How long a chat would the bank have if I walked in with 50K in cash?

The King did it no worries. 😉

It would take longer to find a branch that is open!

It would ring loads of AML /  FinCrime bells unless you had an established legitimate reason to deposit lots of cash. If you've got a decent explanation fine - e.g. your ancient aunt didn't trust banks, kept all her savings under the bed and has sadly passed, probate's gone through with you as the recipient, you have paperwork to back it all up.

I paid in over 15k in cash for a car before. No one asked any questions, just ran it through the machine.

is there any feed into HMRC/taxman

Possibly. Suspicious financial transactions are supposed to be reported, though I'm not sure what the mechanism is, presumably triaged by someone before going to Police or HMRC.

Anything over £5k would need proof of the source of the funds

If you have a good reason and documentation as to where the money came from you'd be ok, otherwise you'll be stuck in aml/kyc hell for a few months

I was warned for paying in £4K cash from one bank to another just across the street.  They didn't like it.

I suspect it would be reported to some sort of compliance officer and your email would start getting spammed with invitations to meet the banks 'wealth management' sales person so the bank could start making some commission out of you.

Agree with the 'not as long as it takes find a branch'

Got a problem with my son's CTF account, coming up to majority in a month or so and account is in old name. Suggested I should 'pop into a branch with documents' - nearest one from Guildford is either Ealing or Croydon! It's Britannia, part of Co-Op FFS, not a small one.

Oh, and they're not open at the weekend. So, pop in on a workday, over an hour away.....

So I presume all these dodgy builders/roofers/handyman who do 'cash only' jobs literally have the roll of tenners in the pocket they pay anything with rather than straight round to the Halifax on a Monday to pay into their current account?

What @Murray said basically.

Inheritence transfers (or any large transfer) are usually done via bank transfer, so it's easy to see what the money is for/where it came from, I.e a solicitors account or a business to business account, etc.

If you walked in with a wheelbarrow full of tenners and you're not an esteablished business owner that takes in a lot of cash, I'd expect they would accept the money, but quietly start an investigation /speak to HMRC etc. which will probably result in the account being frozen or restricted.

So I presume all these dodgy builders/roofers/handyman who do ‘cash only’ jobs literally have the roll of tenners in the pocket they pay anything with rather than straight round to the Halifax on a Monday to pay into their current account?

If they are legit, they will have a history of paying cash into the bank on a regular basis, as i suspect a lot of small business owners do, cafes, sole traders of any sort really.

I suspect its not just that one activity, it's out of the ordinary patterns that will trigger a closer look.

Bob the builder.LTD who depostits a couple of grand a week in cash to his business account on a regular basis... not nessesarily super suspicious.

Someone with a PAYE job being paid £2000 a month, suddenly turns up with several duffel bags stuffed full of notes...alarm bells will ring.

Oh ya the other bank actually want to know where I got the cash from so just explained to them.  They were not happy but eventually accepted.

Give it to me and i'll pop in and see what happens?, I'll pm you my details.

I’d expect they would accept the money, but quietly start an investigation /speak to HMRC etc. which will probably result in the account being frozen or restricted.

Or they’d just submit a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the NCA and then suitably covered make a commercial decision whether to accept the business, no doubt based on past history and explanation given.

What tho OP needs is a business front for money laundering 😉

Have you considered opening a frozen yoghurt shop or a kebab shop? 😉

Funnily enough, notorious hash smuggler Howard Marks opened up a boiler plate company under the guise of importing and selling silk kimonos from the far east... he did it so well that the company actually started making a lot of legitimate money in its own right! lol!

Bob the builder.LTDwho depostits a couple of grand a week in cash to his business account on a regular basis… not nessesarily super suspicious.

You'd be surprised at what triggers money laundering checks.

I know a business owner who deposited several thousand a week, but when he deposited IIRC about £8k after he sold a vehicle, it triggered money laundering questions. And that was a company with a 7 figure annual turnover, so it wasn't as though it was significant amount of money for the company.

For a private customer, I'd imagine 50k would trigger lots of questions, with the funds not available until the bank was satisfied as to the source.

It’s Britannia, part of Co-Op FFS

I'm a coop customer - live in Scotland - they've only had one branch in Scotland for at least the last 20 years. That said I've not had reason to visit it for at least 15 years.

