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In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions.
Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry.
That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts were flagged for “sanctions violations” because his students wrote “Persian classes” in their Venmo memos. There’s also the story about the naked yoga practitioners who lost their payment processor for 60 days, forced to rebuild a subscriber list from scratch. And we can’t forget the San Diego cannabis journalist cut off from Stripe—and from a paid Substack newsletter—because of the payment platform’s rules that prohibit the promotion of the sale of cannabis.
This is “financial censorship,” and it often happens when a bank, credit card provider, or payment app decides that a customer is too risky to serve. But “risky” doesn’t always mean “illegal,” and when a major financial institution errs towards caution about what a customer is saying, advocating for, representing, or publishing, a lot of innocent people can be hurt in the process.
That’s what the digital rights activist Rainey Reitman learned in writing “Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech.” As Reitman explained about these hugely impactful decisions:
“Even if they are well-intentioned, the financial systems can end up pulling in a lot of people that are not the actual target… Sometimes we talk about this as dolphins in the fishing lines.”
These decisions are difficult to fight, frustratingly opaque, and nearly impossible to reverse. Compounding the problem is that that there aren’t enough alternatives available for the financially censored to easily regain their freedom.
The reality for hundreds of millions of people in this country is that about a dozen companies control all their finances. People mostly bank with Chase, or Bank of America, or Citigroup, or Wells Fargo. They mostly use credit cards assigned by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Capital One. And they mostly send money to one another and to small businesses using services like PayPal, Venmo, Cash app, and Square.
For most people, these companies are supposed to operate in the background of their lives, providing reliable, secure financing to sustain and manage their livelihoods.
In reality, these companies can become quite interested in what you say online, what payments you receive each month, and the locations those payments arrived from.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Reitman—who is also the president and a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—about the real stories of those who have been financially censored, why financial companies cut off customers for legal speech, and how a single company’s decision can create cascading consequences that feel impossible to fight.
“They’d be locked out of Venmo, then they’d be locked out of PayPal—which is connected to Venmo—and then they’d suddenly lose their Chase Bank account. You could see that in a lot of instances, losing one form of access to the financial system, it could result in a pattern where they would be losing access repeatedly.”
Tune in today.
You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.
For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.
Show notes and credits:
Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
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