CNBC spoke to a dozen customers caught in the Synapse fintech predicament, people who are owed sums ranging from $7,000 to well over $200,000.
Isn’t that what they signed up for when they put their money in a nonFDIC insured account?
People relied on accounts powered by Synapse for everyday expenses like buying groceries and paying rent, or for saving for major life events like home purchases or surgeries.
Gotta love US healthcare
I’d be broke a long time ago if I lived the US. Good thing I’m French and a surgery for a life threatening condition, plus 4 month of rehabilitation, costed me a whopping 0€.
That’s some kind of communist talk. In the Land of the Free you are your own man. No nanny state telling you what to do. You have options. You can be rich, you can put all your money into a scam bank, which is de facto sanctioned, (and die when they do a rug pull because you no longer have money for life saving, much less preventative care), or you can die. But this was your choice, and you can have a huge truck (N.B. the bank actually owns the truck, but in 5 years you’ll have it paid off).
🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
In reality I left the US years ago and don’t miss it, I do fear for friends though.
America dumb.
I wouldn’t call them dumb. Masochist, maybe, but not dumb.
Risky investment turns out to be risky. No one could have seen that coming.
This isn’t about shareholders being wiped out. It’s about account holders of what they thought were bank accounts losing everything because their accounts were powered on the back end by a company they’d never heard of or directly dealt with.
If you see this as investment, the consider that investors were lied to (the startups claimed to have FDIC coverage) and didn’t have accurate information to assess the risk.
when a bank is described as a “savings startup”, you should run the other way screaming
The government should mandate warning labels on companies like that, maybe “fintech” would be a good word to force them to use, similar to the way large companies have to use the “enterprise” warning label and games companies have to be labelled “triple A” to know their products and services are low quality and have a high risk of failure.
Dont they have to write in the footer WE ARE NOT A BANK
Usually that’s what I look for
Do you not have banking licenses (someone mentioned FDIC)? Over here, that’s how you tell real [regulated and insured] banks from pretend banks.
The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”
At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.
Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.
Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.
Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?
Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.
Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.
The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.
Yes. I guess the problem is that people aren’t reading the small text st the bottom of the website that says they’re not a bank
I like your style
I’m not from the US so unfamiliar with any of this, but having followed the link to the Yotta website from the article, it is a… gambling site? What leap is missing that people would entrust their savings to gambling?
There was no interest on Yotta accounts. Originally, when you signed up, you were given a lottery ticket everyday for every 25$ in the account. There was a lottery everyday where you could win up to 25000. Then they switched to games where you essentially gambled with the tickets that were given based on your amount.
I was once a member but pulled the money when interest rates started to rise. I was lucky.
I’ll also note, when signing up, I was given the impression this FDIC insured.
Why did you think they were FDIC insured?
Because they said they were, or implied it. I would not have opened a savings account had they not been.
In theory, these people’s money isn’t gone, it’s just misplaced into other banks if I understand correctly…and none of these entities want to pay for a full audit because of cost and probably, liability.
The banks that actually hold the money are FDIC insured, but Yotta is not it seems. The way it’s worded it makes it look like Yotta is.
Might as well be a gambling site: It was a startup bank with no Federal backing (FDIC) that appears to have promised greater returns than traditional banks by investing your money and giving you some of the profits back from dividends.
Still, it was a startup that wasn’t fully vested nor backed federally to secure people’s deposits. Sad.
Wow. Stochastic interest payouts. Another lamentable perverted contribution coming from irresponsible MBA schools
The lie was WORSE than that.
A lot of the fintechs invovled actually told people their money was safe, because it was subject to “passthrough FDIC insurance”, because their money was ultimately put in an insured bank, and thus was safe.
Problem is that’s not how it actually worked, so basically everyone was straight up lied to.
Basically the whole thing is that the bank keeps track of who owns which account and how much money they have, so if they go bust, you just have the FDIC come in and use that data and write checks, basically.
Except since they’re disrupting banking, they also decided to just fucking not bother, and so even if there was going to be a payout, nobody has any fucking clue who has how much and in which bank said money was.
Absolute clusterfuck, and about what you’d expect from silly-con valley types.
“Hand us your money and us MBAs promise it’ll eventually get somewhere safe” is not reassuring even before the lie.
I can’t wait until TRUMP Dismantles the Protections that PREVENT this type of thing from Normally Happening!
Except, if we already had protections to prevent this from happening, then it wouldn’t have happened… Or at least the FDIC would have actually stepped in by now to pay everyone back and track down all the funds themselves.
What leads you to believe this?
Republicans deregulate banks every time they get into office.
They are against things like the CFPB but they aren’t getting rid of the FDIC which is the good faith backing of the US banking system. The 1% isn’t so liquid that they wouldn’t lose huge amounts of money with a full scale banking crisis
The fact that every other article about his incoming administration is talking about their desire to dismantle the federal government, maybe.
God damnit, now I want to try to carbonate pasta sauce.
Example #1 is how he’s cozied up to crypto and talked about deregulating it.
People are desperate and Trump is unpredictable. They ‘know’ the Dems aren’t helping them, so Trump might accidentally do it!
I think you need to read it more carefully. He didn’t use a /s tag
In case anyone is unfamiliar, BigMacHole is a joke account.
Thanks, I discarded my sarcasm detector in early 2017
Yotta Savings, the fintech that all these people deposited their money with, first came to my attention through this YouTube video from CoffeeZilla a couple months back, seems Yotta was a huge sponsor of really an astounding amount of YouTube creators, who while hawking Yotta to their subscribers also deposited their own money with Yotta as well. Huge mess.
I am from the US and I have no idea what they are talking about here.
Me either, it sounds like it was a gambling site that encouraged large deposits and offered some sort of benefits for doing so. This seems extremely unethical, and should probably have been illegal based on gambling or banking rules.
Goddam I’m happy to live in a place where these things are well regulated!
This is an absolute horror story, people chose a saving account they thought was super secured, and instead it’s a total scam.deleted by creator
“When she and her husband sold the house last year, they stowed away the proceeds, $282,153.87” Literally the second sentence in the article.
That schoolteachers name? Walter White.
deleted by creator
