If a person wins a massive lottery prize, in the order of 200 million € or £ or $, and this prize is versed to the person's bank account, how can they avoid that their bank balance is gossipped upon by bank employees to the extent of it known by people outside the bank, in case the person DOES want to keep their own privacy? How can they possibly avoid that, assuming that bank employees will definitely not respect privacy laws?
2 Answers
Most Bank employees can't see that info
In most banks there is a team that is in charge of tracking deposits that reach a threshold, in the case that you define, they need to verify that the money that you deposit in your account is legal.
Depending in the laws in your country the bank will demand for evidence in the regard of from where it came? why do you have it? and what are you going to do with it?
Bank employees don't care
This team see this kind of amounts and even higher all day, every day, and some with really really obvious crimmminal background, they also get lottery winners every month, investors/shells that bring everything to shelter from their home country taxes, etc.
Other point is that the clients info is top secret for most banks employees, and nobody can reach that info without a justification, this means that the few that are granted access to this info are heavly monitored.
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Top secret??? Hardly. By policy they aren't allowed to just snoop around, but the customer service rep sees all my transactions when I call on the phone and discuss a problem with her.– RonJohnJan 16, 2020 at 0:13
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@RonJohn - when I call is a key component in your sentence. In modern banking software, every employee view of personal customer details (PII, transactions, balances) is automatically logged. Just querying someone's name is logged. If an employee had looked at your account for no reason except curiosity (i.e. there wasn't a matching call logged in their phone system showing that you asked for help), their activity would be flagged and/or it would be uncovered in an audit. In the US at least, this type of monitoring is essentially enforced via regulators and external audits.– dwizumJan 16, 2020 at 13:45
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Yes - "top secret" is a little arbitrary. I wanted to comment because I don't think many people understand how tightly monitored the systems in a typical bank are, in terms of employees looking at your personal details.– dwizumJan 16, 2020 at 15:12
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@RonJohn sorry, english isn't my first language maybe the right wording would be "highly confidential", as dwizum commented client information inside a bank its a critical asset and an employee snooping around would mean a full scale investigation with law enforcers support if the evidence demand it.– TridamJan 16, 2020 at 17:14
"how can they avoid that their bank balance is gossiped upon by bank employees" -- obviously, he can't. He has no control over what the bank employees may do. But the prize is likely transferred electronically, so no employee would have reason to check the account (such operations are logged and "curiosity" is, understandably, strongly discouraged).
This person might open a secondary account online, request the prize to be transferred to that account, and periodically transfer funds from the prize account to his ordinary account - if the prize account is in a different bank, even if an employee working with the ordinary account got curious, he could not pry into the fund sources' account information as he would have no access. The prize account bank employees would never see the holder and never have reason to check an account they would be unaware of (one doesn't simply run SELECT * FROM accounts ORDER BY amount DESC LIMIT 20 on a bank's servers. The worst that can usually happen is that an employee may access a customer account he knows the number of from the teller station, pretending that the customer is at the desk).
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Any amount of sufficient size to be interesting is going to be flagged for human review, almost certainly (if for no other reason than to check for mistakes), especially for electronic transfers. Using some "new" bank is not helpful, since presumably the other bank would have the same issue. Regular transfers of money in useful quantities is going to get your account flagged_more_, because of anti-money-laundering laws, and laws against "structuring". Jan 10, 2020 at 23:28
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2@Clockwork-Muse: AFAIK structuring is only an issue for US, and there it is only for currency i.e. actual physical cash; you can do electronic transfers or even paper (personal) checks $9999/day all you want. Large and/or frequent transfers might draw a SAR, but I doubt it. Although over $250k/bank doesn't get FDIC insurance. Jan 12, 2020 at 12:40
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@dave_thompson_085: It's not just about detection of money laundering (which involves SARs), the bank will assuredly put human eyes on large transfers to protect themselves against human errors and possible fraud. Jan 13, 2020 at 16:11
assuming that bank employees will definitely not respect privacy laws?- This is a big assumption. You also seem to think privacy is some sort of binary; you have it or you don't, but privacy is a spectrum of sorts (ie, if I'm walking around in public lots of people see my face, and may capture me in a photo, but probably don't know my name). Any large transfers are going to get flagged for review, if for no other reason than to sell some sort of concierge service - and to report to the government for tax reasons. What are you concerned about here?