When I called to figure out what was going on I was advised the account was closed and that a check would be mailed with remaining funds within 60-90 days. I asked about the other accounts and they are all fine and open. BUT, because the fraud closure was related to an online banking transaction I would no longer have access to online banking. Pretty much rendered the remaining accounts useless at this point. So while they didn't close all my accounts themselves, they pretty much forced my hand to close my remaining accounts.
If Google had money that belonged to me, I have no idea where to even begin trying to get it back. Do they have offices that you can stage a sit-in in?
Google is not a bank. If they start to offer banking services it will be through a partnership with an actual bank. Your money will not be “with Google”, unless they enter the multi year, very expensive process of applying for a banking license which they’re not doing.
Not that I don’t disagree with your point, in general. But google can’t just take your money like that. At least not in the US
Best case scenario for me with Google's bank would be an 8-hour drive to Germany, just to run into not only a language barrier, but a buerocratic one as my ID would not mean shit to them and their regulatory bodies would not even consider hearing me out without going through the EU first (== more buerocracy). All of this I would of course have to accomplish while not having access to my bank account.
Banks are one of the few decentralized services that have survived the modern economy and while I would switch banks immediately to have access to even something as simple as a balance check API, I would rather continue to fight the reverse-engineering arms race with my current bank than hand over my finances to a faceless, poorly regulated, foreign corporation and risk any one of a million possible small mistakes leave me penniless.
If the upside is taking a chunk of Mastercard/Visa's 600bn market-cap, the $0.01bn effort of a "very expensive" banking licence is peanuts.
It’s a huge undertaking to do. You have to prove to the US government that you’re capable of handling people’s money safely and that you’re providing a benefit to your customers. Years of internal systems audits with nebulous requirements. How do you do that without handling people’s money? You partner with a bank. It’s easy and relatively cheap.
But regardless of your ignorance on the subject, the original point still stands that Google is not gonna just “take your money”. Your money will always be in the custody of an actual bank.
Hours on the phone with no resolution. They told us we had to get the insurance company to contact them and verify that the check was valid. Like wtf is that. That’s not how checks work. And we’re not talking about a large sum of money. I think it was around $4k. Not particularly abnormal.
We finally walked into a branch with our 4 month old daughter, plopped ourselves in the manager’s office and told him we weren’t leaving until it was resolved. A few hours later we were told that the account was permanently closed and could not be reopened. But that we would receive a check in the mail for the funds that they quite literally stole from us.
As soon as that check cleared we closed all our accounts with Chase. Fuck them.