Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances Some US customers using the Bank of America app to keep an eye on their accounts got a shock Wednesday morning when their checking and savings accounts were unexpectedly empty or out of date. Complaints of wrong numbers in balances started pouring in at about 0930 PT (1630 UTC) on Downdetector, peaked at about 20,500 at 1020 …
Now imagine that your cash under the mattress kept disappearing due to reality glitch.
Impossible, unless your neighbour has a highly trained cat thief.
Cash is an asset you can touch, smell, roll.
Money in the bank is just a sum of all your transactions stored in the database.
You must be a prepper.
And the silly preppers, who imagine gold will be worth anything if it all really went to hell, are too dumb to realize that the metals worth hoarding would be radically different. If I were so inclined, I would hoard copper and tin, which can be alloyed to make bronze, a metal that will hold an edge, and more importantly, worked with relatively low temperature primitive methods. Iron is nice, too, especially if you have the knowledge to work it into steel, but much higher temperature and more fiddly.
A few things -
First off, as some in Western North Carolina have recently discovered - having some cash on hand in your emergency kit, is useful. No power and/or no telecoms = no ATMs or working banks or debit/credit card machines at stores.
And an emergency doesn't always mean a catastrophic storm. A banking outage can qualify. Heck, ever since the Change Healthcare debacle earlier this year, I've made it a point to keep 7-10 days of prescription drugs that me and my better three-quarters depend on, have been put aside and rotated from time to time (for freshness), preparing for the next cyberattack that cripples that industry.
Secondly, I'm sure most people who complained about BoA's outages were people with DDAs (Demand Deposit Account) with BoA. DDAs don't generally pay interest, so second hole in your interest-stealing cat thief.
Third, looking at NOW accounts at BoA, they pay a paltry interest, even in today's high(er) interest rates. In my area, they're currently paying between 0.01% APY and 0.04% APY, depending on the Preferred Rewards Tier with Interest Rate Booster, whatever that means. So, third hole - BoA doesn't really reward you for keeping your extremely liquid funds with them anyways, so what's a few hundreds dollars in a safe or dresser drawer or even under your mattress actually losing?
And for those with more liquidity - there's better places than a DDA or NOW account to keep it, but that'd make the money a bit harder to get at in a moment's notice.
This is not financial advice.
Here in the UK they updated all our English/Welsh* notes in the last few years with new security features and withdrew the previous ones. Paper £5 notes were withdrawn in May 2017, the paper £10 notes in March 2018 and paper £20 and £50 notes on 30 September 2022.
People still occasionally turn up old stashes of money (usually from clearing the houses of deceased family members) and at this point I believe most banks will still offer to trade it in for face value for you but if not you have to take it to the Bank of England to have it replaced.
* Because the UK is a country of countries Scotland and Northern Ireland have elected to print their own notes which are valid at a face value rate (I.E. £1 Scottish = £1 GBP). These notes are designed and printed by various banks in the two nations (as opposed to England/Wales where they are printed solely on behalf of the Bank of England to Bank of England designs) and are circulated on the provision that for every £1 of notes printed the banks have £1 of deposits (cash or bond etc) stored in the Bank of England. This means that if that bank goes bankrupt their notes can be replaced with English notes without the BoE having to incur a debt to do so.
Legal tender for notes is only a legal concept in Scotland - in England/Wales the law states that a merchant must accept legal English/Welsh currency to "satisfy a debt" (I.E. if you've eaten at a restaurant or taken some fuel into your vehicle) however for any other purchase (I.E. groceries that could be put back on the shelves) you may pay in any way which you & the merchant agree on. This could be barter, credit, payment in notes or coins, or magic sky fairy dust if you both agree on it. Scotland however says that merchants must accept Scottish notes as "legal tender" which is why it's a trope of Scottish people insisting they can pay in English shops with Scottish notes when legally that's not the case (shops may refuse the notes for a debt as they're not English/Welsh and they may refuse to take any payment form for a non-debt). Northern Ireland operates under the same rules as England/Wales IIRC.
Coins however are all from the Royal Mint and are legal tender in all the nations, except that the laws variously define how much of each value is "legal tender" - for example 1p and 2p coins are only satisfactory to settle a debt of up to 20p, after that merchants can refuse to accept them and demand larger denominations. This prevents people from paying with wheelbarrows of 1p coins etc (although this does still happen and a lot of facilities accept it just to get the debt settled).
