There is no evidence that anyone who was not directly involved in fraud has lost money or had their account compromised, in the recent spate of fraud that resulted in Fidelity's account restrictions.True, protecting your money is just a happy coincidence.The freezes and 27-day holds aren’t to protect your money, they are to protect Fidelity’s money.An acquaintance on here has been dm-ing with some very rational counterpoint: they are freezing your money to protect you from fraud. Ok, I'll buy it for now and see how this resolves.
Accounts that had fraudulent checks deposited, in order to turn around and quickly withdraw the money, were either people using mobile deposit themselves to deposit fraudulent checks in their accounts or people colluding with fraudsters to have fraudulent checks deposited in their accounts and then splitting the proceeds. Fraudsters got access to people's accounts to engage in this fraud, because gullible/ignorant/greedy individuals shared their account credentials with the fraudsters. No one's accounts were hacked. This was basically social engineering.
So no one who was not personally engaged in fraud is being protected by the current account restrictions.
The reason Fidelity is imposing restrictions on innocent accountholders, is because it's hard for Fidelity to know who is engaging in fraud and who is not. They look for patterns that might be fraud, but it turns out Fidelity's algorithm for identifying these sorts of patterns is very crude and so very large numbers of perfectly innocent people are getting caught up in the restrictions. This is why people are complaining. Other financial institutions, like Chase, were able to deal with the sudden spate of fraud without punishing a large cohort of innocent clients.
So the restrictions are in fact providing zero protection for those of us who were not part of the fraud schemes. Unless you feel that Fidelity needs to be protecting you from yourself.
Statistics: Posted by cb474 — Mon Sep 30, 2024 9:01 pm — Replies 525 — Views 25894