Withdrawing large amounts of cash from foreign bank account

[Mr Doricar]

[Samurai_Jerk]

Could anyone at home transfer money from their bank account to yours in Japan and you could just write them a check to pay them back?

[oyajikun]

Could anyone at home transfer money from their bank account to yours in Japan and you could just write them a check to pay them back?

I don't think it would reach before the weekend. From my experience, most international transfers take at least 1 week to go though, sometimes up to 2 weeks.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I don't think it would reach before the weekend. From my experience, most international transfers take at least 1 week to go though, sometimes up to 2 weeks.

I don't know about coming, but going (from here to the US using Lloyds) it usually only takes me about 2 days.

But, yeah, Dori is probably fucked.

[Cyka UchuuJin]

i've taken 200.000\ in a cash advance off my mastercard at citibank.

the only other thing i can think of is ask a friend to loan you the money and initiate a transfer to their japanese account now. it shouldn't take that long, i transfer my rent every month from my danish bank account to the japanese landlord's at UFJ and it takes 2-3 days.

[omae mona]

I don't think it would reach before the weekend. From my experience, most international transfers take at least 1 week to go though, sometimes up to 2 weeks.

Wow. My transfers from the U.S. have typically arrived in 12 hours or less, and I think even that delay is due to the business hours of the bank. If I ask my US bank to wire money at midnight here in Japan, it normally is available in my Japanese account at 10AM, when the bank opens. Maybe this is because my US bank is large and doesn't need to use intermediaries, but I'm not sure.

[oyajikun]

Everytime I have money transferred from the UK to my Shinsei account it has taken a very long time. It has always made me wonder why they call them swift codes..

I will have to ask Shinsei why other banks can recieve money so quickly.

[FG Lurker]

How long a wire will take to arrive depends on several factors:

1) How efficient the sending bank is. Sometimes if you send from a small branch it has to go through one or two internal steps before the wire is actually sent.

2) How directly connected the sending bank and receiving bank are. Sometimes it has to go through an intermediary bank which will charge $20 or so and add an extra day.

3) How efficient the receiving bank is. Some banks deposit smaller wires (< 5mil yen in Japan) directly but others actually review all wires manually first.

I can send from my US bank account to Citibank in Japan within a matter of hours. If I send the wire before about 2am Japan time it is in my account by 9am the next (same) day. In other words, if I send it at 2am it is there 7 hours later when the Citibank Japan opens.

On the other hand I have had people send me wires that have taken 7 days to arrive.

Also some banks charge to receive wires! Citibank Japan and Shinsei do not but many (all?) of the larger banks do. I had UFJ charge me 5000yen once! That was the first and last time I used them to receive money!

[Charles]

In the US banking system, money transfers over $5000 are typically held for up to a week while they are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database. Apparently anyone who wants to do a large rush transaction is assumed to be a terrorist or laundering money for terrorists. The Bush Administration is working to make the limit $1000. I found this out when I tried to do a wire transfer from my bank to pay for a new computer, it got held for 10 days.
It is likely there are similar secret provisions at UK banks.

[omae mona]

In the US banking system, money transfers over $5000 are typically held for up to a week while they are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database. Apparently anyone who wants to do a large rush transaction is assumed to be a terrorist or laundering money for terrorists. The Bush Administration is working to make the limit $1000. I found this out when I tried to do a wire transfer from my bank to pay for a new computer, it got held for 10 days.
It is likely there are similar secret provisions at UK banks.

Charles, if by "typically" you mean "more often than not", I will have to say this does not appear to be true. Not unless I've somehow been added to an exemption list. I move money around like crazy between accounts domestically in the US and also between the US and Japan. I do it frequently and I've been doing it for years, and I've never had a wire transfer arrive later than the next business day.

[Charles]

Charles, if by "typically" you mean "more often than not", I will have to say this does not appear to be true. Not unless I've somehow been added to an exemption list. I move money around like crazy between accounts domestically in the US and also between the US and Japan. I do it frequently and I've been doing it for years, and I've never had a wire transfer arrive later than the next business day.

I suppose it depends on the circumstances. People like me that hardly ever move large sums of money may be subject to more scrutiny than people with a long history of such transactions. But in any case, all large transactions are in the DHS database, and used for data mining.

[pheyton]

[FG Lurker]

In the US banking system, money transfers over $5000 are typically held for up to a week while they are checked against a Department of Homeland Security database.

Bullshit.

I regularly receive wires over $5k (several times a month) and have never had a problem with wires from the UK or US taking more than a couple of days.

[Hamaki]

sounds like its time to visit a loan shark, i mean loan company.

[Charles]

OK, I did a little more research and oh are banking regulations a mess when the Patriot Act amended the Money Laundering Control Act and the Bank Secrecy Act. The Wikipedia entry under the Patriot Act is rather interesting, but it will lead you in circles. With some outside sources, this is how I understand it (and my head is spinning).

It has long been known that financial institutions are required to file a Currency Transaction Report to the IRS on transactions over $10,000, as required by the MLCA. They were also required to implement measures to prevent the usual skirting of the law (like transfers of $9,999). It appears that DHS used the Patriot Act to bend this regulation and decree that CTRs should be filed with the IRS on amounts over $5000. The CTRs were all used for DHS data mining, to look for patterns that would indicate money laundering and sending it to terrorist organizations.
So there's this list of proscribed organizations that any money transfer will be frozen (and the source account as well). The feds will shut down any account that interacts with these "known terrorist groups." But there is of course a secret list of suspects constantly being monitored. This is tracked by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. They're primarily targeting foreign money transfers, looking for another bin Laden pushing a few hundred thou to conspirators in the US. But it looks like the banks buried the OFAC in data, there were so many CTRs filed in 2002 that they were overwhelmed with data and could not even find a needle in a haystack, let alone money funneling to terrorists.
Incidentally, IIRC, this was about when I bought my new > $5k Mac system in 2002 and had the money transfer held for 10 days. Conservative dumbfuck bankers here in Iowa had officers that loved to file CTRs with the Feds. Banks would play it safe, it was just a year after 9/11 and new regulations were being implemented, the banks reported everything, even if it wasn't required, just to play safe. In my case, it wasn't even a foreign transaction, maybe they thought I was laundering $5k for bin Laden, ordering a computer for him, so I could send it FedEx to Afghanistan. Sheesh. It's my own cash I should be able to spend it as I want. But they wanted to check every CTR against the list, so it took me a few days on hold before my $5k was released.
Well anyway, it looks like the banks pulled back on filing so many CTRs, it was too much data to analyze. I couldn't find hard data on the exact monetary limit that flags a CTR today, but that may not be the only criterion. You could still get caught in a hold if your bank hasn't been cleared as safe by the OFAC, or if it's a large one-time transaction, or at any other damn whim of some Federal Agent (or someone who wants to suck up to the Feds). But they're not really looking for terrorist funding sources in Japan, mostly the Middle East, so it looks like US-Japan-Canada transactions aren't under as much scrutiny. I don't want to do too much searching to investigate the patterns of Asian financial transactions being tracked by the Feds, that is a Google search pattern I don't want to leave behind. But I suspect they are tracking SE Asian transactions closely in some areas (that I presume you guys are smart enough to stay well away from).

[wuchan]

the way around this is to go there, withdraw cash and bring it back in your pocket. You can have $10k on you and the customs officials can not question you. But if you have $10,000.01 they can hold it for investigation and hit you with tax. This gets you out of paying transfer fees too.