A Very Kafka Christmas: Adventures inside the bewildering bureaucracy of My Bank
J R Leach
This is a tale of dystopic woe.
A bureaucratic nightmare.
A glimpse into the Kafkaesque sinkhole lurking at the heart of our automated society.
It began one bright morning in late spring when I noticed my current account’s balance was a little off-kilter—much lower than it should be.
But I’d just been to Greece for a little holiday and eaten my weight in gyros and tzatziki.
Most likely, I had simply spent more than I realised. Oh well. Such things happen. At least I had a good time.
But, as it turned out, this was not the answer. In fact, £700 had gone unaccountably missing.
Looking through my transactions, I discovered a direct debit I had no knowledge of, paid through PayPal, for £647.10.
Further inspection revealed that this was the latest and by far the largest of such payments—eleven in total—going out for the better part of two years.
I hadn’t noticed the ten previous iterations because they were pretty small—£8.99 here, £11.29 there—But altogether, including the most recent £647.10, a total of £1,132.60 had been siphoned from my account by persons unknown.
I did not know how this could have happened.
I called My Bank immediately, and after I was serenaded with a jaunty, albeit repetitive, rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D for twenty minutes or so, I informed them of this discovery.
“Scandal, outrage!” I cried in alarm—
“Not to worry, Sir,” said the chipper Mancunian chap, let us call him Mr Derek DeBitte. “Such banditry is common, and we, at this particular financial institute, deal with such avaricious roguery with an iron fist. Verily, I have liberated your hard-earned funds from the clutches of that detestable fraudster. You can rest easy now, sir, for all has been righted in the world, and justice has been well and truly served…”
Or words to that effect.
The total amount of £1,132.60 was then deposited back into my account, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wish I could tell you that’s where the story ended.
However, a few days later, one fine Wednesday evening, I received a message around sixish that consisted of a single sentence from my trusty, reliable bank detailing this:
“Nah. That didn’t fly, I’m afraid. We’ve taken the money back. Soz.”
Or words to that effect—-minus the apology.
When I checked my account, the money they had refunded was gone. And I was, in fact, overdrawn.
No further information was supplied, and there was no instruction on what I should do next.
So I called them up the following day and informed them—very politely, given the circumstances—that taking that money back had placed me in an overdraft, incurring fines for every day that negative sum was not balanced.
I was staying away from home at the time, and because of the recent fraud, my debit card AND my PayPal were both frozen. So, with zero money in my account, I was rendered suddenly, for all intents and purposes, utterly penniless in a strange city. If not for friends lending me cash, I wouldn’t have had the funds to buy a train ticket home.
I joke about it, but it was an alarming realisation at the time—how easily I had been cut off from all access to money.
I called up My Bank the next day, in a bit of distress.
“The indemnity claim was rejected, sir,” said a Mancunian lady, who was terseer than the previous chap. Let us call her Annette Gayne. “This is a PayPal issue; we advise you to call them immediately and resolve this. It should be PayPal paying your money back, not us; the payments on our end were all legitimate.”
And I, poor naive sap that I am, believed her.
So I called up PayPal, and of all the music I have ever heard while placed on hold, PayPal’s was the worst. Insipid and grotesquely, toxically positive—it sounded a little like the riff in ‘Walking on Sunshine’, but slower and playing on a 45-second loop.
A literal hour went by like this.
I waited. And I waited. Only to eventually be told by a lovely lady that this is not PayPal’s problem; it was an ‘account issue’. Someone—the mystery fraudster—has taken my bank account information and added it to a separate PayPal account that had nothing to do with me.
And they had been using it to pay for little bits and pieces.
And, of course, because of PayPal’s Fort Knoxian approach to customer confidentiality, they refused to give me the perpetrator’s name.
“She is a PayPal customer, Mr Leach, and therefore falls under our banner of protection. PayPal is not in the habit of giving out our customer’s private information, whether or not they’re who they say they are, and whether or not they’re stealing other customers’ money.”
Apparently, this person defrauding me retained her right to do so anonymously, and I retained no right to get my money back.
So I called again the next day, a devilish twinkle in my eye.
“I can’t find a payment on my transaction history,” I said. “Could you please help me find it? My account number is blah-blah-blah, it was for £647.10.”
This was some top-tier deceit, dastardly—that’s the word for it, and potentially the most exciting thing I had ever done.
“Certainly, sir, it’s right here—”
By god, it’s worked—have I gone too far?
“Was that for Airbnb?” She asked.
“Oh, it could have been. Could you tell me the name linked to that transaction, please?”
The thrill was intoxicating.
“Why yes, sir, of course. We here at PayPal are always happy to remind our customers of their names. It was Miss Fern Blahblahblah—”
I won’t reveal her full name.
And that’s how I discovered someone called Fern had spent my £647.10 on an Airbnb in Amsterdam—the duplicitous harlot was having my dream getaway at my expense!
“Ok,” I said, “actually, that’s not me, nor is it anyone I know.”
“Oh,” said the PayPal customer service assistant. Let us call her Fee. “Oh, that’s very troubling, Mr Leach.”
“Indeed, if only someone had said something. But now that I have that confirmation, would you be a dear and send that info to me in writing?
