Bitten By Your Bank?

Bitten By Your Bank? 

By: James A Sheridan & Milan Mijailovic 

October 14, 2019

          Individuals and businesses enter into financial transactions with their banks on a daily basis.  If you asked bank customers about their banks they would tell you that they trust their bank and have confidence in them even though their confidence has dropped over the last several years. Still, they are rated higher than the news organizations, big business and the US Congress.

  According to a Gallup Poll in 2019 that we can see how the confidence in some of our most prominent institutions are rated. As you will see, there is not a lot of confidence in our most influential institutions today. See results below from the 2019 Institution Confidence Rating Poll by Gallup:

 Gallup Poll 2019 Confidence Ratings (%)

                    Great           Quite           Some          Very Little   None  G&Q Total

 Bannks         13                17               43                 25             1         30

Congress      4                   7                26                 48             1         11

Org Labor    13                16                43                 22              2         29

Big Biz        10                13                41                 32              2         23

Military      45                28                18                  8               0         73

Medical Sys 15               21                38                 24              2         36

 TV News      8               10                33                 45              3         18

Police          29               24                31                 16              1         53

Small Biz    34               34               24                   8              0         68

Note less than one-third of the people surveyed had great or quite a lot of confidence in their banking system. The sample surveyed had about the same amount of confidence in Organized Labor as they did in their bank. At the same time, they had very little confidence in the US Congress or the TV News industry. If more people knew the truth about the banking system and its policies they might have even lower confidence in the banks. Your bank is clearly not looking out for you or your money.

I might point out that even with all the bad public relations and news reporting of police in 2018 and 2019, those surveyed had more confidence in the police than they did in their banking system. I think that is saying a lot about the banks.

What is really striking is that small business (68%) was seen by those surveyed having more than twice their confidence as did banking (30%).

    The low level of confidence in the banks and the banking system is justly earned and probably should even be lower based on the shenanigans they have pulled on their customers. One only has to google the banking industry on the internet to discover the massive amount of deceit and fraud that has taken place in the past and is still taking place.  Customers of banks are victims of the following practices by the major banks in the USA and abroad:

 1.    Overcharging for overdrafts

2.    Overcharging for mutual fund transactions

3.    Increasing credit card percentages without due cause

4.    Refuse to transfer client’s money

5.    Refuse to refund fraudulent bank charges

6.    Charging monthly fees for debit cards

7.    Creation of false accounts in client’s name

8.    Improper lending practices

9.    Abusive mortgage practices

10. Manipulating financial indexes such as the Libor Index (and other indices)

11. Not disclosing fees charged to account and transactions

12. Charging fees and expenses for custody of clients assets

The above are just a few of the infractions of the law that the banks have been found guilty of doing in the past and in some cases still do on a regular basis.

     Then, of course, we would be remiss if we did not bring up the role the banks played in the financial meltdown of the housing and mortgage sector of the economy. Banks played the major role in Monetizing bad mortgage loans and selling them as securities with full knowledge that the loans were faulty and based on lies. They knew up front that the borrower had no chance of ever paying the loan off. And for that, we the taxpayers bailed them out and the banks made money on the foreclosed real estate.

      While most of the cheating by the banks identified above apply to the regular retail banking customer some of it does apply to business entities as well. Even large businesses with capital in the custody of their banks were not and are not immune from being defrauded. While most retail bank customers are not even aware of systems that banks use such as the one identified as SWIFT, companies and individuals who move large sums of money are familiar with the service. The SWIFT system provides the banks with another avenue to defraud clients.

     The SWIFT system is a messaging system used by banks to send, receive and receipt for large cash transactions and bank instruments. Billions of dollars move every day in the banking system. The SWIFT system provides an opportunity to charge clients large sums of money and to overcharge for those services. For example, some of the ways banks overcharge their SWIFT clients are: 

a.    Claim they didn’t get the message and charge for resending it

b.    Overcharge for the original message

c.    Collect the fee upfront but never send the message

  Banks don’t want money to leave their bank. When money leaves one bank and is deposited in another bank the sending bank loses assets. Banks don’t like to have money leave their bank and reduce the assets on their ledger. Thus, banks routinely delay and delay and delay the transfer of the assets as long as they can or in some cases outright refuse to transfer the customer’s funds as requested. You might think that the bank cannot do that but I had a client whose bank outright refused to send the money. Yes, it was a big 3 bank in the USA.

        Few bank customers, either retail or commercial, have escaped not being bitten at one time or another by their bank. The bite can be small or large but it is always in the wallet.

      Today the intrusion into private banking transactions is more than obvious. With the recent laws to guard against money laundering and preventing funding of terrorist organizations, the government in cooperation with the banks has become an intrusive financial threat to the ordinary citizen and businessman. The government wants to know where every US dollar is and where it has been claiming they are doing so to protect us from criminal organizations and terrorists. I believe it also to control the wealth of citizens and everything we do in our financial lives Banks in their back-office can put a hold on your funds without any reason. All a clerk has to do is red flag a transaction as suspicious and you cannot get your money. It may take months to actually free up your funds.  If funds do not go through a clearing process prior to them being presented to your bank, there is a good chance if it is a large transaction the funds will be held.

    The creation and growth of cryptocurrency is a natural reaction to the invasive actions of governments. In the beginning there was great skepticism that cryptocurrency could succeed, but it has. Now, everyone wants to get their own branded cryptocurrency. Facebook is trying to launch Libra as their own brand of cryptocurrency and eventually, they will probably be successful even though they are struggling right now and facing congressional scrutiny. 

  But Facebook is not alone. In fact, there are 2,403 different crypto-currencies right now with a Market Cap of $230,224,845,519. Bitcoin alone constitutes 65.2% of the total or $150,247,529,200 (yes folks that is one hundred fifty billion). So, is cryptocurrency here to stay? You bet and it is only going to grow bigger and become more widely used in more creative ways than ever before.

 And guess what? As the cryptocurrency phenomenon progresses (right now it is just a sliver of the world financial transactions market) banks are going to be squeezed out of many lucrative transactions. No more SWIFT scams and overcharges. No more refusals to send a client’s funds when they are asked to. And most important – no more delay after delay after delay while your funds clear or are held for no good reason. However, cryptocurrencies will bring with it fraud and scams as well – beware.

 For those readers who are tired of the run around the banks are giving you or are involved in large international financial transactions, there is a lot more to know as a new financial age emerges. More and more countries are instituting procedures and policies and are determined to place restrictions on your funds with regard to what, when and how you can use them. But we all know, as soon as impediments to business are established, scores of very bright people begin to create ways to legally regain control of their financial destinies. Thank goodness for those creative minds.

 So it is today, solutions for maintaining control over your funds and dispersing them legally to almost anywhere in the global financial system is already here. You can put a stop to “Your Bank Biting Your Wallet” because there now are opportunities for putting a stop to your bank pilfering your funds at least when it comes to the international movement of funds.

 Want to know more? 

 Best initial communication method for Jim and Milan is email. Looking forward to hearing from others on this topic.

 Contact:

                   James Sheridan  [email protected]                                  

Milan Mijailovic [email protected]

 Disclosure: The opinions in this article are those of the author. The information was gathered from public information available on the internet and direct experiences with banking transactions. The information regarding the Gallup Poll data is the property of the Gallup Poll organization as published.