Out of date, non cirulation coinage is generally worth more than its face value at least to coin collectors, I sold a silver sixpenny bit as a child for 1 shilling but I think that was the miniscule silver content. Then again even paper currency is still worth something to collectors and the like
"but people don’t still actually use it, do they?"
A few weeks ago I encountered an area where parking meters wouldn't take cards despite being apparently equipped with card reader hardware. Getting sufficient change to last for a few days wasn't easy.
I'm not sure whether or not they had pay by app because I'm not going to download and grant bank account access an app I see advertised on the side of a parking meter.
Well, at least they were only zeroed and not put into massive debt, https://www.newsweek.com/woman-checks-49-billion-debt-bank-account-night-out-1602883
I remember the day I closed my BoA account. The teller said it may take some time because the computers were slow. She went from one computer to another, trying to find one that worked. The hard drive lights were almost continuously on. I peeked around at the screen and saw cryptic exe names flashing in the Windows task bar and the focus jumping in text fields. I asked for cash ASAP.
It's mainly because American banks are so backward, so it's convenient in some circumstances. I walk down the road and put a physical check in my lawn service guy's mailbox once a month. Safer than cash and far easier than dealing with the bank.
Most of the restaurants here do cash only because it's a small town and the margins are thin, and the credit card companies rates are extortionate, especially for a $8 lunch.
See that is why Australians lead the world in being ripped off by scam artists ;)
With paypass, tap 'n' go and other world leading tech, I think the last time I opened my wallet was to check the 3 digit code on the back of my card for an online transaction.
As an Australian, checks are a Pain In The A$$ (PITA). You have to physically attend a branch to deposit them and often the funds are not available for 3 days. Nowadays actually finding a bank branch that is open nearby is nigh on impossible.
So we are being forced to use cash or electronic, with our supermarkets being defacto banks.
As an Australian, checks are a Pain In The A$$ (PITA). You have to physically attend a branch to deposit them and often the funds are not available for 3 days.
Not quite so. Cheques can be deposited online eg NAB Mobile Cheque Deposit limited to AUD5,000 per seven days for personal accounts (and I think AUD20,000 for business accounts.)
I did this once with a AUD1.00 "cashback" cheque from a product promotion when living in a remoter area where "finding a bank branch that is open nearby is nigh on impossible" was already a problem.
I still use a personal cheque to pay for purchases or services requiring a completed paper form - otherwise I am expected to provide card details to which I am averse.
If am still here in 2030 *and* cheques are no longer, I will likely use a stored value card as a stop loss measure which I normally do anyway for online payments.
Compared to Austalia's banks US banks appear decidedly dogdy* but is there actually anything left in the US that isn't?
* I imagine Wayne and Arthur now reside in the US and are prospering.
"Checking" accounts are completely liquid and have a lower interest rate, maybe even negative at BoA. They're used for debit cards and most small electronic transfers. "Savings" accounts have some transfer restrictions and usually have a higher interest rate.
More importantly, millions of financial computer systems have a "C" or an "S" code for the bank account type. Think of how much COBOL, FORTRAN, C, PHP, PL/SQL, and Java 5 code would need to be updated to change that now. Hell, only one of those systems is modern enough to use lower case letters in its name.
“ Hell, only one of those systems is modern enough to use lower case letters in its name.”
All of those languages you list are acronyms (or single letter) so using capitals is standard, with the possible exception of FORTRAN, but that’s been referred to as Fortran since around 1990.
One of the things I have noticed over the years, is that when it comes to computer glitches regarding money, they always seem to occur to the advantage of the persons or entities who are collecting the money en masse, like banks and financial institutions of some kind, rather than to the advantage of the individual consumer! Could this be because more attention is paid to one part of the transaction, which benefits the financial organisation rather than preserving the safety of looking after the person or entity entitled to the money? Or am I making myself the victim of a very bad conspiracy theory, and that this feeling I have is more based on intuition and gut than actual science or fact...Just a thought...:-).
Probably the latter. Like most other glitches, this one will end and everyone will have the same amount of money they had before. Glitches don't always go that way. It was about a year ago when a different bank had a glitch allowing people to take more money than they had. Those people didn't get to keep that money, and these people aren't going to have their money taken.
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