Fee very politely did as instructed and once again advised that I should get on to MyBank ASAP.
And I did.
And they put their Fraud Prevention Team on it.
What you need to know about the FPT is that they are very, very busy.
So very, very, VERY busy.
Too busy to answer their phones.
Too busy to even have phones.
The first rule of the FPT is that you can’t call them; they have to contact YOU.
And they never ever do.
While waiting for them to get in touch and after A LOT of reading through Reddit forums and probing the citizens’ advice webpage, I – on my own – made a small breakthrough.
Fern, or whatever black-market, shadowy operation she owes her allegiances to, had somehow pilfered my account details in 2015 when I had the misfortune of living in Central London. This was proven when I found an indemnity fee of 0.01p paid into my account.
Through some digital jiggery-pokery I don’t understand, this gave Fern (whoever/whatever she is) access to some of my account information.
This is known as “indemnity fraud”; it is reasonably common, and you might imagine it could be quickly dealt with. After all, I had found quite a bit of information on my own, without any of the vigorous vetting or special ops training I’m sure these mysterious Fraud Prevention professionals go through.
But when I tried to pass this info on to the boys at the FPT, there was only more silence.
Maybe they are so desperately up to their rear ends with preventing fraud that they simply cannot afford the time to deal with any of their customers who are victims of, well, fraud.
Or maybe My Bank’s Fraud Prevention teams’s main tactic in ‘preventing fraud’ is making it next to impossible to report it.
I don’t know. However, I can confirm that the FPT never ever talked to me about my fraud.
And so I was reduced to calling various bemused but well-meaning ordinary staff members and call centre operatives, who did nothing but put me on hold.
You see, by this time, My Bank had accumulated pages of case notes on my claim, and I would have to wait on the phone, twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour—for whoever I was talking with to read and decipher what was going on.
And every time I talked to someone, I would have to start again from the beginning—again and again and again.
My advice would always be: “I suggest you read from the end upwards, as a lot of the earlier information is unnecessary, and everything you need to know is at the end.”
But this was rarely heeded.
After waiting 20 minutes, I’d be inevitably informed: “Hello, Mr Leach, thank you for your patience; I understand now! It seems your claim was rejected.”
I would sigh and explain, “No. You’re still in July. It would be best to skip to at least September, maybe more. Just keep reading.”
“Ah,” they would say and then disappear again for forty minutes.
Keep in mind I had no record of these notes. Only they did. I had to work entirely from memory of previous conversations.
By the end, I had memorised my responses and created a concise explanation.
“IT IS NOT MY PAYPAL ACCOUNT—MY DETAILS HAVE BEEN USED ON A DIFFERENT ACCOUNT. NO. THESE TRANSACTIONS DO NOT SHOW UP IN MY PAYPAL TRANSACTION HISTORY. NO. I HAVE NOT SHARED MY DETAILS WITH ANYBODY. YES. THIS IS, IN FACT, FRAUD.
CAN I SPEAK TO SOMEONE FROM FRAUD PREVENTION, PLEASE.”
I kept an account of every phone call, and by the end, I had amassed a total of 18.25 hours and counting on the phone between PayPal and My Bank. Most of which I spent on hold.
Every so often, when I called, one of these brave, confused souls would “go away and try something”. These somethings were always vague and would take an arbitrary amount of time to finish, and when they had finished, no attempt was ever made to get in touch with me and inform me of the result.
If I wanted to know, I would have to call—and wait.
Eighteen hours of my life—siphoned off by bureaucracy, never to be seen again.
I could have solved world hunger in that time; if I wanted to, I could have taken up pottery or watched Doctor Zhivago six and a half times or spent a day in a padded cell contemplating the sordid reality of existence, y’know, something fun, which by comparison, could have been anything.
Having my teeth extracted felt more rewarding and took a fraction of the time.
Remember, all this time, I had solid proof of the crime and the name and account details of the perpetrator—yet this made no difference. There was still allegedly nothing either MyBank or PayPal could do to get my money back.
Eventually, and I remember these days as ‘The Days of False Hope’, a would-be hero steps onto the scene—let’s call her Miss Hope Rises.
Hope Rises is a customer service assistant at My Bank, and, in the early days of October, on one of my weekly ‘lets-see-if-those-folks-down-at My-Bank-sort-out-this-whole-fraud-thing’ calls, Hope answered the phone.
“By all that is good and holy, Mr Leach, what you have suffered through is ungodly and unjust. I have informed my manager, and I now lay my sword at your feet and gift you this oath—for as long as I draw breath, I will fight for your cause. From now on, you’ll have access to my email address, and I will personally see to your care and comfort. No more will you have to ring up some nameless customer service assistant like one of the common rabble. I will be stalwart guardian, sir, and you, my blushing damsel.”
“Hope,” I said. “That won’t be necessary. But if you could tell me how to sort this whole fraud thing out, that’d be swell.”
“Righty-o,” she said and got to work. “There is a questionnaire in the post; fill that in, and I’ll whip it over to Fraud Prevention, and we’ll get that money for you—oh, and some compensation for the inconvenience once this is all cleared up!”
“Bloomin’ marvellous work, Hope,” I said. “God bless you in this life and all others.”
A resolution was within my reach.
But the questionnaire never arrived.
