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SCB: Invasive Account Review

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  1. #1

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    Angry SCB: Invasive Account Review

    I'm not an expat in Hong Kong nor do I live in Hong Kong - I'm from Hong Kong, but posting here because I don't really know where else to do this.

    I have a mostly dormant (3 years) Standard Chartered Bank account with quite honestly very little money in Hong Kong, and I have been their client for more than a decade.

    Suddenly, I received an email asking me to do an "account review", with the email saying financial institutes are legally required to do that.

    The form not only asks for personal information and immigration information outside of Hong Kong (I trust that the Hong Kong Empire doesn't extend to the other side of the world), and in fact also asked for my *lifetime* earnings from *all* sources.

    Does anyone know if they are really legally entitled to know your earnings even when you don't live in Hong Kong, none of those money has ever even entered Hong Kong, and Hong Kong doesn't tax its citizens for their earnings overseas? I mean, that doesn't even strike me as something the Hong Kong government is entitled to know, let alone a random bank.

    I demanded to be presented with the relevant legislation and not only did they never respond to the request, they are threatening to suspend my account (which isn't really a big deal since I don't actually use it) if I don't do the form. I couldn't even get a response from that so-called Customer Due Diligence Specialist until I yelled at the audio chat person online and emailed both the specialist and the bank again, asking them to stop threatening me or I'll sue after cancelling my account.

    I'm also puzzled by the assumption that I could even provide such a piece of information. The little money I have in their bank account consists of money I made years and years ago from irregular part-time gigs, as well as allowances from parents. I guess some of them might have been the red packet money from Lunar New Year too! Like, how am I supposed to be able to declare anything??


  2. #2

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    Almost everyone with an international foot print is going through or will go through new KYC procedures.

    If you don't need the account shut it down and move on.

    If you really do need it, few alternatives are available. Best option might be to give them a little bit of info and suggest you don't have any more to give.

    emx, clh_hilary and spode like this.

  3. #3

    Join Date
    Mar 2007
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    Try lying, honestly.

    The people who are reviewing this stuff are not paying attention to the answers.
    So just answer, make it look realistic but feel free to BS thru your teeth.
    The guy will see everything is answered and that will keep him happy...

    If your account is not big and not doing much of anything, they are not going to pay much attention to it...


  4. #4

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    "Does anyone know if they are really legally entitled to know your earnings even when you don't live in Hong Kong" . They are not. But they will close down your account if you don't comply and they are allowed to do that.

    clh_hilary and SalseroHK like this.

  5. #5

    It varies from bank to bank. The said bank has been in the media a number of times for being fined by regulators for weak controls, so what they are doing is not surprising. If you deem it to be excessive then either close or you can write to the banking regulator who asks banks to explain why they are doing and what..

    clh_hilary likes this.

  6. #6

    Join Date
    Jul 2013
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    Easy2, they are just doing their job as a bank. Here's latest HKMA AML guidelines that causing all this horror: https://www.hkma.gov.hk/media/eng/do...deline/g33.pdf

    It's part of the HKMA requirement to collect those information from customer. In simple manner. They need to review customer profile, and fit customer into high, medium, low risk category, apply different monitoring threshold and review frequency.

    It's not just HKMA, pretty much all bank in the world (except sanction country) need to comply these kind of regulation. Each bank has different approach to this, same but different.

    I think they decided to review you even though it has little money because you are living in Mexico, it's one of the high risk sanction country. Believe it or not, you can probably sell your dormant account to the drug trafficking mafia in Mexico for quite a lot of money.


  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by bobobo:
    Easy2, they are just doing their job as a bank. Here's latest HKMA AML guidelines that causing all this horror: https://www.hkma.gov.hk/media/eng/do...deline/g33.pdf

    It's part of the HKMA requirement to collect those information from customer. In simple manner. They need to review customer profile, and fit customer into high, medium, low risk category, apply different monitoring threshold and review frequency.

    It's not just HKMA, pretty much all bank in the world (except sanction country) need to comply these kind of regulation. Each bank has different approach to this, same but different.

    I think they decided to review you even though it has little money because you are living in Mexico, it's one of the high risk sanction country. Believe it or not, you can probably sell your dormant account to the drug trafficking mafia in Mexico for quite a lot of money.
    Oh yeah I know they do do that. And accounts with no activities and only with a little money are suspicious for money laundering.

    I have no issue with their reviewing my "account". My surely reviewing my "account" is not the same as reviewing my life? Do they really have the legal justification to know my lifetime earnings everywhere? I mean, whether they're asking my global earnings or just in Hong Kong, I still won't be able to do it as I simply don't have a record of my earnings, especially with the irregular part- time gigs and parents giving me allowances. And no, I can't put down a reliable estimate either. I'm sure you can understand that as a child then a teenager, I wouldn't have a record of money gifted to me by family. Since I move so much and banking has also changed so much, I also don't have my statements from the accounts I have in ~11 banks across 4 continents in the past decades. (I don't even remember how many bank accounts I have had!) Then there are my small investment earnings that I made as a teenager and once again with no record (Standard Chartered would know better than I).

    So would your advice be do it sometime in the future, ever if the numbers I put in are going to be almost entirely random? They can suspend my account now all they want since it doesn't affect me the slightest. But eventually I'll want to take out the money on top of the investments I made years ago that have not been realized.

    And tbh I've always assumed Hong Kong to be one of those "sanctuary countries", seeing how it had a big chunk of the Panamá papers back then.

  8. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by shri:
    Almost everyone with an international foot print is going through or will go through new KYC procedures.

    If you don't need the account shut it down and move on.

    If you really do need it, few alternatives are available. Best option might be to give them a little bit of info and suggest you don't have any more to give.
    Thanks.

    I cannot close my account right now as I have investments made years ago that have yet to realize. I don't need it in the meantime so I don't care if they freeze my account, it's just that eventually I'll take the money out.

    But perhaps I can indeed try to just give them a little then say I don't have anything else I can possibly declare. Problem is I will really have very little to give as I have no record of my lifetime earnings. I can barely tell you what I'm going to make this year, or a confirmed number for last year, and these two years have been the least complicated in terms of making money for me. So I guess I'll try but not sure if they'll be satisfied with that.

  9. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by HowardCoombs:
    Try lying, honestly.

    The people who are reviewing this stuff are not paying attention to the answers.
    So just answer, make it look realistic but feel free to BS thru your teeth.
    The guy will see everything is answered and that will keep him happy...

    If your account is not big and not doing much of anything, they are not going to pay much attention to it...
    Surely lying would be much worse in terms of potential legal issues than just saying I don't know or don't remember?
    SalseroHK likes this.

  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by madoju:
    "Does anyone know if they are really legally entitled to know your earnings even when you don't live in Hong Kong" . They are not. But they will close down your account if you don't comply and they are allowed to do that.
    So they can close my account even when I'm legally entitled to withhold those information? Or in this particular instance, they could? I mean, hypothetically, they shouldn't be able to close my account if I decline to declare how many sex partners I have had or to present them my sex tapes or whatever?

    I don't care about their suspending my account now. But when I finally visit Hong Kong again to reactivate the account, does it mean I'll have to first do the declaration first?

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