Cash App – You’re Account Has Been Closed in 2022: The hidden downside to Digital Nomad life

The digital nomad life comes with a lot of perks. No one complains about working from a seaside condo while downing a beer on a budget that costs a fraction of most American lifestyles. But there is one hidden dark side to the Southeast Asian lifestyle that occasionally rears its ugly head and sends you spinning: Doing business with companies that are extremely sensitive to fraud.

The story started in the usual way: I woke and stumbled over to hit the button on my coffee pot to get that transition from sleepy to focused underway. While I waited for the reassuring steamy sounds from the machine, I casually reopened my Cash App account (?!) to see if that refund from Aliexpress had made it back to my account.

 I was greeted with an excruciating sight that got my blood pumping faster than the coffee brewing in front of me ever could:

I can’t think of any shady P2P transactions that I may have been involved in, or any deposits or payments I’ve made that might warrant such a brash accusation. For the most part, Cash App is a nice way to keep some online purchases separated from my credit card and toy around with a few stocks.

 

“We found activity on your account that goes against our Terms of Service.”

Underneath the generic tone, it’s so harsh, yet so un-informative. This sounds serious, and yet there is no apparent way to appeal, or contact customer service and pleads my case. Did I really inadvertently break the rules? Or did some overexcited bot misfire it’s whistle, trip the alarms, and nuke my account.

After a few minutes of frantic poking around, coffee mug finally filled to the brim, I was able to Google the “Terms of Service” that were now somehow (and surprisingly) unavailable from inside the application. As I scanned it looking for some clues as to how I could have earned the ban-hammer, I came across this foreboding little tidbit from the Cash App Terms of Service:

 

·        I’m going to take a wild swing and guess the Cash App’s security bot had enough of this and decided the account might not actually be in use by a US Resident.

·        I have a memory of the olden days when a concerned bank might give you a call and ask for clarifying information, such as “this check seems unusually large, do you want to authorize it?”

·        Or a business partner might call you to say “we noticed your volume is changing, is everything ok?”

·        Heck, even our friends sometimes call to say “I’ve not heard from you in too long, how are you doing buddy, is everything ok?”

 

Not anymore. This is 2022 and our lives are now monitored by bots. Cold, calculating, strictly-rule-based, only partially informed bots that have been instructed to look for unusual activity. Then flag it. Then kill it.

 

They don’t ask how or why that information seems unusual, but it strays from the mean. They aren’t smart enough to suspect there’s a good reason it’s unusual. They don’t alert internal teams who then go and investigate – in fact human interaction is no longer necessary. Those reality checks and verification steps were apparently just getting in the way of progress. So the final result:

 

Banned from Cash App.

Frustratingly, this is not my only sorry tale of losing access to banking, stock and crypto exchanges, selling marketplaces (looking at YOU eBay) or other online platforms because of my geographic location at the time of access. Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix have all caused problems. The online bill pay system for one of my credit card accounts cannot be accessed unless I connect through a VPN. Let me say that another way – I cannot pay my credit card bill online unless I fake my IP address. All of these companies have limited or even blocked me entirely after deciding my IP address comes from somewhere they don’t like.

 

It doesn’t always happen on the first access, but eventually, after more and more use, my accounts become marked and the ban is then only a matter of time.

 

Are VPNs the solution?

In many cases, I’ve been able to resolve “permanent bans” at other businesses with a phone call or an online chat, followed up with a scanned drivers license or utility bill to prove my case. At other times I’ve contemplated using a VPN connection to hide my true location, but I’m afraid this cat-and-mouse game will eventually break some other Terms of Service provision and land me a truly irrecoverable ban.

But why has it come to this? Is it not reasonable to develop a security system that asks questions first, and shoots later? Maybe the idea is that asking questions only leads to more fraudulent answers, but is giving a presumed bad actor insight into your security processes so bad? If it is, maybe the process is faulty to begin with. Maybe they are so inundated with fraud that they can ban away and assume fraudsters won’t even try to recover their accounts, leaving just those legitimate customers to try and repair.

 

Some corporate digital security teams look at the IP connections coming from Southeast Asia, and other developing countries, and assume that nothing good could possibly be coming from them save the periodic tourist remote connection. With this information, they train their bots to treat every connection from these regions as suspicious, and negatively flag every connection coming from the area.

 

Over time, they build a profile of your account (and you), ranking your account as “good”, “suspicious”, or “bad”. Of course, using IP-region blocking security is easily bypassed with VPNs, so it’s really more of a “keep the honest ones out” approach.

 

Some online hacker forums even discuss how they can totally evade these rankings and which tools to use avert them, so to an extent, the strategy is obsolete from a security perspective. The bank, or other online business employing IP-region blocking gains nothing meaningful except frustrated users.

 

Unfortunately, us digital nomads, expats, and long-term working-from-a-foreign-country-while-on-vacationers get lumped in with a group that we are not really a part of, leading to occasional, sometimes even frequent, classification as a high risk customer. Someone to be feared, rather than trusted. Someone to be suspicious of.

 

Is there a way out of using automated bans?

Some businesses have developed appeals processes and customer service teams that can step in to mend damage left in the wake of security bots gone awry. But many businesses offer no grace – no pathway back – relying on the likelihood that a very small loss of good customers is a low price to pay to get a cheap and wholesale block from regions of fraudsters.

Tags:-

Cash App account Closed | close cash app account | cash app close your account |close my cash app account |how to reopen cash app close account|