The days of The Many Questionnaires had begun.
(I keep using the word ‘questionnaire’ because that is what My Bank uses. I’m unsure why the usual choice of ‘form’ is unsuitable. The questionnaire makes it sound whimsical and fun, as though there will be a Trivial Pursuit angle —which there certainly was, come to think of it.)
Questionnaire the First: Lost in the mail or never sent.
Questionnaire the Second: Delivered a week later, filled in and posted back (1st class and tracked) on the 14th of October. I see that it makes it there safely. I breathe a sigh of relief. And then a month goes by… and I hear nothing.
I called and emailed, and there was no response.
Hope, you have broken my heart.
I return to calling the ‘contact’ number, as listed, and soon return to my familiar pattern of explaining the situation to some clueless My Bank employee who is horrendously out of their element and doesn’t know what to do.
And then, Hope replies!
“Apologies, Mr Leach, we didn’t receive your questionnaire,” she says.
But I saw it. I tracked it. I know it got there. Hope… don’t do this.
“I have sent you another questionnaire,” she concludes, bringing us onto:
Questionnaire the Third: It doesn’t seem to arrive after two weeks.
“Sorry about that, Mr Leach; I have sent another.”
It is at this point I ask: “Why does it have to be a solid, physical copy, handwritten and hand posted when we live in an age of easy communication, emails and phone calls and text messages—how is something so spectacularly concerning to any financial institution, such as fraud, still going through the monotonous rigmarole of standard mail like though it’s 1812?”
I was sure a more modern method of communication would reap some benefit, like a fax maybe? Or a telegram. I’ve even been practising semaphores, just in case.
I sent Hope all the attachments anyway, not waiting for a reply—Word documents and the like, things I had written up since this whole mess started, including the rundown of all the fraudulent transactions on my account and a detailed, dated itemisation of everything that had happened up to that point.
Hope does not respond.
And then arrived Questionnaire the Fourth: Filled in and sent back.
And then, one day, I got a knock at the door. Mr Postman has a letter for me from MyBank, but it hasn’t had the appropriate postage paid.
So I paid £1.50. Opened the envelope
And inside was Questionnaire the Third.
I paid for it.
In this ongoing investigation into my missing money, I paid My Bank for a questionnaire I had already received, filled it out, and returned it TWICE.
And then, I kid you not, out of the blue, Questionnaire the Fifth arrives.
Who is this mysterious stranger?
Is Hope just sending me questionnaires ad infinitum now? Is this just something she does? Is it out of fear? Desire? Frustration? Is Hope trying to teach me some lesson about something I don’t understand?
Hope responds after a month.
“Sorry about the delay. Work is hectic. My Bank Employees cannot open attachments from third-party email addresses, only from internal ‘My Bank’ email addresses.”
And then, as a follow-up…
“If it’s easier, you can just scan a filled-in questionnaire and send it to me by email.”
No.
No, Hope, what fresh madness is this?
You JUST told me that My Bank Employees can’t open attachments from third-party email addresses… and now you’re suggesting I send you an attachment from a third-party email address.
Which, of course, you won’t be able to open.
I point this out in a slightly less antagonistic way.
“Oh, um, sorry, um, Hope, but, um, how can you open an attached scan of the questionnaire, but not the Word documents I sent you earlier? Um, sorry for asking.”
She does not reply.
It is December. Christmas Day.
Hope is still silent. I have sent my questionnaire electronically once and physically twice. They definitely received at least one hard copy and one attachment. I do not know if they received the other hard copy (Questionnaire the Fourth), as I forewent the ‘tracked delivery’ this time, mainly out of a growing, desponding apathy.
Part of me thinks that’s what all this has been for.
To break me. To shatter my resolve.
It’s been six months now. And, like the ghostly calls of a long-dead widow lingering in wait for a husband who shall ne’er return—I still email Hope occasionally.
And when that doesn’t work, I call, as I am well accustomed to by now.
“Do you think those fraud prevention guys will call me soon?” I ask.
They ask, inevitably, about the questionnaire they sent.
“Which one?” I ask.
“The last one,” they reply.
“I filled it in and sent it back a month ago.”
“Then the FPT should be in touch soon,” they tell me. And once, I swear, I even heard one of the more chipper Mancunians laugh when they said it.
I’m still waiting.
I think I might be waiting a while.
JR Leach is a fantasy author and graphic designer whose debut novel The Farmer and the Fald was published earlier this year. You can follow him on Twitter or Substack and see more of his work on his website
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Being a Kafkaland native, I’ve read your account with some interest. I have to conclude, however, that the most kafkaesque aspect of what you’re whining about is your own behavior.
While the bank and PayPal play a lateral role in this affair, they’re not the principal actors. The principal actors are you and that bitch Fern who ripped you off. Some blame for your predicament falls on your shoulders, for you should know better and use cash instead of shit services like PayPal. Or bank for that matter. But I understand, you can’t help yourself. Anyway, the main culprit is this cunt Fern, no doubt.
You have shrewdly obtained her name, kudoz for that. Why the fuck do you then keep pestering the bank and PayPal? Why not pay a quick visit to Ms. Fern, perhaps on your way home from the hardware store carrying your newly acquired sledgehammer, and collect. Like, “Hi Fern, you fucking bitch. Remember me? I’m the guy you stole money from to rent a place in Amsterdam. I’m here to collect. Oh, how do you like my new hammer?”
