This is a heads-up for anyone who may be using Wise for business or has higher amounts of funds parked with them. In that case, you should exercise caution when paying a TD via Wise.
The following occured recently with my Wise account:
I had been using Wise (formerly know as TransferWise) since 2019 for private transactions. I have sent about €60,000 in total since then, within EU and outside. Not once did any of my transactions trigger any money laundering alerts.
3 months ago I tried to send approximately €300 to a TD's UnionPay card in China. The payment did not go through. Instead, for the first time since using my Wise account, a money laundering alert was triggered and I was asked to submit documents to prove the source of the €300 I was trying to send to China. None of the documents provided were sufficient to get the payment approved. After a few attempts, the final notice was that the recipient's account was currently unable to receive any funds and that the money would be refunded. My own Wise account was unlocked again, even though the verification of my documents was unsuccessful. A few days later, I was able —as always— to transfer about €1,400 to an account I own outside of the EU and that I had previously sent money to dozens of times without any issues.
Since then I had not used my Wise account... until last week when I attempted to repeat the same transfer again, but this time once again a money laundering alert was triggered. Again, any documents I submitted were insufficient to resolve the issue. However, this time Wise decided to completely shut my account down. There's no obvious reason to do so on my side, so I assume that this must be somehow linked to the incident with the TD's Chinese bank account back in April/May.
Luckily, I do have no funds worth mentioning parked with them and I don't need them for business. I can simply switch to an alternative for my private transactions with the half a dozen other fin tech apps I have, but if you should have larger sums with them or if you need your account to conduct business, just be careful. If, for example (according to my research, this is even explicitly mentioned in their terms!), your private Wise account is terminated, any business account you have with them will be suspended as well and any funds will be frozen for up to 6 months or in some documented cases even up to a whole year.
As always, your own mileage may vary and this is just one case you may have heard of. But if you research this topic, you'll see that account suspensions have increased dramatically since 2020 and many banks and financial service providers will prefer to shut down an account of an innocent customer like myself over the tiniest suspicion than to risk hefty fines from regulators. In this case, I suspect that this particular account the TD had used (I think they use several at a time) was previously flagged and I caught a bad moment to send the funds... Then, apparently mine was flagged as well and Wise's algorithm or perhaps an overly eager, money-launderer-huntin' case officer decided that my ex-EU transactions were retrospectively suspicious and then on top of that, they didn't like the docs I submitted and bam!, account suddenly terminated — most likely also guided by an internal "better be safe than sorry" policy.
Well, again, just use caution IF you really need your Wise account... Or IF you have a lot of money with them. Other than that, you can mostly disregard this.
The following occured recently with my Wise account:
I had been using Wise (formerly know as TransferWise) since 2019 for private transactions. I have sent about €60,000 in total since then, within EU and outside. Not once did any of my transactions trigger any money laundering alerts.
3 months ago I tried to send approximately €300 to a TD's UnionPay card in China. The payment did not go through. Instead, for the first time since using my Wise account, a money laundering alert was triggered and I was asked to submit documents to prove the source of the €300 I was trying to send to China. None of the documents provided were sufficient to get the payment approved. After a few attempts, the final notice was that the recipient's account was currently unable to receive any funds and that the money would be refunded. My own Wise account was unlocked again, even though the verification of my documents was unsuccessful. A few days later, I was able —as always— to transfer about €1,400 to an account I own outside of the EU and that I had previously sent money to dozens of times without any issues.
Since then I had not used my Wise account... until last week when I attempted to repeat the same transfer again, but this time once again a money laundering alert was triggered. Again, any documents I submitted were insufficient to resolve the issue. However, this time Wise decided to completely shut my account down. There's no obvious reason to do so on my side, so I assume that this must be somehow linked to the incident with the TD's Chinese bank account back in April/May.
Luckily, I do have no funds worth mentioning parked with them and I don't need them for business. I can simply switch to an alternative for my private transactions with the half a dozen other fin tech apps I have, but if you should have larger sums with them or if you need your account to conduct business, just be careful. If, for example (according to my research, this is even explicitly mentioned in their terms!), your private Wise account is terminated, any business account you have with them will be suspended as well and any funds will be frozen for up to 6 months or in some documented cases even up to a whole year.
As always, your own mileage may vary and this is just one case you may have heard of. But if you research this topic, you'll see that account suspensions have increased dramatically since 2020 and many banks and financial service providers will prefer to shut down an account of an innocent customer like myself over the tiniest suspicion than to risk hefty fines from regulators. In this case, I suspect that this particular account the TD had used (I think they use several at a time) was previously flagged and I caught a bad moment to send the funds... Then, apparently mine was flagged as well and Wise's algorithm or perhaps an overly eager, money-launderer-huntin' case officer decided that my ex-EU transactions were retrospectively suspicious and then on top of that, they didn't like the docs I submitted and bam!, account suddenly terminated — most likely also guided by an internal "better be safe than sorry" policy.
Well, again, just use caution IF you really need your Wise account... Or IF you have a lot of money with them. Other than that, you can mostly disregard this.
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