BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

From mid-2024.

I regard all FinTech-type companies as unreliable, after incredible (in the literal sense of the word) experiences with Revolut (seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned, and that actually happened only after I made a GDPR request, and they got it done - seems its less work for them to close than meet the request) and Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).

By all means have an account with them, but never, ever, ever, rely on it, and plan on the basis that the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone, and that customer support is a defensive shield the company uses to keep customers at arms length.

If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.

> Transferwise (who shortly after the UA war started, blocked donations to the UA State bank military support account - yes, really, if you didn't know).

Oh wow. Well, at least donations to NGOs / individuals seem to work.

Agreed, IBKR are a nice bunch. I wouldn’t rely on them either, but it’s always better to have more options, in case everything else fails. And of course, when banks can block your accounts at any moment just because they don’t like your passport, crypto is king.

Of course who would ever doubt that

All my bank accounts only have money for daily expenses and maybe a little more just in case of emergency. If it's gone, I'll be upset, but not the end of the world. Most of my actual savings are in DeGiro, which AFAIK is okay for EU customers. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

> Transferwise

what was the “incredible experience” with Transferwise?

> the next morning you wake up to find the account, and everything in it, has gone

they’re all protected by the FCA via the FSCS scheme: https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/

> they’re all protected by the FCA via the FSCS scheme

Which would help if Revolut went insolvent, which is not the case here.

Sounds okay-ish? But as they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Up to 100k per bank account is secured by the European central bank though, so for most Europeans, the money cannot just simply disappear and you never get it back. And if you have over 100k per bank account, you probably should look for banks with better insurances anyway.

Ironically crypto is also what helps fund and survive (bypassing sanctions) the warmongers and dictatorships which make banks not like our passports

In the end poor peasants shouting "crypto is king" are the ones owned from both sides. They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros. The peasants transactions are the rounding error but they are the ones who allow to pretend it's "freedom"

I would need to look into this again, but I am not sure this is actually true.

Something like the underlying account(s) used by the FinTech are secured in this way, but your account with the FinTech is not.

This is why Revolut for example have accounts which are something like "vaults", which are in fact accounts which are covered, because they are actual accounts, one per person, with a normal bank.

That sounds incredible, it needs to be checked, about to leave the house so can't right now.

Revolut/Wise etc. make it quite clear they are not "bank accounts", and therefore their accounts don't come with the normal protections associated with bank accounts. I think there is some form of regulatory protection, but it's much less than for banks.

I’m not sure if that’s the case. I mean, crypto is surely used for some transactions, but governments also just pay for stuff openly. EU is still paying Russia for gas, I believe?

> They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros.

For a razor-thin margin, maybe. It’s still the cheapest way to move money out from Russia, meaning it’s not used there to pay taxes (i.e. fund the war!) And the alternatives are using banks or money transfer systems, which I think are more likely to be pro-government than just a bunch of local guys that want to make some cash.

so what's the case?

> all FinTech-type companies as unreliable

Please allow me to disagree (not really but yes). In the same spirit that some (fin-tech) companies prefer to _not_ do business with certain industries (e.g. porn) or countries (e.g. North Korea) for a wide variety of reason, doesn't make them unreliable. Makes them exactly what they are.

I am not trying to equate "access to my money" with "my favourite soft-drink is discontinued" because they have a very different impact to one's life (paying rent/mortgage/bills money vs sugar). I do understand though (I was working in a dairy company many-many years ago), that "we pulled this product because it costs X and makes 2x while product Z makes 5x, so bye-bye". In the same spirit many companies have profit margin requirements and they won't keep 'a service offering' that makes 'just a little'.

I’m actually not sure:

> seven years to get an account closed and the money in it returned

Maybe OP can shed some light on why they wanted it closed. My bet is, it was frozen, and transfers blocked for some reason. Happened to my Revolut (LT) account, too, but I could transfer my money out at least.

Revolut is an actual bank if you’re in the EU! https://help.revolut.com/en-EE/help/accounts/what-does-uk-ba...

Edit: and apparently they’re now setting up a bank in the UK as well: https://help.revolut.com/help/more/legal-topics/is-revolut-a...

Wise is not, and it might be more difficult to get the money out if they are insolvent. For the customers in the EU, they’re a Payment Institution in Belgium: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...

Which is why you also buy a house :D

After working in a couple unicorn FinTechs:

They're just like traditional companies, but with much less oversight, attention to regulation and transparency.

At the beginning there is plenty of support channels, but that's because of marketing and because there's investor money. But as soon as the money gets tight, people start suggesting dark patterns and everything becomes "you must contact us to do X".

Not only that but there is way less auditing, as technical auditors that deal with fintechs aren't really ready to deal with anything made after 1990. That's you, Deloitte.

Also regarding security, what I saw in practice was that everyone has access to absolutely everything and could do anything. Everyone but the lowest support people can transfer money from anywhere to everywhere, change passwords, view and edit personal information, collect private data. Customer personal data is sent around in Excel files in email like it's candy. There was SO MUCH logging that seeing suspicious employee activity was basically impossible without having a complaint from the customer itself and a thorough investigation (which rarely happened).

Also: AI and Data Science are mostly people running one or two queries per week in the production DB, exporting to CSV and calling it a day.

And I don't want to dox myself but: a popular German FinTech with "AI" in its name has way less automation than a 5 person startup. Every single operation is triggered manually and is super error prone. And such operations involve 20, 30 records, when there are 10 million in the database.

Recently there was allegedly a kerfuffle with a german Fintech bank banning hundreds of users because of suspicion that they had gang relations. Well guess why.

> For a razor-thin margin, maybe

facepalm. for the fake aura of legitimacy that keeps the whole charade going.

> but governments also just pay for stuff openly

they should stop doing it, but it doesn't change the fact thay the wins around sanctions for russian gov are incomparable with wins for regular people, and regular people suffer sanctions and all related stuff because of the gov in the tirst place

Not frozen - nothing like that.

Both the email address and phone number I had with the account had gone.

It was impossible to recover the account.

It was also impossible to close the account - until I issued the GDPR request.

With Transferwise, one day I logged in from a new IP address (in Western Europe) and that seemed to trigger a requirement for me to re-upload identity documents.

The web-pages to upload identity documents did not work; the process would get so far, then just stop working.

I contacted Support, Support were unable to grasp the situation, let alone help.

I had 30 days before the account would be terminated for not uploading documents.

A couple of days before that happened, I tried again, and now upload worked.

>If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.

I wish I'd known this four years ago. I had US$2000 to send from US to Canada and the cheapest method (~$50) I found was, to my surprise, to send BTC within Coinbase (the recipient was another Coinbase user).

Perhaps surprisingly, PayPal is a bank too.

> a popular German FinTech with "AI" in its name has way less automation than a 5 person startup.

Maybe their Cobol programmers are too busy writing an all caps function for a month, instead of providing forms to their employees or customers with default values already configured to shorten each process's cycle.