I got the dreaded certified letter from First Tech on October 1 basically telling me to stop my manufactured spend activity. Others who have gotten this in the past have gotten it because they would have received an internal FT transfer and then pay their credit cards with the incoming funds, which in FT’s eyes is MS (don’t get me started on how that’s not even close to MS.) Anyway, I called them up and asked them what I was doing wrong. The first line rep wasn’t sure and she put me on hold to talk to compliance. She then came back, rather angrily, with something along the lines of, “You know what MS is, so stop doing it. Whatever you’re doing, stop!” After some back and forth, I then asked to speak to compliance. She said, “They won’t speak to you. Just stop what you’re doing… transfers of 25K…. just stop.” I haven’t done any 25K transfers btw; this account probably did less than $5K of transfers in the past 2-3 months. After a while, I gave up on her since I knew I was getting nowhere.
A quick aside here – I don’t do any MO deposits into FT, which is usually the #1 MS reason you get shut down from a bank. I’ve sent a few bill pays to it, but that was many months ago and hadn’t done one in probably 6-12 months, and I doubt it’d take them that long to get to me. The only recent activity is that I received some p2p transfers and done some Venmo payments out (I’ve never paid a cc push or pull from this account.) My guess is that maybe they think receiving a p2p transfer and paying out via venmo is somehow MS activity. I really don’t know. And at this point, I don’t care either. The only reason I was using the account was for the p2p, so if I can’t do that, good riddance.
A copy of the letter:
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