Skeptics Stack Exchange
Skeptics Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [banking]

for questions about claims based on banking and banks.

21 questions
84
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1 answer

Did Steve Mnuchin's OneWest Bank foreclose on a 90-year-old woman's house after a 27-cent payment error?

Politico reports: Two years ago, OneWest filed foreclosure papers on the Lakeland, Florida, home of Ossie Lofton, who had taken a reverse mortgage, a loan that supplies cash to elderly homeowners and doesn’t require monthly payments. After…
ff524
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Did only one banker in the US go to prison for the Financial Crisis of 2007-08?

In the movies The Big Short (2015) and Capitalism, a love story (2009), it is claimed that only a single banker, Kareem Serageldin, went to prison for the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, for which many blame the practices of bankers. Big Short…
Quora Feans
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Does the Rothschild family own most central banks?

Someone on my Facebook feed posted a video that stated that the Rothschild family owns all the central banks in the world except in North Korea, Iran, and Cuba. It also claims that in the year 2000 there were four more countries on that list:…
tupto
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Were a large fraction of US Dollars in existence printed since 2020?

For many months now I have heard claims on the internet and radio that some large fraction of USD "in existence" were printed since 2020. The percentage ranges between 40 and 80%. Is it a big deal that 40% of USD was printed in the last 12 months?…
thechimp
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26
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Is money being spent globally being reduced by going cashless?

There is a scenario going around the Internet (Google link showing extent of reach) saying the following (with possible slight variations which I haven't spotted yet)... Why should we pay cash everywhere with banknotes instead of a card? I have a…
Chris Rogers
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24
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1 answer

Are criminals wandering around with contactless POS sale terminals helping themselves to small amounts from people's RFID credit/debit cards?

There is quite a lot of good coverage on Skeptics already of the security of RFID and contactless credit/debit cards, but it mainly focusses on card cloning and identity protection/privacy/tracking issues. However another issue which you see a…
timday
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Are businesses required to cut up credit cards?

There are several movies and tv shows in which a character attempts to use a credit card, only to find that it's been cancelled. This usually results in the card being cut up. In the trailer for the movie Identity Thief, they even went so far as…
DForck42
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Is posting my bank account number online unsafe?

With a credit-card number, validity date and CVV-code, people can make purchases, so this information should be strictly protected. But if I post my bank account details online (IBAN + BIC/SWIFT), does this put me at any risk at all? In my…
gerrit
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Do banks typically lose as much money as they make in the long term?

Nicholas Nassem Taleb makes the following passing statement in his latest meditation on the nature and management of risk (Antifragile): ...businesses with negative optionality (that is, the opposite of having optionality) such as banking have had…
matt_black
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Could the Nokia 1100 be hacked to sniff SMS messages intended for third parties?

TL; DR; version: Is it possible that hackers were somehow able to "reprogram" a specific Nokia 1100 phone to make it receive SMS messages sent to another person's phone number? A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I happen to have an…
fstanis
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Is there a $15 trillion fraud involving Yohannes Riyadi and the HSBC?

According to Lord James of Blackheath speech in the UK House of Lords there's evidence that a $15 trillon conspiracy/fraud is going on. In particular he says: "Today, I have this quite frightening piece of paper [...] It is from the general…
Christian
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Do 95 percent of the world's ATMs use Windows XP?

Reuters claims: Windows XP currently supports around 95 percent of the world's ATMs. Is that true? In the same article, it is said: The U.S. software company first warned that it was planning to end support for Windows XP in 2007, but only…
Franck Dernoncourt
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Is the equity ratio of US banks around 3%?

Did John H. Cochrane, a professor of economics at Chicago, wrote: In order to make $100 of loans, a typical bank borrows $97—from depositors, from money-market funds, from other banks, or from bondholders—and sells $3 of stock, its "capital." So if…
Christian
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Have 36 bankers died in 2014 from accidents, suicide, and murder?

This blog claims that: I would call a rash of 36 deaths – grizzly murders, accidents and questionable suicides – in one year… suspicious. And that’s just this year. If you look back, this has been going on since at least 2011. So far, 36 bankers…
ike
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Did Libya's Central Bank offer loans at 0% interest?

I just watched The illuminati Exposed By Muammar Gaddafi. It's a really good watch (especially for us skeptics), but at one point they said that the reason Muammar al-Gaddafi was overthrown was, not because he was a bad, unpopular or corrupt leader…
Coomie
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