Bank worker has just lectured me on my spending

Wall I will say is: don’t make a habit of spending like that.
I don’t know if you have a mortgage, if not one day you probably will apply for one.
They will view that spending as irresponsible,

This is what a lot of the banks are like in France and they absolutely go through your spending with a fine-tooth comb when you try to get a mortgage! We have started getting cash out again so we are not getting judged for our takeaway pizza habit.

I had a similar incident. Opened a monzo account and never looked back. No issues since

Was the lecture intended to be education on how not to look like a criminal in the future? Was it factual? And was it her tone/manner that you found rude/ patronising/ condescending rather than the content?

Or was the nature of the lecture only a judgment of how you choose to spend your own money?

Well luckily that’s not what happened here - explaining why a card may have been stopped when a customer phones to ask is not the same as a bank assistant phoning a customer and tipping them off.

You saved £1200 for a shopping day and spent it online??

Worst. Shopping Day. Ever.

I had a similar experience with NatWest when I was a student in Paris!

Interesting.

Just wait until we end up with CDBC and "social credit" type monitoring.....

If people dont want to be asked for this they should keep their money under their mattress. If the bank give them the money regardless, who will the customer be blaming and expecting the money back from if they are being scammed? The bank. Better a few extra checks than losing out to a scam. If its nothing untoward customers shouldnt have an issue with providing proof. People are sometimes just too stubborn and think the big bad banks are out to get them.

The worker warned you it looks like money laundering. They are doing you a favour as banks can simply close your account if they suspect this. There is no right to appeal and opening another account us possible but difficult.

How is saving up for something, then buying it irresponsible? Surely irresponsible is putting it on credit card or using an overdraft.

If you've transferred money from savings into a current account and made online purchases from established retailers, there's no suggestion of money laundering whatsoever! There will also be clear evidence of you having saved that money legitimately. PLEASE make a formal complaint to your bank. All calls are recorded so they can listen to the conversation in question. It is quite normal to stop cards/accounts if there is a sudden or unusual uptick in spending. It's just fraud prevention. But usually, you just have to log into your account online or call them and problem solved. Whichever idiot you spoke to needs setting straight. You are also due a formal apology. Quite often, they'll give you a bit of money as a good will gesture. It happened to me when I was making a large purchase in IKEA a while ago. RBS gave me £50 for the inconvenience after I complained.

Its formal complaint time.
How is spending a grand of your own money money laundering. WTF!!!!

I had similar in branch once. I complained. I got a letter and £130 for my irritation. Complain.

She’s talking bollocks, lenders don’t get to see your transactions on your account, especially when it’s your cash, they can see how much credit you have available and have used on credit cards and loans. You can spend your own money any way you choose, spending £1,200 shopping online doesn’t look like money laundering anyway, unless you were doing it regularly and returning everything for refunds.

She shouldn’t be saying that. If you work in AML you can’t tip of customers off if you find their behaviour suspicious. Lending and money laundering are completely separate things anyway. Complain, she needs training!

Is that really what they said though, or have you misinterpreted it? They are right to flag up unusual spending patterns but obviously not to judge you. I think they would/might have recordings so you could query it.

Yanbu, how weird of her X

The bank must have thought it could potentially be criminal activity though. Obviously you know you aren't one! But the bank doesn't. They see account number bla bla has an unprecedented large deposit from another account followed by a flurry of smaller spending at various different shops. That does look like potential money laundering.

Bank worker hears your explanation and thinks you're daft for your behaviour. It's obvious to her it will flag up as suspicious. She forgets that not everyone has her training and is condescending to you. She could do with a refresh on customer service skills

It's £1200 - hardly irresponsible. There's no evidence that the OP will ever need a mortgage or any other form of borrowing. They can do what they like with their own money.

Yup, this ^.
banks have to confirm spending and warn customers about fraudulent patterns

I was looking for a new violin.

I had saved tens of thousands and been in the market for about two years, looking for the right one. Found it. But it was £6k more than I had saved.

I decided that it was really "the one" and I didn't want to let it go. Decided to put the extra £6k on a credit card and pay it off over the next year.

Obviously the card was declined, because to fair, it was unusual activity!

Phoned up to sort it out, and declare that yes this attempt was me etc etc - only to find myself pleading with the bank worker to allow me to make the transaction because in her words "£6,000 is a lot of money for a violin".

And the rest love.....! None of her fucking business.

ETA - it was from a very large, very reputable London based dealer well known to all of the music colleges and a big international dealer of fine instruments. Not like it was dodgy "barry-sells-violins-ltd"

I don't.

Some years ago, I had a card stopped for "unusual activity".

We'd just had an extension built so that we could move in my mother. We'd decided to have our kitchen done at the same time.

This was 2013 and I didn't have the means to make electronic payments at that time. (I do now.)

The main contractor was paid by cheque from my main account, but I had other bills to pay too and drew £200 from my emergency account from an ATM two days in a row. DH had had a stroke on the last day of the build, so it wasn't possible to withdraw any money from his account.

When I tried to make a third withdrawal on a subsequent day, my card was blocked.

I then had a real pantomime trying to unblock the card, thanks to the bank's automated service: "Is your year of birth: 1, 1914; 2, 1918; 3, 1901?"

When I finally got through to a real person, I was told that nothing could be done until I went into the branch on Monday.

On Monday, a cashier told me that my theory that a random date had been fed into the computer when the records were digitised was simply not possible.

She got the bank manager.

Manager: Ah yes. I was here when they digitised everything. The then manager told us that if we didn't have a date of birth for a customer, we should just type in "01/01/01".