That article also says they’re being investigated for closing accounts… in much more unambiguous terms than the guardian one.
Are we sure they’re not?
If they are, I very much doubt Monzo would be making a public song and dance about it. There’s probably an obligation to report this to shareholders but the public, unlikely. It doesn’t look good - if it is true.
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I don’t think it says that. It has the standard line that there’s an active investigation over “potential breaches of financial crime regulations”. The article then brings in closed accounts, but that seems to be speculation - there’s no official word linking the two.
Of course, while I think the collective view is that the investigation is because Monzo’s financial crime regime wasn’t strong enough, the opposite could also be true. We’ll just need to wait, I suppose.
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The BBC article is a rewrite of the Guardian one, where the writer has made a few changes to make it look like it’s all their own work. This is not uncommon, but in doing so they appear to have accidentally inserted the implication that the two things are linked when they changed the wording to “This follows on the back of…”
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I think the articles are deliberately obtuse having researched alot about penalties etc. they are making mountains out of mole hills
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It doesn’t actually say that, as others say. It does the classic trashy journalist trick of listing a temporal order and making it imply the things are related.
It’s very common. I think I noticed it first in a daily mail article that’s sub headline read something like ‘Muslim teenager found not guilty after telling jury he ‘wasn’t used to drinking’. The angle of the article was very much ‘look how unfair this is, courts are more lenient on Muslims now’. However, a little googling and it was pretty clear the not guilty verdict had nothing to do with the statement about not being used to drinking at all.
You see, you can say ‘this thing follows this other thing’ and it can be technically true because one thing happened after the other. But you also know that your readers will read it as meaning ‘this thing happened because of this other thing’.
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Not sure if this is best thread to post this (feel free to move it).
Thought it was interesting as Simon is ex-Monzo so would have insight. (Hugh - also ex-Monzo, commented on the Twitter thread too).
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But then again, as those people worked at Monzo while these breaches were happening and then left before any investigation started - probably they are not the best people to ask about them.
Seems likely there were gaps in Monzo’s knowledge or understanding of regulation at that time.
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Yep of course, I just meant more generally - interesting to hear from people who worked in the industry on what they think of the regulations in general, as opposed to exactly what is going on just now. 
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“seems likely” based on what…?
AML laws in the UK are terribly archaic, and ineffective.
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It’s likely that there were gaps in Monzo’s knowledge or understanding of regulation at that time, based on the fact Monzo is under investigation for AML breaches over that period.
From the next comment on that post
Further validating the above, it’s not just Monzo that has come under fire. From a non-paywalled article about Monzo:
The regulator is separately pursuing criminal money laundering charges against state-backed bank NatWest .
Well there is no get out clause for someone else having the same problem, but it should probably illustrate that this is not a problem unique to Monzo
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Also just to point out, an investigation is to determine whether there was wrongdoing, it doesn’t mean anything is wrong yet.
If the FCA had evidence something actually isn’t going the way it should, they would say so, instead of investigating.
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Well they don’t just randomly start investigations. It means there were very likely some AML breaches and they are investigating the extent of them.
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Personally I think there are going to a lot of nuances around AML and designing easy to use sign up flows etc…
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For clarity this is the 1 article they use to back up that shoddy claim 
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I’m always surprised people don’t know about number spoofing. It’s been a well known thing for ages
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Yeah I always think the same, but then again I suppose people act differently under pressure and can panic, common sense goes out the window.
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I’d love to know what they did that meant that Monzo wouldn’t give it back.
Some of the cases I’ve seen, you look at what the person has done and you can’t believe they’ve fallen for it but Monzo still refund them.
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Bad wiki editing there, as the referenced article does not directly support the claim made in the Wikipedia article. This means the paragraph on Wikipedia is synthesised, and amounts to original research.
The reference could be tagged as not supporting claim it’s supposed to support, or indeed the paragraph could simply be deleted.
If the reference was to a story or stories about university students enticed into signing up for Monzo so they could do some immediate money muleing, that would be more relevant.
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