As this is a civil matter the standard of proof is balance of probabilities and the burden of proof lies with you.
If you don’t tell them where the money comes from, they are entitled to assume it is illicit and act accordingly.
You’d be an idiot to not tell them … unless you like having your bank account frozen.
Nobody likes having their bank account frozen. Perhaps I’ve been lucky or perhaps it’s relative, Santander know the value of my mortgage, they know my salary so they know that it’s not a far reach for me to have access to that money. Perhaps it would be different if someone who was on min wage/benefits received that money.
Santander must have been satisfied by your explanation and the checks they are able to do behind the scenes to see where the money originated from.
This doesn’t alter the law - onus is on your to explain where the money comes from when your asked. For the bank to judge if they think it’s suspicious.
Or the bank didn’t know it came from a genuine mortgage transaction
I never said they were mortgage payments (one faster payment, two chaps payments) over a 6 month period and zero issues. I have zero doubt that if this was monzo I received the funds into there would’ve been an SAR thus me saying I think monzo’s threshold is too low
We’re going to have to agree to disagree … if you don’t like how Monzo does it’s business bank somewhere else.
On what you’ve said here, I would regard that as suspicious without further background/explanation and SAR accordingly. If you refused to explain that would just heighten my suspicion.
I do 
.
The point to make here is monzo aren’t even asking people about payments to give them the opportunity to explain. In the situation at Santander the money was credited to my account and I went into branch to withdraw the funds (and there was a legitimate and legal reason for my receiving a large sum of money and withdrawing it in cash - I also had to tell them I wanted to withdraw it and come back the next day so they could order the cash into branch).
But it was at the point of withdrawing it that I was briefly questioned and if I hadn’t satisfied the cashier’s questioning then I think it would’ve been perfectly reasonable for them to submit an SAR and said oh sorry there seems to be a system error with your account it’s not letting me process the withdrawal. (Completely a way to do this without tipping someone off - although any criminal in the fincial crime industry would easily be able to tell their accounts frozen and that would tip them off)
It wouldn’t be tipping someone off if monzo sent someone a feed item when they received what they believe to be a high risk payment and asked the person for any explanation of where the funds have come from. Obviously in this state they could freeze the account automatically if someone tries to use the funds before their satisfied and if there not satisfied then submit the SAR
Do we know they don’t do that? I had a payment that is “unusual” (as only comes in every 4/5 months) and that wasn’t flagged and I wasn’t questioned.
Would you not rather that a Bank has a more pro-active approach to possible fraud/ money-laundering than just waving transactions through - with the fact that Monzo being a digital only bank making it much easier for things of that nature to happen.
Yes as I said I know of 6 people who’ve had their accounts frozen as false positives
Sorry if I’ve missed something but I thought you said that Monzo said it was a technical issue?
I’d honestly rather have false positives than Monzo get slapped with a massive fine by the FCA - the legacies naturally have a better infrastructure to detect fraud and analyse customer’s behaviours, Monzo just aren’t at that level yet and so will likely need to be more careful - just my opinion anyway.
That’s what monzo tell people when they freeze their account.
From other threads I’ve seen where an account has been frozen or blocked - the individuals haven’t heard anything from Monzo (hence them coming to the forum). I’m not saying they might not do that.
I suppose my question still stands - what would you prefer? Lax fraud detection, or more careful detection which results in false positives?
I think the forum makes it hard as we see it more frequently - I never heard of anyone’s Santander account being frozen or blocked when I banked with them for 7+ years - and I highly doubt they didn’t block someones account in that time.
Its just a balancing act - we choose to deposit our money with whoever we Bank with - so I wouldn’t be adverse to telling them about where my money comes from - they are looking after it for me. I wouldn’t give my friends something to look after and not tell them about it.
They don’t tell the person that there’s a technical issue.
They wait for the person to ask why they can’t use their account, they take a while to explain normally a day or so to come back and say there’s a technical issue and a specialist will look into it and resolve. This specialist never appears.
So you’re sure that a thing that did not happen to you, and might not have happened to anyone, would definitely happen?
And there was talk above of balance of probabilities and burdens of proof…
So they don’t tell them?
But they do tell them?
They don’t send a push notification or a message saying this. They wait for you to ask.
I’m sure Monzo would rather avoid all of this and concentrate on adding custom pot images and the like, but it is the burden of the field
Probably an area where being dynamic young things has its drawbacks as compared to more established parties
Though HSBC have never told me about how many accounts they freeze and no one has a forum to discuss them
I didn’t suggest Monzo pro-actively try and speak to the customer. Instances I’ve seen on the forum the customer has tried to ask chat and hasn’t received anything or has no access at all to the app itself.
I’m sure that if Santander froze an account and you called them up - they’d likely say the same thing? I’m not sure the false positives are truly the problem with regards to freezing and blocking accounts.
I don’t think @m8tt is helping himself here. I’m sorry to say it but you sound suspicious as hell, with your answers and attitude to all of this 
When you start being evasive, vague and spouting off random bits of the law, in my opinion you’re up to no good. There is nothing wrong with the bank asking and you being helpful by saying “Oh, that 20k, I got that from selling my car. Here is XYZ as proof” Job done, account unlocked 
I think if the fraud was the other way round and you were the victim you’d have a very different opinion.
Just to put this in context - 6 accounts out of over 1,000,000 represents a false positive rate of less than 0.0006%… that’s pretty good in my book.
Assuming the 6 accounts @m8tt refers to are genuine accounts, and not money mules or sob stories from fraudsters or organised crime gangs trying to claw back their loot