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The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.

The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.

There was a video game written about this scenario... 38 years ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.

it sounds like youre a victim of SAR (suspicious activity report)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report

in most western countries it is illegal to disclose the nature of the SAR. they will simply end your account with no recourse.

Are we being trolled. Is this deeply cynical humor. If so I love it

At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.

This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT

In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.

When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.

In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.

It feels like particularly in finance, that startups who disrupt traditional players do so without a full understanding of all the corner cases and none of the regulatory accountability which is why those traditional finance players were so expensive in the first place.

Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.

I have and never will forgive them for this.

I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.

Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:

"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."

When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.

There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.

They might have to follow up with a “why we are never using <hosting> again”

I got the same notification, US business owner here. In my case, I did not change my address (or anything else). But I suspect their system is regularly looking for work and can't handle DBAs well. To avoid this exact scenario, I was on their butts and uploaded every document I had. Eventually I was escalated and they did something, but I still can't enable their APR option due to some error somewhere. No one seems to know what. I'm very concerned one day I'll wake up to the same fate as the author.

It's a shame because I really love using the Wise website, app, payment system, and even the physical card (esp. in Japan).

Happy to work with anyone over there if they read this and want to dig in.

    So this is my word of warning:
    Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.

You've taken the wrong message away from this.

The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.

If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.

I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).

But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.

IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.

The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of our risk appetite, bye.

For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?

It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.

I had a very similar experience with Wise recently. I finally managed to find a document they deemed acceptable (at the fifth attempt) the day before the deadline. At no point did I receive a clear explanation as to why a document was rejected.

After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.

? "Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, is an English financial technology company focused on global money transfers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_%28company%29

> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill.

It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.

Story as old as time. Fintechs may be cheaper or have a cooler app, but if you ever stray off the happy path, you can kiss your account and/or money goodbye.

Has anyone ever just called them 'Wise'? Every single mention is 'Wise (formerly TransferWise)' like it's part of their legal entity name. Their CEO probably introduces himself as 'CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise)'.

As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.

For more on why banks might drop customers in a seemingly-capricious way: "Debanking (And Debunking)" - https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Prior HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476

I've had good experiences with Wise but jesus this is a nightmare, it looks like their customer service is crooked. It's a shame that such a great company can be so inflexible and let this type of situations fly.

Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks

Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.

If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.

I've had similar from Wise and it's partly their fault but partly also not. If you do anything suspicious, they have to do this and they're not allowed to tell you why.

See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

This was the best thing about Google cache. It's sad they killed it. I really wanted to read this.

New Zealand banks are horrible. If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.

NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.

I've opened a business account there back in 2018 and used it for a couple of years up to the moment when they asked me to "update details" or so in the middle of a routine transfer. I've sent them what they wanted and they made the transfer with a day of delay, but the experience was too humiliating and alerting.

Revolut might be a bit better but again, you don't owe your money, they may ask for random stuff (a selfie, a scan of your passport, a PoA) randomly at any time, they may arbitrarily block you from accessing your money when your passport expired and you haven't received a new one yet, or when you landed in a new country and their heuristic thinks it's not you, so you cant't even buy some food or get a taxi. Even if you pay their Ultra subscription (which I do) it's hard to speak with someone who may make decisions and I've experienced some comical situations like "we can't figure out which one of your cards was used for this attempted transaction, we can't find it in our database, we will reissue all your cards"

We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.

After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.

Wise still has something to learn about banking business.

If anyone opened this and still has it open, please paste the contents here so we can read it.

I feel as though the whole story isn't here, as there's one key detail that seems suspect from Wise's email: "Additionally, the reason behind our decision is because your activities exceed our risk tolerance."

It seems as though Wise had noticed payment patterns that seemed outside of what Wise is comfortable facilitating. I hope the author can get their funds, but this behaviour is consistent with all banking services.

I don't know but I just quickly read the google doc cached version at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YS8FLnSz2eP-nXp7FJR7Gsef...

And does this seem like AI automation gone mad?

I had Wise ask for my tax documents when I was in South America! I couldn’t access any documentation so I just ignored that account and used another one. That is the second time I have refused to use Wise. The first, they closed my account because I sent some money to my son and referenced a trust a/c. Ai carumba! Why do they make it so difficult when they only exist for overseas functions?

I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.

Jesus Christ, what a nightmare. I've used Wise quite a bit and was blocked as well, though I'm not entirely sure what I did to get released. I was stuck in a place where I had to login to do something but it wouldn't let me log in. I told a friend of mine who managed to find me a page where I could finally get customer support without being logged in.

In my case, it was totally my fault because I foolishly used Wise on my work email. Why would I even do that? It did start this half-Kafkaesque nightmare but I managed to eventually get the account back. I'd compounded the problems by also trying to make a new account so I could get customer support and promptly ended up being banned for trying a duplicate account. Fantastic.

But at least you know there is some flow that can get you out of this temporarily restricted state - which seems far less severe than the flow they got stuck in. Being unable to actually get their money out seems crazy. I would have rented the damned WeWork and been done with it to be honest.

I have an archived copy here if you want to see https://archive.roshangeorge.dev/archive/1761866967.0412/ind... (hopefully the Cloudflare cache isn't misconfigured)

EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy as well, so you don't need mine https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

My only issue with a personal Wise account is that it was unobvious to me that they charge 1.75% on ATM withdrawals (over NZD350).

I'm not sure if using Wise actually saves money otherwise - but it mostly works fine.

The one technical issue I've hit in the US was a bowser asking for my ZIP code which it couldn't verify so I couldn't use that gas station.

I've personally found wise to be more than helpful and I've changed addresses across continents, to far more red flag jurisdictions than my native Australia

So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?

This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.

From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?

There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.

Can someone propose a similar alternative? All these services seem to suffer greatly from the same kind of “poor support”.

I had problems with Wise too. Here in Canada there at least is some federal regulation for money service providers.

Your error was arguing about the tax invoice being a bill. Corporations don't like when you argue. Don't matter if you are right or wrong.

How can the business gets its money back ?

This would have been a good page to archive before hugging it to death.

I have a personal Wise account as do several family members. I've had a few odd things happen with their debit cards, and actually (eventually received some reasonably sane customer support via email). Otherwise no problems. That said, when I was opening the account another family member with a history in fintech said "you know that's not a bank, right?". Accordingly I've never kept a large balance there.

Man, that background animation is really distracting.

Wise is not a bank, and is not licensed as a bank. They should not be treated as a bank.

HN hug of death just FYI

Is this site hosted on AWS??

>A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.

who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there)

>This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable.

meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost

Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.

It’s like when I updated my Stripe account to be used with my new shiny Ko-Fi account I opened, like Ko-Fi suggest I could do… and then Stripe immediately closed my account for linking it to Ko-Fi because they suddenly considered it crowdfunding. No recourse, just “fuck off to the void forever”.

I'm not really sure what the author expected. If you're in KYC and ask to speak to a manager when your document gets rejected, you're going to have a bad time. The person processing your documents can't give you leeway even if they wanted to, they have legal requirements and a process they must follow.