I’d venture to say that the balance owed would now be long repaid.
On more general a note, your is NOT a Kafkaesque experience. A Kafkaesque experience is an imbroglio along the lines you describe involving an entity having power over you, which neither the bank nor PayPal ain’t.
You’ve simply got ripped by some fucking bitch, and the bank and PayPal are washing their hands because their job is to move money, not investigate fraud.
BTW, wouldn’t the obvious thing be going to the police?
How would he know where she lives? Let alone the city or country. This isn’t an 80s film, people aren’t listed in the phone book any more.
But in general I agree if one could find her address, on sorting it out oneself and not relying on the ‘authorities’ to serve justice (lol).
Ya – Paypal is a criminal organization. Sorry you didn’t know that.
What a fucking real life Kafka!!
Think about it…is it really ok that somewhere people are armed?
Recently my telecom stop sending me paper invoices. I called call center and climbed through most of menus…no living person to reach, just machine.
Then went to physical telecom’s office and demanded paper invoice by mail. “Ok sir, no problem.”
After two months still didn’t get one.
In latest few months my closest ATM almost never work for accepting cash to deposit. I complained to a clerk in the bank and she said everything regarding ATMs is outsourced. And we had kafka conversation.
Now imagine, very soon all these “customer services” will be run by AI chat-bots…cluster fuck on another level guaranteed.
The invoices phone already contain little detail if any. Mine just went up by 12% with no explanation. And we have people volunteering for auto-debit because they supposedly get a “chance to win” something.
I discovered the same. An ATM nearby eat several €200 the way the money came out but drew immediately back again.
A paper came out saying the money was pulled from my account and the failure should be dealt with by the bank.
The bank who owned the ATM rejected the claim saying it should be dealt with via my own bank.
My own bank ask me to fill in schedules on their home side and submit a copy of the transaction. Hereafter nothing happened.
I went personally to the bank who explained the ATM was owned by an overseas closet company they couldnt get hold on.
After discussion they paid the €200 back to my account but only per kulance, saying it was the customer’s fault the ATM didnt work.
This ATM still owe me another attempt of €200 where I didnt get the paper.
Conclusion: I only use the ATM now for reading saldo and withdraw cash from supermarkets instead.
I check my balance every couple of days. Saw recently a charge from amazon. Looked in every way a legitimate charge from amazon. Only I hadn’t bought anything from amazon of late. Amazon had no record. (Yes. I got someone on the phone.) The charge was for $40-something — the third time a fraudulent charge against me was for $40-somthing, the first two spent at Burger King! All refunded, eventually. And my bank couldn’t have been less concerned that fact someone very clever was stealing my money, claiming to be from amazon.
Just imagine you do not own a mobile phone and PayPal can’t send you a text code to confirm your identity. YOU WILL NEVER EVER BE ABLE TO CONTACT THEM . That’s it, finito, the end of the affair. You may get an email from them inviting you to check your account but don’t think you can without a mobile number, it’s impossible.
The same for eBay, no way to log in without a mobile phone. Not only that but if the code does not arrive there is no other way to log in, and if you are not logged in you are unable to contact anyone on eBay. Basically if you cannot login your account you need to log in to solve it!
And Google (You Tube, etc) are starting to ask for a code sent to your phone more and more often.
I don’t have that problem with ebay, I can’t think how I got round it.
I applied for a menial job with some borg hive capitalist shithole recently – 1/2 a mile away. The only way to confirm ID docs is to allow a US shady entity to remotely access a net camera of mine, and photo my ID docs. I own a PC, scanner – the works. I can supply any format, from Wordstar forwards, including visiting the location, but no, these pricks want me to outsource my risk to the NSA.
or you own a dumb phone and same result,
PP mofos sitting on a hunner bucks odd that I’ve not been able to access since 2018-ish. e-mails yield bots, never results. Must have smart phone.
“they gotta us in a trap, in a trap,….”
Why cant the bank just give me a loan?
excellent summation,
but old hat in life experience: we old basterts saw this as soon as the first customer service posts closed and “we” went to call centres. (. . now everything is online, alas, eh?)
Alarm bells back then, clear as a mountain burn.
“the castle”, aye, since 200?, and only ever gets more layered. burn that book lol!
welcome to the castle.
Didnt you prepare yourself? You saw it coming, you must have made some preparations:
Junk silver, cash reserve, reserve storage of baked bean cans, mountains of Budweiser.
axes and oatmeal and salt ; ) the rest will be contested as required.
small solution
Every year lose your credit card/debit card and ask the bank to change all Your banking details due to this.
cancel all direct debit due to the lose and you will have to resubscribe to all the access faster payment online crap which we all use to have a easy life when buying online
any company who you have direct debit or done micro deposits with will have access to your spend signature and any payments like the 20million people in the U.K who got there council tax refund during covid.
read the small print of what that 3rd party who the council used to run it for them have been allowed to do due to your consent and under the guise of fraud and prevention.
…. and use a dedicated debit card for online purchases with only a couple of hundred dollars or whatever in that account that you top up as needed. That way, fraudulent deductions can only go so far.
