Monzo in the media

‘Hi I’m a mother who needs to buy food for my child’

‘Sorry there’s nothing we can do, heres a list of helpful options that you could potentially turn to in your time of need. It includes talking to family members’

‘Thanks thats helpful’

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The Guardian is a bad example here, because of the Scott Trust. While they obvious want to write things that people will read, they generally avoid the sort of outrageously clickbaity articles that you’d find on the Times and Telegraph (indeed, one of the latter two will deliberate add Monzo mentions to online headlines of articles that actually have little to do with Monzo because they’ve identified that Monzo stories get more clicks).

Granted, the Guardian did do a poor article on Monzo recently repeating some of the inaccuracies from Resolver, but that’s actually an exception to the rest of their Monzo coverage which has been broadly positive.

She might not have thought so, but I think its reasonable to consider it a helpful reply!

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Would you rather Monzo just went with “Computer says ‘no’” replies in future? Because that’s the only alternative, effectively.

Remember, when accounts are frozen, Monzo cannot tell people anything because of the laws around ‘tipping off’. That means they are legally prevented from giving replies that people want (when people complain, they can be given the most helpful replies ever, but can be blind to that if it’s not what they want to hear).

In that context, offering advice on where to seek support is helpful, and far more helpful that offering nothing whatsoever at all.

Granted, Monzo COps are supposed to read the customer and gauge if they would find such advice helpful rather than offer it as rote, and that’s perhaps the only thing that went wrong here.

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A whole lot of déjà vu going on in this thread. It’s like we’ve warped back to October.

Does this mean we need to go through Christmas again?

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which ‘new features’ has monzo created which other banks do not have are you talking about?

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Pots*, get paid early*, salary sorter*, pay-from-pot*, and of course - this community*

*includes, but not limited to

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This is old news now. Probably just a re-post

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Monzo hasn’t been around that long

If the money is from a legitimate source they can get it sent again if sent back to the source.

In all these articles the complainer rarely says where the money is from, they just say I need it to feed my baby etc. If wages it could be sent to another bank, if from a friend it could also be sent again, I am suspicious that they don’t know where it is from and laundering it in some way.

I do think the new banks are just a bit over cautious. I mentioned in the Starling bit of the forum that my account was restricted recently (and subsequently unrestricted) but when I’ve had the same thing with a larger bank they just called to ask about the transactions they didn’t freeze my account. My account was unrestricted within 2 hours though with Starling so I can’t complain, they did their job and it didn’t cause any issues. Only improvement would be if they just called at the point of restricting the account and asking the same question then it would’ve only taken a few minutes.

I think the smaller, newer banks just take a more cautious approach which results in a much larger number of accounts being blocked (whether fraudulent/illegal or not)

Do we actually know that Monzo restricts/freezes a larger number of accounts than the ‘legacy’ banks (as a proportion)? This seems to be an assumption so far. It could just be that a smallish group of fraudsters think they can generate enough publicity to have their accounts opened, since Monzo is in the news a lot and needs a good reputation to grow. There could be as many or more people with frozen accounts at Barclays, for instance, but they haven’t gone to the press because they know it won’t make any difference.

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For anyone interested, the Vice journalist joined the aforementioned Facebook group asking for people to contact her (I’m only in it because I find it all quite interesting). Does seem the entire group is a bit of a hate mob and anyone sticking up for Monzo soon gets ejected.

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6 posts were merged into an existing topic: Removed Posts - February 20

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playing devils advocate there are more results relating to Monzo when you google variations of “bank account freezing” than other banks.

I’m no Googling expert I just did a few searches

Unsure why this has been flagged but given the person I mentioned is no longer here, I’ve edited my post and removed my reply to them

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For what it’s worth, there are no industry statistics that measure this metric :slight_smile:

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