coveredbridge
Recycles dryer sheets
- Joined
- May 2, 2016
- Messages
- 164
SAR = Suspicious Activity Report.
Never expected this to happen to me or my family but my son was called into his bank to answer questions about suspicious activity on his account that may be money laundering.
In January I sold our car to a dealer a couple of weeks before we left the country, returning to England to live. The check was $14,000 which is above the $10k mobile check deposit limit and we no longer had a bricks and mortar place to deposit the check so I went into my son's bank with him and endorsed the check in front of a teller before he deposited it into his account.
He then used Transferwise to send the money into my bank account in England, and to avoid wire charges he sent 3 payments over a 4 week period using ACH. This triggered the SAR resulting in him being called into the bank. Apparently he should have explained to the Teller clearly what he was intending to do, or better still called the Bank as they only saw a large sum being deposited and then paid out in smaller chunks.
I have done this a lot last year, paying in large chunks of money from my brokerage, then sending lots of smaller payments to my bank in England.
I'm a little confused here...how do you know a SAR was filed on these transactions? The bank should not be disclosing a SAR filing to the customer. That would be in clear violation of AML regulations.
General Prohibition on Disclosure
Important to the usefulness of the reporting system is the general prohibition on
disclosure imposed upon financial institutions. These entities are barred from disclosing SARs,
or information related to the existence of SARs, to “any person involved in the transaction”reported upon in the SARs.