I’VE NOTICED MORE AND MORE BANKS ARE PUTTING LIMITS AND DELAYS ON WITHDRAWALS: Apple Customers Say It’s Hard to Get Money Out of Goldman Sachs Savings Accounts.
Apple’s AAPL 1.60%increase; green up pointing triangle savings account, a partnership with Goldman Sachs GS -2.32%decrease; red down pointing triangle, launched in April to great fanfare. Some customers say it has been hard to get their money out.
Nathan Thacker, who lives outside Atlanta, had been trying to transfer $1,700 from his Apple account to JPMorgan Chase since May 15. Each time he called Goldman’s customer service department, he said, he was told to give it a few more days.
The money arrived in his Chase account Thursday morning, he said, after The Wall Street Journal contacted Goldman about his and other customers’ experiences.
Others said they also had trouble transferring money from their new Apple accounts. Customer service representatives at Goldman, which holds the deposits, sometimes gave differing responses about what to do, they said. Sometimes, their money appeared to have simply vanished, not showing up in their Apple account or in the account they were trying to move it to. . . .
On brand-new accounts, like Apple’s, transfers that make up a large share of the overall balance can trigger anti–money-laundering alerts or other security concerns that require additional review, according to people in the AML field. Those delays usually last five or so days, they said.
It can also be a red flag when a customer tries to transfer a large amount of money from a newly opened savings account into an account that is different from the one where the money originally came from.
Min-Jae Lee was curious to try out the Apple account and intrigued by its high interest rate. She deposited $100,000 in April, but soon decided she would rather have her money elsewhere. On May 1, she tried to transfer it out.
It took more than three weeks for her to get it.
Lee, a lawyer, said Goldman told her to contact JPMorgan Chase, where she was trying to move the money. Then, on Goldman’s advice, she tried sending the money to her Vanguard account. The $100,000 moved there before going back to Apple the same day, she said.
Goldman then called her, she said, and told her that the money could be transferred only to the account from where she had sent it. She initiated a transfer to Ally on May 16.
A few days later, Goldman told her that her account was under a security review.
Her Apple account showed a zero balance, but the money wasn’t in her Ally account either. It finally showed up there on May 25. She isn’t entirely sure why.
It is reasonable that a bank would delay a transfer to do enhanced due diligence, but the length of the delay in these cases is surprising, said Dennis Lormel, who worked on financial crimes for the U.S. government for three decades and now is a bank consultant.
“A two- to four-week delay definitely seems long,” he said. “As someone who deals with banks on a frequent basis, to me that seems unreasonable.”
It does.
But hey, you don’t have to worry about a bank run if depositors can’t get their money.