Bank of America Delays BullionValut Deposits

April 6th, 2007

In Money: Going Tactical, I discussed how I wanted to immediately move some of our money into gold using the BullionVault system. I did, indeed, try to move some money to BullionVault. I used the electronic payment option for customers with U.S. bank accounts and followed BullionValut’s instructions exactly. Since I haven’t used BullionVault before, I decided to try it out by moving a small amount of money at first.

I’m a Bank of America customer and BullionVault uses Bank of America to receive funds from clients with U.S. bank accounts. If you were to use BofA’s system to pay anyone, a slow payment would take four days. I’ve never had it take longer than that. It has been a week since I made the payment to BullionVault, and Bank of America finally said that it was complete on April 3rd.

The money STILL hasn’t shown up in BullionVault.

I emailed BullionVault:

I should be showing a deposit of US$ to BullionVault user account [DELETED]. Do you know what the story is with this?

I sent this payment several days ago, and my bank only indicated that it was delivered to BullionVault’s Bank of America account on 3 April.

Transaction Description: BANK OF AMERICA, N.A. Bill Payment
Date: 04/03/2007
Reference Number: [DELETED]
Amount: $[DELETED]

I’m a Bank of America customer so I didn’t expect delays like this.

Thanks,
Kevin Flaherty

BullionVault promptly wrote back:

Dear Mr Flaherty,

Thank you for your email.

I can see your deposit pending on our Bank of America system – it should clear in the afternoon of the next working day (this will now be Tuesday 10th April, as we have Easter bank holiday Friday and Monday).

We have complained to BOA about these delays, but it seems they process these particular payments manually. We are currently looking into ways to improve this system.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if I can help in any way.

Regards

I must say, even I wasn’t paranoid enough on this. I expected the transaction to simply be noted in some Homeland Security database. Obviously, it’s all being archived in some crypt, forever. But held up and an inspected for manual processing? Again, even I wasn’t paranoid enough.

There is obviously a national security component to this type of transaction. While Bank of America processes millions of transactions per day in an automated manner, moving a few hundred dollars into a physical gold trading account requires manual processing… If you are inside the U.S., or have assets there, this type of nonsense represents a clear and present danger to you and your money. Only criminal regimes behave like this.

If this is happening now, what will be your chances of getting money out of that thing in the wake of a crisis? It’s like someone said it a comment on the post, “Zürich seems like a long swim to get your assets.”

Before even mentioning BullionVault, I warned people to TAKE PHYSICAL POSSESSION OF THE STUFF. Pay cash for it at a coin shop. The only reason I didn’t take my own advice is because New Zealand has less than a thriving precious metals market. However, that wasn’t a good enough excuse to break my own rule.

I honestly feel that BullionVault is a first class operation and that they are sincerely doing their best. I cannot, however, recommend this service for U.S. bank account holders, unless you are prepared to physically travel to your Brinks vault of choice to recover your gold in the event that the U.S. government bans gold ownership again, (BullionVault explicitly allows this in case the regime in your banking country turns overtly criminal). The U.S. has gone too far down the path of fascism for a service like this to be viable for Americans. If you have a bank account in a free country, BullionVault might be ok, if you’re willing to pay the FOREX fees. I wouldn’t, however, recommend it for U.S. bank account holders, since the Bank of America branch of the Department of Homeland Security is manually inspecting each transaction and could easily decide, at some point, to put a stop to this.

This post is actually an update to Money: Going Tactical. Please post comments there.

Posted in Dictatorship, Economy, Surveillance | Top Of Page

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