Friday, December 30, 2011

Transferring savings from one country to another is delicate

I finally decided to close my American banking account since I haven't used it for some time, and especially because I don't live in California anymore.
I will miss having a totally free of charge double-account, which I not only opened for free, I also received $40 to go from the bank. I will also miss the $280 reward they gave me after one year of "fidelity".
Today the AUD-EUR rate is pretty bad, then I wanted to keep my Euros for some more time, this might be tricky but I will come back to this a bit later.
The USD-AUD rate was instead pretty good, then it was the right time to transfer my savings from American dollars, onto my brand new Australian account.
To do that, I had to go through a number of security features to let me transfer the sum from one account to another. Such things like passwords, security codes sent via mobile, credit card check, and even stored image recognition.
Well, that was apparently not enough as it appeared that moving savings from USA to Australia, perhaps operated by an Italian, turns on security procedures and sends off an alert: I had then my account and credit card blocked, as well as the transfer canceled because reckoned fraud.
I appreciated their attempt to protect my savings. It was not big deal though, I only had to call my bank and state that the transfer was actually operated by me, not someone else.

It is funny if we consider the 19-hours difference, when I called it was 3pm in California, and I said: "Hi, I am calling from the future to save my money, here it is 10am of tomorrow!".

No comments:

Post a Comment