Once you have exhausted the complaints process
you get sent to the….
and what do you think happens with the
nonindependentLOLfunded by themfinancial ombudsman….faking it as someone to go to who will help.I am no expert as to this sort of fraud, but I suspect that Fern got the necessary data to pull it off either because she actually works at Paypal and decided to freelance which would give her access your data, or has an accomplice in Paypal. If I were in your situation, I would close your Paypal account first, get a new account at a different bank, and then close your current account at your current bank. Also look at alternate ways to transfer money and pay bills electronically other than PP. My current bank in the USA allows me to pay bills directly from my debit card account at no fee.
Of course on a global level this is a symptom on what is being done intentionally to usher in their NWO. Banking has always been a Ponzi scheme since the Venetian goldsmiths discovered fractional reserve banking. One may think that only central banks can print money out of thin air, but in reality, up until about 15 years ago, the vast bulk of money printing was done by commercial banks. In the USA, the fraction which had to be a held asset was only10% so that 90% of any loan that the bank makes was printed. However the Fed reduced it to zero recently. The banks are now almost all insolvent meaning that their debits are larger than their assets. The system mathematically must implode eventually. This is too complicated to depict in a comment, but I think it likely to happen in 2024 and very probable by the end of 2025. One might meditate on the WEF phrase, Build Back Better. If one had a house which was collapsing and one wanted to build back better, the first thing one must do is raze the house to the ground and haul away its debris to the landfill. This will happen globally this decade which is why 2030 is such an important year to the Globalists. It marks the year on their agenda when the “transformation to tyranny” should be completed.
The central banks have only two choices soon, either hyperinflation to save the financial system or hyperdeflation to save their fiat currency. I would recommend three things:
!) Never leave more currency in a bank than you need to pay your bills. Take the balance of your income out of the account and store it in a safe place as cotton/linen currency. Do all your retail shopping using paper bills and support stores that accept it. This will probably become worthless sometime after the collapse is initiated, but you can’t lose it overnight like “stored” in a bank. Also realize that the laws have been changed around the planet and currency which you put into your bank account is no longer yours. It is simply an unsecured loan to the bank. You then would be an unsecured creditor to that currency, and in the case of bankruptcy, you are at the back of the line of creditors which includes the Wall Street and City of London derivative gamblers estimated to be over a quadrillion dollars, and you will almost surely get nothing. Also that (for the USA) the FDIC (insurance) has less than 1% of assets to compensate eligible accounts and there is no guarantee that the Fed will print the currency to make you whole. And even if they do, it would be incredibly inflationary and the purchasing power of it would be immediately reduced drastically.
2) Check out billholter.com to familiarize yourself with counterparty risk and how to try to avoid it, One might also subscribe to the UK website of Maneco64.
3) Watch the free 1 hour documentary video titled The Great Taking where the brilliant David Rogers Webb tries to explain his free pdf book of the same title. If you really want to get into the weeds, read the book afterwards. I would add that I agree with 100% of the first 55 minutes of the video, but I tend to part company with Webb regarding some of the details of a remediation to prevent it.
Avoiding enslavement and future total poverty requires a lot of mental work and then execution of what you discover, but not doing it guarantees that future.
O G and shill co partners
always sell the blame china social credit system hardly ever talking about what is happening in the U/K city of London.
Further to what you wrote el Gallinazo there is something incoming and the world biggest
auction site ebay LAUNCH IN THE u.k as a world exclusive.
is a thing called fluffy nice independent sounding
ebay Authenticity Guarantee
any item mainly jewelry or watches gold silver costing over 499.99£ (£500)
and it will be lowered in the future..
Authenticity Guarantee run by the eBay gest**p* will refuse a sale to your buyer if your a seller or stop you buying it from your seller if they think it is not approved by them.
what does that mean??????..
example if you was to buy 2nd hand gold or silver chain or watch and it did not have the correct stamps they will refuse to sell it and say it failed the Authenticity Guarantee it also scared the buyer into thinking they need ebay Authenticity Guarantee as a trusted source of information to be able to buy.
they are controlling the valuable item market and then tracking who has item of value of 500£ or more.
I can assure you. The Rolex or solid
gold bracelets are worth more money than the money you had in the bank when the U>k also has a bail in place on bank if the shit hit the fan,
U.K again 1.6 million home owners will-be hit with a 5% mortgage rate increase in 2024 as there 5 year low interested rate policy finishes in 2024.
Who you calling shill? That’s the sort of thing a shill would say! Ahhhhh (get him)!!!
What good is your cash or gold going to be in the case of a collapse? It’s not that the corporations will accept it, and start paying our utility bills with cash notes and lumps of gold/silver.
My opinion is that there won’t be any collapse any time soon, based in part in me having heard the same predictions for over 10 years “the financial collapse is just around the corner”, but instead a mixture of a slow decay, pseudo relalities and indulgences, that lead to self destruction.
Good luck, Geo.
“Unsecured loans to the bank” … What about mutual banks? The are cooperative financial institutions owned by its depositors or customers. They include mutual organization, mutual savings banks and cooperative banking. Unlike traditional banks, which prioritize shareholder profits, mutual banks focus on serving their members’ interests. They reinvest profits back into the institution to benefit customers, …
I am no expert on banking and my accounts in the past have not been with mutual banks. I assume you are writing about USA banking.
