Quote:
Originally Posted by PokerSpiv
Really? I bet the BDS or Occupy idiot-land protestors would be extremely keen to freeze the accounts of say, Sodastream corporation or MacDonalds if it could be done just by sending a fake scam complaint. Or Greenpeace vs tuna companies, PETA vs battery egg farms etc.
Which is why banks don't do it.
Not that I am saying your complaint is fake, but it would not very hard to make a fake complaint up every day and get a bank account permanently frozen.
You seem pretty set in the way you think, so I won't try to convince you otherwise beyond setting out the following for your consideration:
On a very simple level, there are far easier and more damaging ways to mess with a company or individual you don't like than going to all the trouble of getting their bank accounts frozen (especially when you'd have to commit fraud on your own account in order to make up a story to get it to happen...) and it wasn't slightly to happen more than once or twice, or for more than 24 hours, without raising eyebrows.
The reality is that in order to get the accounts frozen two separate letters with supporting evidence had to be sent to a specific individual at the bank by lawyers. The individual at the bank then evaluated the evidence, looked at the accounts, and saw something was up and froze the accounts. If there was a repeated problem where some political protester was fabricating stories consistently about one or a handful of companies, the banks would take note, I'm sure.
Of course Barclays wasn't interested in helping to solve the problem (and in previous cases of the exact same nature actively impeded the investigation), but that's a separate issue. The fact is they can pretty clearly tell in the majority of cases when something is clearly motivated by an agenda versus an actual situation by a cursory look at the facts, history, and context.
Airbnb, by the way, has a similar problem to what you're describing but it's not dont out of malice towards others, but it's like a reverse-scam. They have a situation where day in and day out they get legitimate issues (like ours - stupid as you make think we were) with well-intentioned customers getting tricked and defrauded. They also have a huge # of phony complaints about this, and so they have the unenviable task of separating real (trying to be made whole) from phony (hoping for a pay-day). That's not a fun business to be in, which is why I think their # 1 priority should be to work with us to shut down the banking aspect of the operation.
My personal feeling is that I'm sure they'd love to make us whole from a business standpoint, even if it costs them some money. If they're a smart business, and no doubt they are, they would turn this into a story about how something went wrong, they took care of it, took action against the bank and pursued and held the individuals accountable. And they made us whole. Who could possibly think negatively of them after that?
The problem is that they get so many fake-complaints each day (along with the standard western-union/money-gram scams that no amount of warning people will ever stop) which makes it hard to weed out the people who really did try to do everything right (probably the minority) and didn't do overtly stupid things (sorry, falling for this was perhaps not brilliant, but was hardly stupid) from those that are making fake complaints and are basically trying to hold the company hostage to make a buck.
It's not a fun situation, but they have to deal with it as a young, fast-growing company both practically and ethically or else at a certain point nobody will truly feel safe using their service on either the host's end (despite the insurance - who wants the hassle?) or the guests end.
