A Change of Address Led to Our Wise Accounts Being Shut Down
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A business owner shares their frustrating experience with Wise, a financial technology company, after their account was shut down due to a change of address, sparking a heated discussion about the company's customer support and regulatory compliance.
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They've probably forgotten to rotate web server logs.
I once had to do terrible things to make a WordPress blog work under massive load. Actually not that terrible, I just did some manual caching; grabbed the html, saved it as index.html and made sure the webserver served that (if present) rather than WordPress for the front page, and approximately nobody clicked past the front page (I could have cached some of the article links too)
Thankfully, a little while later, I had a good reason to write a rage fueled just barely dynamic replacement of WordPress that met our exact needs with data stored as files. Not as fast as static files, but page generation in < 10 ms (IIRC) is good enough most days. Sadly, I think that blog moved to something slow again, but I no longer support it.
Also. Well done wise.com. Only having customers who use Wordpress means no vitality on people posting hate for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscaDkzHqek
They moved offices, informed wise of a change of address. Wise asked for proof of address. They sent a phone bill. Wise rejected it because the terminology of bills in New Zealand is different to the US (i.e. here bills are usually labelled Tax invoice rather than Bill). Wise support agent also made a barmey suggestion on how to get around it that they didn't follow. Another Wise agent called them back agreeing that the document should be accepted and resubmitted on their behalf. Later the document was rejected again and then their account was closed without any further communication from Wise. Later the author's personal wise account was closed just for being associated with the company.
Until it isn’t.
This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.
And all we did? We updated our address.
A Routine Change Turned Nightmare Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.
Fair enough – we had no problem with that.
Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:
Correct entity name Correct physical street address Even detailed our fibre connection at the new premises So we uploaded it – and assumed that would be the end of it.
We were so wrong.
The Call That Made No Sense Days later, we received an email: our document was rejected.
No clear reason. So, I called Wise and explained the situation to the customer service representative.
Her response left me stunned.
“The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill.”
Wait… what?
I paused, trying to process this. I politely explained that in New Zealand, a “tax invoice” is a legal form of a bill – even down to the name “tax invoice” being a legal requirement by IRD, and that’s how telecommunications companies issue invoices here. But she refused to accept it.
“It needs to say Telecommunications Bill at the top,” she insisted.
“A tax invoice isn’t acceptable.”
This is simply not true, and completely out of touch with New Zealand’s business documentation standards. The rep wouldn’t budge.
The “Solution” That Was Beyond Belief Still trying to find a solution, I asked: what do you recommend I do then?
Her answer?
“You should find a local shared workspace, lease a desk under your company name, change your registered office to that address, and use that lease document to verify your address with us.”
Yes, you read that right.
Wise’s advice was to artificially lease a desk we didn’t need, change our registered address, and use that document – just to verify an address we actually operate from.
I asked to speak to a manager. That request was refused. She told me, flatly:
“I am providing you with the correct information.”
A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
A Glimmer of Hope – Then The Hammer Falls Later that day, I received a call back from Wise – not from a manager (because apparently, Wise doesn’t have managers), but from a more “senior” representative.
This rep was more empathetic and agreed the document should have been acceptable. She escalated the issue, resubmitted the document herself, and said she’d personally follow up if it was rejected again.
Progress, I thought.
Until the next morning.
“We’ve Restricted Your Account” I woke to an email with a stunning subject line:
“We’ve restricted your account”
Just like that, our entire business account was locked. No warning. No reason. No discussion.
We could no longer send or receive money, use our Wise cards, or even contact support. The email stated:
“Due to our current risk policies, your account will be closed in a few months. You will not be able to use support channels.”
Even worse? My personal Wise account was locked too. The same personal account which did have its address fully verified, by a rates invoice for my personal address.
Both had funds inside.
I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies
Edit: Someone posted a copy of the article below, and it seems to be a similar issue with no satisfactory resolution.
After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".
When I said Apple I was referring to this part
Wonder if the same logic can be applicable to Wise.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
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.
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.
- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff
- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances
There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward
Combine that with the absence of any built-in user verification (some national schemes have a PIN code, but the track record of that isn't great), and it becomes clear why these documents don't fully solve the problem of strong identity verification.
There is a DataMatrix barcode containing the same data plus a digital signature from the government. The Wikipedia page for this specific barcode happens to show the back of the French national ID card as its example:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D-Doc
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
For other things there are notaries public.
Most branch offices have been closed. The bigger part of the remaining ones are appointment only and getting an appointment can take weeks.
Very few offer cash and similar day to day services without appointment, but only very short hours. People who cannot use cards or the internet will queue in the street.
So like the modern challengers, traditional banks just offer no customer service deserving the name.
Seems like you're back to square one: Having to trust a scan of an authentic document.
I wish we could as a society move on from rituals paying tribute to what used to be an authentication method, towards one that actually constitutes one today.
Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.
Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.
I agree in the sense of FDIC insurance and being nominally operating under the banking regulatory system - but those typically offer exactly zero protection to a whole category of not-crimes.
