It does say those were tied to “mules”, so freezing those accounts is the right course of action.

In fact the last thing you want to do is give criminals warning that you’re going to freeze their accounts. I’d imagine that would be extremely counterproductive for everyone bar those criminals.

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ryandrake 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Believed to be tied to "mules" unless their classification method has zero false positives. If it does have false positives then those non-mules have a right to complain.

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Muromec 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They used to just kill without trial those believed to be tied to drug deals too.

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hnlmorg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone has the right to complain about practically anything they want.

But that doesn’t mean that freezing an account suspected of fraud isn’t the right course of action.

Yeah there’s going to be false positives. However that’s precisely why you freeze the account: to allow you time to follow due process and investigation. If you assumed the process was infallible then you wouldn’t need to freeze the account; you would just skip straight to the punishment and remediation stages ;)

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kayamon 2 days ago | parent [-]

If all your money vanished tomorrow you'd have a different argument.

> However that’s precisely why you freeze the account: to allow you time to follow due process

Due process comes before the actions.

	▲	AlexeyBelov a day ago \| parent [-]
		> If all your money vanished tomorrow you'd have a different argument. But that would just mean they are very biased, since they are kind of defending their own money. Right now they are a bit more impartial.

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msm_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What is the threshold?

If two people accounts were unjustly frozen (and they have to do some work to unlock them), and at the same time two hundred people life savings were saved, would that be OK with you?

I don't know about them, but there are plenty of ways for law enforcement to get mule account numbers. After all that's the whole point - actual criminals don't have to reveal their own identity, instead they convince a "mule" to (knowingly or not) participate in a crime.

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weird-eye-issue 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not actually what happened

They did a crackdown where if the name associated with the phone number on the account didn't match the name on the bank account then they froze it

Also they froze most accounts owned by foreigners with specific visas

It really had nothing at all to do with mule activity, they were using blanket heuristics

	▲	Canada 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They froze accounts in this situation: Mr Bob Smith is married to Mrs Alice Smith. The bank has their status as married, which they have been given copies of marriage certificates over and over and over for many years. Bob works, and Alice is dependant based on Bob's visa. Bob has an account, Alice has an account, and they also both have credit cards under their own names. Bob and Alice also have joint accounts, where most of the money is, and it is a lot of money, enough that Alice and Bob have "VIP" status at the bank, and they've been good customers for about a decade. Alice and Bob have recently updated all FATCA, CRS, and whatever other insane bullshit has been asked of them by the bank. Alice and Bob have Thai tax IDs, which the bank also has. Alice and Bob have cell phones of course, and naturally, the family phones are in the account "Bob Smith" The bank freezes Alice account. Alice goes to the bank in person. The bank doesn't unfreeze the account, they demand she change her phone account to be in her name. Yeah, for real. Bob isn't happy. He thinks Thais shouldn't rely on these banks and should use cash as much as possible and avoid QR payments as much as possible.