that last one might just be Indians.
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the venmo and cashapp thing definitely happens between zoomers in the US unfortunately
the weird part is that there seems to be a strong class divide despite the two services being essentially identical. middle class and up disproportionately use venmo, while working class and below disproportionately use cashapp.
idk how the heck cashapp caught on with poors in the first place considering venmo was released several years earlier and at one point had a huge marketshare lead. they must've ran some rslurred free money promo or something that baited all of the poors into using it.
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Some poors use cashapp as a bank account
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/r/Cashapp has some bangers that explore this phenomenon
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Euros ngmi
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Lolwut? Practically everyone working for a company gets paid via direct deposit.
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I've talked about this before but I'll reiterate: there's a decent share of boomer small business owners that think they're out-jewing the banks by refusing to spend the extra $1.50 on direct deposit and instead spend extra labor hours on payroll writing physical checks.
There's also a class of boomer slumlords that refuse to set up online payment portals for their rentals and require rent to be paid via check.
I'll note that I've never seen anyone under the age of 70 engage in either practice, but it does still happen.
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Nothing will change until rich neighbors lose real money.
Remember how Burgerland payment cards never included chip & pin until Target got hacked and then like two weeks later they bent the banks and Visa/MC over and made C&P mandatory?
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I remember going to LA in 2014 and having to swipe a debit card and Canada already had tap by then
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Are burgers not a fan of direct debits? TERF Island will even automatically port your direct debits if you move to a different bank.
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They're done through processing companies mainly. Like if I wanted to send you money directly and we had two different banks, it would most likely be through Zelle, Cash App, Paypal, or some other 3rd party. You could give the routing and account number to the other person, but that basically allows them to take any amount of money they want as well.
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That's crazy. I can go onto my banking app on my phone, enter someone's sort code, name and account number and send them money instantly and free.
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Practically any bank account worth having has Zelle attached to it, which would only require a phone number/email to send money to someone. As soon as a business is involved though, the processors are going to try to skim 1-3%.
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I just need an email or phone number
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We have that and plenty of places do it, it's just that there's still a decent amount of geriatrics running things and there aren't any incentives afaik pushing people to use it aside from convenience. Which is really a disincentive if you've been processing checks for 50 years and it's all you know how to do.
And I don't mean to characterize checks as common; you only run into this with small businesses with <=20 employees and 70 y/o managers or landlords also in their 70s.
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What does direct deposit have to do with paying rent?
Every rental agency I've used charges a non-insignificant fee for paying online so it's cheaper to cut a check
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$3 is significant to you?
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My current place charges 4%.
So you're off by an order of magnitude.
Last place was $30 flat.
Once again what does that have to do with direct deposit.
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Wtf is wrong w ur apt? I can do a direct deposit from my checking acc to an acc they provided me for rent payments and no fee above $3. I get charged those % fees if i use a credit card only (and the fees dont even come close enough to cashback worthiness).
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Check processing isn't the 1980s anymore. Its basically a paper SWIFT/ACH transaction request now.
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Without checks you don't get SpaceX
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brag about brand new thing they found
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Neighbors discovering financial crimes is the kind of lighthearted news stories I need more of.
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I reeeeeally doubt it.
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