I presume that mutual banks also function on the fractional reserve system. This system, until 2020, allowed banks to make loans with only 10% of the loan in their assets and the balance from funny, printed from thin air. The Fed changed this to zero % assets in 2020, so the loans are now all funny money. I assume this but have not researched it in the past as without this leverage they would not be close to competitive with commercial banks, all of which do it.
One must realize in any case that all banks make loans. If the borrower defaults on the loan, it is a loss to the bank’s balance sheet. My understanding is that most mutual bank loans are made on real estate and small businesses which are now under tremendous pressure due to the high jinks of the Fed with their discount rate. So MBs can go belly up from this just as commercial banks and investment banks can. People, like CA Fitts who is an expert on banking, say that MB are safer because they do not gamble in the quadrillion dollar derivative casino, which IMO will be the initial cause of the coming collapse of the global financial system.
I’m NOT suggesting you borrow a jCB and extract one of your Bank’s ATMs and wrench it open and take the money they owe you.. No DONT do that
Well, this is what happens if you put an ansaphone/AI receptionist/chat bot in between you and the humans at your bank.
It’s why bank branches are so, so important. Not for the 99% of the time you don’t need them. For the 1% of the time that you do. When you have questions that AI won’t answer/is programmed not to answer etc etc.
What we have are a 0.01% elite who will continue to live face-to-face whenever they feel like it, but are ordering the 99.99% to speak with robots.
The problem with society is that it allows ‘do as I say, not as I do’, rather than criminalising that.
Once you criminalise those who expect others to do things they don’t do themselves, things become much, much easier.
Yes, if that happened to me I’d be at the bank’s branch on a regular basis annoying the hell out of the staff until they themselves pick up the phone to talk to someone, or politely demand to talk with the branch’s manager. Forget the phone and remote comms.
I wonder if this sort of thing is happening by design.
To drive us all so batshit crazy that we breathe a sigh of relief born of desperation when CBDC arrives.
There will be no fraud, nor perhaps even Paypal, with the WEF and Central Banks at the helm.
I’m wondering how the black market is going to work once the CBs are in town.
Are they going to have to make drug trafficing, human trafficing and armament trafficing legal?
There will be fraud with CBs whenever the PTB want to show that they have the power.
Any day they want to empty your account, they will empty it.
CBs are the death knell for privacy, autonomy and relationship banking.
CBs are all about Gates et al stealing every piece of personal financial data on the planet.
There’s no other reason the elites want them.
You seem to have omitted Control of what you can/are allowed to spend it on, according to your social-credit score, and time-limited, expiry date stamped currency which will automatically delete itself from your account if you haven’t spent it by said due date, and will magically reappear in the favourite WEF charity of their choice.
Yes, but (and thank you for responding, I always find your comments interesting)
what are drug dealers, weapons dealers, and human trafficers going to do?
I can’t imagine them going to CBDCs, right?
CBDC is transparent and “on the books”.
The dealers operate in the dark. Will they create their own currency?
They operate off the grid now. All cash. Money laundering.
It will be interesting.
I understand only to well that we will lose autonomy,
I think about losing my social security when it will depend on my medical supplication.
My guess is that the central bankers are the drug/weapon/human trafficers, and always have been.
Excellent story JR, thank you.
I’m in IT (retired) and once had a high-street bank client. One day, on-site, I waited two hours and forty-five minutes for credentials to log into a server. I had a login screen, I called the IT dept. five times in that interval, still no credentials. Generating once-off credentials is so simple to do, such morons.
The blatant incompetence of banks and the “we don’t care because we have so such money” attitude is brain-shattering.
They are laughing at us while ‘vampiring’ our assets.
Remember how certain US cities had effectively de-criminalised shoplifting? How this was being used to both drive out small businesses and make those that survived put their produce in locked displays that needed QR codes to get into them? How this would fit in with both the CBDC and social credit agendas?
https://dumptheguardian.com/law/2023/dec/26/shoplifters-most-affected-by-ending-short-jail-sentences
It’s almost like there’s a transnational crypto-government that’s following the same playbook. How exactly did supporters of the current UK government demand this? Where was the debate whether this was a good idea?
Oh, and the Fraud has a headline that compares being a communist to being a superhero.
The strength of your voice is directly related to the size of your wallet.
Don’t fret JR.
It’s just a bug in the system.
Nah, more like scorpions and black widows.
I suspect that Miss Fern works for a company that gives a kick back to MyBank and PayPal.
