One of the reasons banks have these restrictions (besides the obvious thing of making it difficult to take large sums of money out because it hurts their business) is to prevent fraud. They want to prevent the case where some criminal gets physical access to my computer, or my login credentials, and drains my account without my knowledge. So they want you to initiate a manual verification that you really do intend to move such a large sum to prevent that fraud.
If you do what I did, you usually get a temporary hold on your account and some very skeptical bank employee calling you to grill you on what you’re doing.
On one hand I get it. For every story like mine, where this is just a temporary frustrating inconvenience, there’s probably a story where grandma lost her life savings after talking to the nice man from Microsoft on the phone. But also they don’t make it clear at all what you are supposed to do as non-criminal to work around their restrictions, which is just bad for customers.
> So they want you to initiate a manual verification that you really do intend to move such a large sum to prevent that fraud.
Yes, it's hilarious.
One of my banks requires me to do the transaction over the phone if it's above a certain limit.
At which point, you talk to someone in a call center, and they proceed to ask you exactly the same information which you needed to introduce in their web interface to make the wire transfer yourself, and nothing else.
This includes giving your web interface credentials over the phone, which could be heard by someone inadvertently or even phished if you happened to have misdialed accidentally. Or stolen by the call center employee.
It's also great fun to have to spell out 20+ account digits, the names of the other people/companies, phone numbers and email addresses to receive confirmations and even a description of the transaction (fortunately I don't always buy sex toys).
Gosh, how I love to spell out all this information, digit by digit, letter by letter, over a phone call! But since it's for my protection it makes it OK, right? Right? Hello?
If you do what I did, you usually get a temporary hold on your account and some very skeptical bank employee calling you to grill you on what you’re doing.
On one hand I get it. For every story like mine, where this is just a temporary frustrating inconvenience, there’s probably a story where grandma lost her life savings after talking to the nice man from Microsoft on the phone. But also they don’t make it clear at all what you are supposed to do as non-criminal to work around their restrictions, which is just bad for customers.