Have a look if theres a Post Office Banking Hub near you - a new project where a facility is set up in towns that lack bank branches and different banks are then able to send staff one day a week

If you walked in with a wheelbarrow full of tenners

I remember back in the 80s when I was a kid we were house hunting for a couple of years but never actually moved. Anyway. One house we went to look at was a joint viewing with another potential buyer - guy in his early 20s. At the end of the viewing he approached the estate agent and said 'Ok, so do I just pay you now?'. He had the asking price for a 4 bed family house in cash in a carrier bag!. His parents had died and that was his inheritance. Poor naive guy just expected he was supposed to hand over the cash and get the keys there and then.

For a private customer, I’d imagine 50k would trigger lots of questions, with the funds not available until the bank was satisfied as to the source.

They are suspicious of the anomaly.

@theotherjonv
Full Member
Agree with the ‘not as long as it takes find a branch’

Got a problem with my son’s CTF account, coming up to majority in a month or so and account is in old name. Suggested I should ‘pop into a branch with documents’ – nearest one from Guildford is either Ealing or Croydon! It’s Britannia, part of Co-Op FFS, not a small one.

Oh, and they’re not open at the weekend. So, pop in on a workday, over an hour away…..

Yep, we'd have to go from Rochester in Kent to Croydon for our "local" Co-op branch. 😑

You could always bank with HSBC. They don’t seem to care about suspicious transactions.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68138476

.

A builder mate found a bunch of biscuit tins full of cash under the floorboards of a house he was working on.

That sparked off many conversations on exactly this topic..

Problem could also be old out of date notes.

The cash in this case originally belonged to the former owner (his estate actually) of the house and passed to the new owner on completion of the sale.. I guess they will be able to afford the roof that was out of budget after all..

It was enough to buy a new Lambo as far as I know.

I’m a coop customer – live in Scotland – they’ve only had one branch in Scotland for at least the last 20 years. That said I’ve not had reason to visit it for at least 15 years.

I'd have thought the situation we're in (TG Identity change) could have been done by phone or at least recorded by phone and then followed up by scans or certified hard copies of the relevant docs. But the customer service I got when I phoned was so unutterably bad and frankly -uncaring, leading to the 'can you both pop in to a branch'.

No, it's not the kind of conversation that you can have with my son, that's why I need it sorted before he's 18 while I am still a signatory on his account. If it goes beyond 18 and he's still deadnamed and misgendered on his account and I'm removed as the signatory and they have to have that conversation with him directly will be 10x trickier.

I think we have a path forward, but if they reject the docs we send then I will be putting a formal complaint into the ombudsman.

A friend once walked into a lecture at uni with the previous nights club takings (several grand), sat down next to a girl and made an indecent proposal, she said yes, he opened the bag.

So I guess it depends on what you expect the chat to be?

(They didn't actually go though with it, and he walked it to the bank later that day)

Have money laundering checks changed over the past 8 years (UK wide or Scotland)? We're in the process of moving house and our solicitor has been going over our source of funds with a very fine comb. We had nothing like this when we bought before. So either something has changed or our previous solicitor overlooked a lot!

I’m guessing yes, purely for money laundering I suspect.

They would ask a few basic questions and then possibly file a Money Laundering Report after they have accepted it in. As long as you go to your local branch. have an active account with them with decent history and answer honestly and clearly you won't have any issues on the day. The deposit may well be uncleared while background checks are run etc but on the whole there shouldn't be any issues. It's always best to give the branch notice of the deposit too as they may have issues with storing that large amount for a few days, it isn't uncommon for smaller branches to have a rather low limit on what they can keep on site! The branch may well ask you to bring it in on a specific day and time, usually a few hours before their Cash Delivery as they can then get it offsite quickly. It's actually not as uncommon an occurrence as you may think!

When we bought our house 10y ago the sol asked where the money came from. I just showed a payslip and said X amount times Y months equals Z. Which was a load of bollocks really as the money could just as easily have been the proceeds of the massive drug deal I had completed the month before.

40y ago FiL bought a house in USA with a briefcase full of cash. But banking over there is primitive even now, back then it was basically prehistoric.

Have money laundering checks changed over the past 8 years (UK wide or Scotland)?

Yeah they've got ridiculous. I supplied a flow chart showing how the money got to the various accounts we were using as I got fed up of all the questions! Took a fair bit of working out.