A bank can decide you are suspicious and simply freeze your accounts indefinitely - and stonewall you at the customer service level. It’s not like they are required by any law to respond to you or anything like that.
There is likely more recourse if you have enough funds worth perusing legal action to its final conclusion - if you win then you can be more assured the bank will exist six years later when your judgement finally hits. Enjoy paying those legal bills though.
Having witnessed this happen and seen six figure losses due to absolutely zero crime being committed, I basically operate under the mental model that any money within a bank or financial institution is their money and not yours.
A lot of banks are now fintechs - no branches, everything in an app, with a website if you are lucky. The rest would like to be like them to cut costs.
Wise is straightforward in the UK, where it is regulated by the same regulator as banks but subject to different rules (the big difference being customer fund ringfencing rather than a deposit guarantee). It varies in other countries but is locally regulated in a good many.
Reputable financial businesses follow regulations in countries in which they do not operate (e.g. by not opening accounts in countries where they are not authorised).
I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.
So, from an ML perspective you want to maximize recall, precision be damned.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YS8FLnSz2eP-nXp7FJR7Gsef...
And does this seem like AI automation gone mad?
As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.
https://www.vetta.online/
https://aorangieftpos.nz/
https://www.reliance.net.nz/
Business networking, local ISP, card payment solutions, basically. Given the blog posts about cPanel and Outlook, it tracks.
I note that the blogger lives in a small town in the South Island, so likely is focused on the local market.
I checked the DNS records, then the Companies Office register of all companies the blogger is a director and/or shareholder of.
And it's his personal blog considering it's on the domain name of <first-name>.<country-code>.
Not sure why you're so certain that it must be a dubious company.
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.
If they make a mistake they say... "your activities exceed our risk tolerance". It's legal boilerplate that covers all possible situations.
NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.
Yeah, if the banks could provide a service similar to Wise I'd happily use a bank.
My bank wanted ~$800/mo in foreign exchange fees for what I'm doing. Wise charges me ~$100/mo. That's, what, 700% more fees? I'm saving $8.5k/yr.
Even if Wise imploded tomorrow and I lost the cash I have in there I'm pretty sure after this long I'm still ahead versus having used my bank all along.
And there are a lot of value-adds on top.
I can get a Visa card that lets me pay directly in the foreign currency instead of paying the exchange fee twice. This was a whole separate expensive/specialty product from my bank.
I can send electronic transfers (through Canada's Interac e-Transfer service) that exceed what a local bank will provide even to my business account and completely avoid the need for additional services/hacks/fees/etc. This is, apparently, "impossible and not supported by Interac" according to multiple banks I've talked to, the business rep, etc.
Long story short... I agree. Wise only exists because banks are kinda terrible at this. If the banks sucked less, few people would bother with the friction of the additional account.
After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.
Also, any suggestions on reasonably secure bank accounts one can hold without citizenship / residency? Swiss?
Bitcoin doesn't have a blacklist functionality and you can use lightning for full anonymity.
Huh that's a pretty interesting idea. I guess the downside is you need enough margin to cover the short.
For personal foreign currency transactions, usually whilst travelling, I've used Revolut for years without issue.
However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.
I have and never will forgive them for this.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
Justice is more than just following laws.
In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.
Realistically it is way more nuanced than that. Its a juvenile worldview to think in black and white.
Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side. After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all (albeit as any force causing many to suffer, it's hard to justify it).
The bottomline is - reality is way more nuanced than just black and white.
This is a Russian narrative.
> After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all
This also is a Russian narrative.
It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.
Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.
It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.
Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.
There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".
Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.
What is the "russian narrative"? Whats is this made up definition?
> Putin is a dictator.
Based on what?
> Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out
I don't think Russia is living in fear, neither I should be speaking out as I am not in any way related to it.
> It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine
Doubt this is true.
> Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery
Yea, all presidents/PMs were "his men". If this is not propaganda what you are desperately trying to do (and you do it quite poorly I must admit), then I don't know what propaganda is.
> Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom
Thats why ukraine sold everything it had, including it's rare minerals for years to west :) We certainly have different definitions of freedom.
> Putin wants to possess Ukraine,
There is no proof for that. What "posess" means?
Justice also isn't what you feel justice is.
The whole point of laws is to have a set of definitions and do judgements upon.
> buys western banks to do it's money laundering through
Western banks do enough money laundering even without changing owners to beneficiaries from Russia.
Transfers to other accounts were still possible.
Kyiv Independent, who are pretty good at this and are on the spot, do not report large scale or significant military corruption. They have found and report on pretty corruption (individuals selling personal weapons). I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.
> I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.
That's funny :)
Can you provide any sources for this?
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
Thats common knowledge for everyone even tangentially related to finance industry and likely for anyone who ever did international business with cross border payments . Not sure what kind of "sources" you expect to see here.
> Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade
Perhaps for it's own populace, but not for it's rulers and those who they work with.
The fact is that there are no proofs that any money donated by EU, US or other donors for Ukraine was misused.
I’ll leave your imagination to judge why the most powerful propaganda machine in the world tries to claim otherwise to stop such aid.
1.2.3 Other restricted activities c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services. Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
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/...
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