Yep it is now rampant out there.,..2 breaches of my credit card in 6 months….bizarrely one sailed closed to the WEF with someone using my card to attend one of their side conferences in Dubai…me who rarely goes 50 klm from home….new credit card and it didn’t take long before someone booked up a heap of groceries on line for pick up….apparently one of the favourite frauds in Australia.,,.my bank decided that wasn’t my usual behaviour and refused to honour until they had contacted me…seems they are teaching AI to recognise patterns of normal expenditure as one way to beat the fraud….so Coles got to wear that one…
it seems they can get just about anyone….and I have little idea how the breach occurred..,though like other suspect PayPal…..I have been issued with a new card but am reluctant to use it,.,not sure I ever want to buy anything on line again as it starts to feel like that is an invitation for personal violation…yep I guess it limits one’S world but there seems a price to pay for all this instant digital game.
and I have been advised they always start off small to try the water so to speak…sadly from what I gather one cannot rely on waiting for statements, they can run up big bills in a couple of weeks…so it can all get to be just too much hassle to be bothered,
For many years, my girlfriend(now wife) and I got a flight to often The remoter Greek Islands..and went to the nudist beaches…
She said it will be O.K…if we go swimming naked together..and leave All our stuff on The Beach. Everything..WE liked THE GREEKS
No one ever stole anything
❤️
It’s true. You can leave your shopping out all day in Greece and nobody touches it. But if the Greeks catch you stealing, they don’t call the police. A group of them will find, beat and kick the shit out of you.
They like to make sure you understand this.
TODAY, We Woke Up at 1;15pm in the Afternoon to Peace AND NO SOUND, except our 10 week old Kitten Purring in our eARS…We all agreed best Turkey, Ham and Pigs in Blankets – Wife, Me and The. The Cat is just so sweet
One Day Off from The Grandchildren…CHRISTMAS DAY
sHE’S CUTE
kIDS EVERYWHER BOXING DAY…HAVE YOU GOT ANY bATTERIES THAT WILL MAKE THIS WORK gRANDAD?…
the screw driver is over there in the pot…+
Come and Play with us Grandad
Apologies for The Capitals
“Marilyn Manson – mOBSCENE (Official Music Video)
Maybe you just don’t quite have the right mindset when it comes to this sort of “misunderstanding “? 🤪
“The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
— Franz Kafka, book The Trial
Modern life. And so it goes.
You are a fantasy author? A fantasy author?? You are a fantasy author???
Is this a fantasy or real story. Let me advice you:
Close your account and open a complete new account incl new belonging cards in another bank.
Horrible, hell to have to go through that.
Thanks for the warning.
Geeze.
Horrible.
Hackers worldwide must be eager in anticipation of
practicing their Arts on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) ?
There are more hackers in the world than their are purse snatchers !!
Precisely. Thats why they made all this digital id and e-money. Its so easy to let you go Kafka inside the electronic system and pull out especially small amounts from your account.
Putin’s army of hackers can put their puppet in the White House but couldn’t get inside CBDCs or other AI? How does any of this add up again? But then a “2+2=4” world is so old hat…
And here’s some more covid nonsense:
https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/covid-nasal-spray-fda-do-they-work.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb
“some influencers suggesting the nasal sprays are part of a smart COVID prevention tool kit, along with tests, masks, and vaccines”.
A functioning brain and a strong bodily defense system are conspicuous by their absence.
What would be safe to spray into the sensitive nasal passages? At the height of the panic in 2020, we heard of “40% ionised” water from a French business, to clear “99%” of virus in 30 sec., reduce spread by “90%”, but also described as “only preventive”. People were also being liberally sprayed with a mist of bleach.
While police and others to tackle street crime are being reduced under various excuses, there is a relentless push to lock us into the digital Matrix in every plausible aspect of our lives.
There’s an old (original) Star Trek episode in which an alien society enforces its rules with minions referred to “The Givers of Pain and Delight”. This dismal drawn-out torment succeeds brilliantly in eliciting both reactions at once.
Don’t get me started! Fortunately for all, I will abide by this idiomatic imperative, and refrain from countering with my own, admittedly less onerous but comparable mega-hassle that occurred this past summer. I will only disclose for the benefit of US readers that “Sears Home Services (SHS)”, which ostensibly dispatches qualified repair technicians to fix failed AC systems, is a fraud and confidence scheme.
It’s mildly comforting to be “validated” with tales of woe that resonate with personal experience; misery loves even vicarious company.
One subplot which wasn’t mentioned, but I’m sure the author experienced, is the Job-like phenomenon of having ostensibly sympathetic third parties along the way point out all of the things the victim did wrong, or failed to do right, to invite or prolong the victimization.
OK, I said I wasn’t going to do this, but I can’t resist illustrating the point with one of the many hassles I suffered: in the latter stages of my ordeal, I was sweltering and suffocating in my little house during a protracted heat wave. I had at long last gotten a “confirmed” return date in which an allegedly defective AC condenser coil would be replaced. On the morning in question, there was no routine SHS “tech service on the way” e-mail, and the tech who’d visited on three previous visits didn’t show.
This “triggered” me to call SHS, which has automated all transactions; on this day it didn’t even offer the option of being connected to some heavily-accented call-center flack in a galaxy far, far away. After SHS’s HAL 9000 informed me that I needed to “reschedule” my appointment yet again, it paused and then informed me that there was no credit card number on file– and to please add it using my telephone keypad.
Since I have a so-called “service contract” that covered the visits, I’d never used a credit card and saw no obvious reason why SHS suddenly required one. In dozens of previous calls, this supposed omission had never been presented. But I was so frazzled that I thought this irrelevancy might be obstructing progress– so I reluctantly provided my credit card number as HAL instructed.
