OK, re-opening the thread. As you can see, I removed a few posts.
Regardless of what might be broadcast or posted elsewhere on the internet, let’s not try and pick apart any individual cases. It’s not helpful - for one, images are easily doctored - and two, just because someone might have shared something doesn’t necessarily mean they are happy for it to be picked apart on another platform. Finally, there are absolutely no conclusions that can be drawn from it, because transaction history alone is one of many, many, factors that can potentially come into play if we decide we no longer wish to do business with an individual - so it’s of absolutely no benefit to anyone.
Unless you work for Monzo and are a skilled, trained professional in this area, you will not ever have all of the information on any individual case, or even a significant amount of information to come to any kind of reasonable conclusion here, and neither should you. Even people who do work for Monzo in other teams wouldn’t have all that information by default.
This, for obvious reasons, is the area of the business that we are completely unable to be transparent about, because it’s not reasonable and also - it’s the law. Reasonable discussion of the report, and our response to it, is totally fine - we don’t need to start armchair investigations based on fragments of information.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, is there a reasonable list that could be drawn up that would indicate some actual reasons that an account may be frozen/closed.
There seems to have been a number of new joiners to the forum who have expressed legitimate concerns about their account being frozen - It’s likely (although not necessarily), that they haven’t taken as much interest in Monzo previously (or banking in general), and good old ‘Auntie’ has scared them into worrying unnecessarily.
I’m thinking of factors that perhaps some might not consider “suspicious” - Especially if they are younger and grown up with it (like PayPal transactions, Crypto Currency, Foreign transactions) etc etc.
I personally have the benefit of reading the forum and have years of experience with Monzo to know that I’m OK - But it would seem that a lot of others don’t necessarily know what “suspicious activity” actually looks like.
The blog post about freezing accounts didn’t really go into it.
Not sure if it’s possible, but it would be good to understand what type of activity could trigger a check.
I’m afraid that’s not possible. The more information people could access or learn here, the easier it would be for them to find out ways of circumventing it. And please believe me when I say that there are people working every single day to try and figure out how to skirt around these things. It’s for the benefit of everybody that we share as little information as possible here.
My guess is that they won’t because they don’t want to disclose the numbers that would prove that they’re no better / worse and / or because they don’t have them about other banks.
For clarity, Monzo does actively market the following:
Compared to other UK banks, we’re 4x better at stopping card fraud, 3x better at stopping identity theft, and 10x better at stopping account takeovers. Being a newer bank with newer technology has its benefits!
Thanks for this. I don’t think I’m asking for a relative comparison so much as an approximation of the number of frozen accounts frozen correctly vs erroneously. I appreciate that releasing statistics on a national level is beyond Monzo’s remit, but some transparency on Monzo’s part would certainly help settle my mind.
I suspect there’s some regulatory issues preventing open discussion around compliance; Monzo are considerably more transparent around their outages and technical discussions.
I did ask further up if they were planning future financial crimes posts/stats - apparently, there’s going to be a talk at their upcoming event, but I’d imagine now they hold a full banking license, actual statistics are harder to publish.
This thread is a certainly a read. This may sound cliche but people just need to be kind to each other. Arguing the same points over and over isn’t going to get anywhere.
I thought @anon91821566 statement summarised the details and facts very eloquently and as he said Monzo have said all they can say.
This was a few years ago tho but I use to bank with Natwest and I’m not a shamed I use to have a massive gambling problem so because they see on my account so much money coming into my account and leaving my account they stopped me using my account until they Could confirm where it was from as when I use to use my card if I ever won anything which was very rear they would give me cash and I would have to go put it back in my account that why it happened to me with Natwest
Sounds like Natwest done a great job of detecting suspicious activity and resolving it so everyone is happy as can be in the circumstances. Kudos Natwest. Leading by example