Have money laundering checks changed over the past 8 years (UK wide or Scotland)? We’re in the process of moving house and our solicitor has been going over our source of funds with a very fine comb. We had nothing like this when we bought before.

I moved house 18 months ago and only had to show that the funds had been in my possession for a while rather than miraculously appeared days before the purchase. What might have changed in the shorter term is the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctioning of the Russian money that has being fuelling the property market in the Uk - and having to make sure third parties aren't being used by sanctioned individuals as a means to move money about.

Most I ever banked was about £7k which was all the entry money for an enter on the day, cash only cyclo-cross race I organised.  I suspect the friendly 'Wow where did all this cash come from?' question wasn't just friendly cashier chit-chat, but they took it.

This was 2018 and I suspect rules are much tighter these days.

I withdrew £1500 from my own account in cash in a HSBC bank that was convenient for my working day a few years back. I had to have a code word, and the teller (the branch dogs-body by the look of him) asked me what is for, and being annoyed by the whole rigmarole I said "Coke and Hookers, obvs" in a jokey mind your own business sort of way, and he actually hesitated to give me the cash.

I took pity on him and said it was a bike I was buying and the relived look on is face was almost sweet. He was clearly a moron though.

Possibly. Suspicious financial transactions are supposed to be reported, though I’m not sure what the mechanism is, presumably triaged by someone before going to Police or HMRC.

The very short answer is unusual activity report raised by employee or Transaction Monitoring solution picks up patterns (rapid movement of funds, large value transactions and lots of other scenarios). Alerts worked by TM teams and if they have suspicion MLRO will raise a Suspicious Activity Report to the NCA.  Customer may then be exited depending upon bank risk appetite. HMRC do get a feed but it’s for tax reporting purposes not for AML.

For cash it is something like anything over £5,000 would need proof of the source of the funds
For Bank Transfers I think it is about £20,000.

My wife got about £25K when her mother died and when it landed in our account a lady rang to ask where it was from. When my wife explained it was inheritance from her mother dying the lady said "You lucky thing, I will clear the funds now". Somehow, telling my grieving wife how lucky she was because her Mum dies seemed sadly inappropriate.

I withdrew £1500 from my own account in cash in a HSBC bank that was convenient for my working day a few years back. I had to have a code word, and the teller (the branch dogs-body by the look of him) asked me what is for, and being annoyed by the whole rigmarole I said “Coke and Hookers, obvs” in a jokey mind your own business sort of way, and he actually hesitated to give me the cash.

I took pity on him and said it was a bike I was buying and the relived look on is face was almost sweet. He was clearly a moron though.

Theres something important happening when bank staff ask you about cash when you're withdrawing large sums, it's part of their training. People who are being pressured, coerced or defrauded are often in a state of denial, fraudsters use embarrassment and time pressure to prevent their victims having the time to think about whats happening to them. Just saying out loud what you are withdrawing the money for seems to be a very effective way break the spell. So you know - just doing it for your benefit and protecttion but **** em they're clearly idiots even if you don't know what the conversation was really about. 🙂

I was warned for paying in £4K cash from one bank to another just across the street

intrigued as to why you did this and not a bank transfer…? I’d warn you if I knew there was a much better/faster/cheaper/secure way of doing it!

Friend of mines grandad died and they found about £90k of cash in his house.  The three sons split it equally. One went off and fed his share through the cash deposit machine and almost immediately had the bank on the phone asking all kinds of awkward questions.

And did he say "I stole it from the estate of a dead man"?

Yes they (government using private sector agents) have made it harder and harder to move or spend large amounts of money (not even that large anymore) in the UK and EU as a whole. I can't remember the exact dates as it is quietly done via financial legislation/regulations. Your average member of the public only notices it when moving house or some other larger transaction. Some people rarely come in to contact with it so effectively don't know about it!

The principle of rolling out policing via the private sector has been grabbed with both hands by UK government (why do you think they are so keen on privatisation across all sectors) because it costs next to nothing to bring in legislation/regulations and get the private sector to implement it! They have got nothing to lose. The private sector agent gets the majority of the blame for the inconvenience involved, in what is increasingly interfering with legitimate day-to-day life. You see it everywhere from rubbish tips, telecoms to basic ID/licence documents.

The best part about it is the two tier system allows rich people and some dual nationality individuals to opt out of the majority of vetting and hassle by conducting their dealings off-shore in lesser regulated environments.