When I finished inputting the number, HAL paused– then told me the transaction couldn’t be processed and to try again later. Literally a minute or so after I hung up, I got an e-mail alert from my credit card company asking me to confirm a new one-cent (yes, a penny) transaction to a rental car company. I promptly replied and denied the charge, which of course cancelled my credit card.
I knew the routine, and the replacement card arrived in about a week; BTW, its Fraud Department had no interest in explaining or investigating the fraud. I also got my AC fixed by a legitimate local company. But every time I told a sibling or friend about this vexing interlude, they all felt compelled to point out how stupid I was to provide my credit card number over the telephone.
It didn’t matter that I’d already “confessed” that I knew it was ill-advised and risky, that I normally never did it, and only “cracked” in a moment of weakness because of cumulative stress. My otherwise sympathetic interlocutors just couldn’t resist jumping on that mistake to conduct a parent/child “teaching moment”.
This shitstorm of perhaps well-intended but supercilious and superfluous advice, given on top of all the other aggravation I’d endured, still bugs me. Can you tell? 😡
It’s all conditioning us for the one and only new God to tell us what to do, what to think and how to behave…
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/fobo-wef-predicts-44-human-skills-will-be-replaced-ai-five-years
This is doubtful, he, the robot, is having trouble picking up tools, it appears to be a challenge which is not overcome so easy, i’ll give him another 10 years before he turns simply militaristic.
Not gonna happen. Totally or largely autonomous robots are a practical impossibility.
We’ve been hacked in this similar manner about a dozen times in the last 24 months. This systemic approach to CC fraud seems to be progressing in a typical boiling-the-frog, salami tactic fashion. And it is growing into checking accounts as practice. Just a few days ago, mind you my credit union, credit union, not bank which i abandoned 30 years, physically returned a check deposit of mine because it “does not have the name of the account owner on it and we cannot accept it”. Or rather as I later found out, the machine they have hired to now do their check processing cannot, or will not, be dithered to recognize a nickname, used for over 30 years.
Previously, we never experienced mystery CC charges and could cancel payments if necessary. Then any fraud was instantly refunded. Then as of about 2016, phone complaints would go to AI operator’s loops of doom, ending with “Thank you… Goodbye.”. Google has NEVER been accessible. Biggees like these began broadcasting one way only like a walled and moated, reverse Panopticon. Inaccessible is their new positioning. CC fraud like we now experience, is met with the claim of “we will investigate” and we’ve had to wait. I have one pending now. It was a small $8 charge from nothing i recognize or have record of. JR’s case is an evolution of the above to the next level nightmare that is coming. Digital cash, paperless record keeping, AI 5G IoT remote control economy, closed small businesses, uncontrollable credit and bank fraud, is an imminent environment we should all work to withdraw from before it’s too late. This article needs wide sharing as a call out to personal action.
As I’ve been writing for quite a while, the elite have moved from predator of Earth, predator of nature, predator of other indigenous, predator of the “other”, to predator of everything, including and now featuring the bottom 99% of Humanity worldwide. As they hunt us down and knock us out, they expose themselves and their methods of predation all too clearly. Like JR, they leave us few options within their ever shrinking net of fraud. In my opinion they are forcing us to do what they don’t want us to do, re-localize ourselves back to survivable scale regional living.
Stopped using PayPal decades ago. Double charged for an item. An Ebay purchase. Took weeks to get it taken care of. Service center was in Columbia, South America. PayPal drew on my credit card. Closed the PayPal account and changed my credit card number. Never ever transfer cash from your bank to another. Period. Credit cards companies do all the chasing for you when you have a breach. And they always assign you a new number when there is a breach. Using pay services is a scam waiting to happen. How do these little upstart companies protect your data? They don’t. The technology is too expansive and they can’t provide the service you need. Banks can and do. I hate fucking banks but I like to shop online. PayPal still sends me emails. You cannot unsubscribe from them. I keep asking Off-Guardian for a physical address to send them a donation check. They don’t accept credit cards. Weird isn’t it? Maybe, after reading your piece, Off-Guardian will reconsider it’s policy and start accepting credit cards.
Agree. To eliminate these parasites, banks should offer a service of (a) opening multiple bank accounts in multiple countries (b) moving balances above a minimum from each such account to the base account periodically.
My bank used to have something called POP Money, seemed pretty damn good, but it is, or was, bank-to-bank. Used to send $$ to son in Italy. $2-charge next-day service, no charge three business days.
Complete madness! Publicly naming and shaming may get a more effective response! They usually have folks scanning reviews and responding with sincere apologies!
Thank you for this! Hilarious but also very scary. An object lesson for our time. Please keep us updated! Will Questionnaire the Sixth arrive in due course?
Typical idiocy, but shit man, you kinda screwed yourself by not noticing it earlier. I was looking through my girlfriends bank statement because she was missing money and it turned out that she was subscribed to some bullshit service that she forgot about.
I guess you and her never got the training of checking your statements , naively forgetting that even if it’s not fraud, they can still attach charges to your name. It pays to check statements, that’s why they have to provide them!
Good luck on your endeavour.
OFF-Topic. Andrew Bridgen fully explains himself. And what the chief Whip told him to do, immediately before he eas resigned.
https://rumble.com/v42l83e-andrew-bridgen-mp-opens-up-on-the-wef-who-vaccines-climate-change-and-our-f.html