Privacy Reality Check

So I just started doing training for a work from home customer service position for a subcontractor for a MAJOR national bank. A call center job. In “fraud prevention”. The people on the line when you call the number on ur card to report a lost/stolen card or see suspicious activity on your account. Or to get your card unlocked if it was flagged for “fraud” and you didn’t get/respond to the “was this you” texts. This is done by AI when there’s “suspicious” transactions.

Real talk and not throwing rocks at anybody, but this particular employer in our area is known as the employer of last resort and is known as a place to get a job for people who have been criminally justice involved or “in recovery” and such as that. (I know it’s alarming to know what kind of people have access ON THE INSIDE to your financial info.)

Some of the training materials seem to be turning people into snitches. Part of the “problem solving” is asking questions like “does this seem normal?”. And red flags include multiple accounts with a lot of transfers, “Unnecessarily complicated” structures, “large” purchases (i put that it quotes because the example used was an $800 credit card transaction). Any of these scenarios requires an “escalation” to a system that’s for AML stuff.

The thing that got me was that I FIT all of the categories that they call “suspicious”. I have 3 accounts with my bank and transfer money around DAILY. I have “large” transactions going to investment and crypto platforms fairly regularly. In addition to a regular job, i buy/sell used cars and real estate and have cash deposits between $1k -5k fairly regularly. I have deposits FROM investment/crypto platforms. But the people flagging me for suspicious activity and making judgements about “does this seem normal” are from a different paradigm where a lot of them are borderline homeless and don’t own a car and don’t have regular bank accounts. They get paid on a paycard. Their normal and my normal ain’t the same.

I’m definitely not doing anything illegal or remotely illegal and could be subjected to (and my shit DOES seem to get “fraud” alerted pretty often) unnecessary scrutiny based upon some scrub at a call center thinking I have too much money. And there’s the BIG emphasis on “don’t tell the customer you’re suspicious”. And to watch out for people who seem “annoyed” as if having to call in every week to get a fraud alert cleared and talk to these people isn’t ANNOYING as fuck.

There’s also the class thing that’s pretty obvious too. In this particular situation the “preferred” customers that get transferred to other departments are ones with $20k in deposits (which isn’t that much) and “wealth management” which is people with IRA’s or investment products are portrayed as expected to be snotty or expecting special treatment and that’s seen as “elitist” and spoken of with derision by the ones taking the calls. And they have an implicit bias to be awful to you if you are not also broke like they are and they are in a spot to make your banking life more difficult than it needs to be.

I say all this because most people don’t realize how important your right to privacy is and how little we have already and it is gonna get nothing but worse.