New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: Wise froze $40k+ in funds for 10 days and counting

Tell HN: Wise froze $40k+ in funds for 10 days and counting
6 by ritzaco | 3 comments on Hacker News.
So I know there are a lot of stories like this and this is not the first or the last one, but Wise, my bank, froze all our main operational bank accounts last Monday. They want proof of 'the source of my funds'. I have been a client with them for over three years but apparently that does not count for anything. I've done everything they want but their verification team is "busy" and needs "5 working days" to check what I submitted. That was 10 days ago - I'm not sure how many days per week they regard as working days. Luckily, because I have heard of Wise, Stripe, etc doing this on a regular basis I very strictly transfer any excess funds to a real brick-and-mortar bank, but this could easily have caused huge cashflow problems if I hadn't. As it is, it's pretty hard to set up an alternative, pay contractors etc etc, but I figured it's a good reminder for others who might be going "Surely if I don't do anything wrong they won't do anything bad to me right?" Some of the other stories have been from people who turned out to be doing things - e.g. cryptocurrency trading - where I can kind of see why their finance providers would maybe get suspicious of illegal activity. We (Ritza) just offer technical writing services, which means we get paid by a few customers around the world every month and pay out contractors also around the world. We're headquartered in the Netherlands, not Cayman Islands or Mauritius or anything dodgy, and we pay out to people mainly in South Africa. Posting as a warning to others, but also if you know of any alternatives to Wise that serve EU businesses I am all ears. I tried Revolut Business and Airwallex and got a generic "We can't offer you services at this time and you can't appeal and we can't tell you why" rejection from both of them. I would love to know if I'm on some kind of list and how I got there if I am. https://ift.tt/mplPvr1 https://ift.tt/GZz7pcn