Originally Posted by Lemma

Quite apart from the structuring concerns which have already been discussed in this thread, this is another good reason to deposit all your MO at the same place rather than splitting them between multiple banks (and please, not Chase or Citi - some small local bank or CU where you don't want a CC). If you are the guy who always brings in MO and all the tellers know you, they won't be calling up moneygram to see if it is fake. Banks work on trust and they can't be calling up to verify every time someone deposits a MO, or any check for that matter. Transactions that fit a regular pattern for an account are much more likely to be legitimate, which is why you stop getting fraud alerts on your CCs when they learn you will be spending lots of money at drugstores. At my CU, any deposit over a certain dollar amount has to be confirmed by another teller coming over and entering their password before it will go through. One afternoon, there was a long line and only two teller windows were open, so the teller called some phone number to get the confirmation instead. I don't know what question the person on the phone asked about my deposit, but the teller replied that I was a regular who always deposited MO. At that point the person on the phone did something to make the transaction go through and my receipt printed out. As usual there was no hold on the deposit, which I think totaled about 12-13k, because my CU trusts me.

The people on this forum who have described opening accounts at different banks to deposit their MO so that they won't draw too much attention and become known by the tellers are never going to develop that kind of relationship and trust. I did not know about this delay in activating the MO, but I see no reason to change my practice of going straight from WM to the CU and depositing the MO within 10 minutes of purchase without any tedious validating. So long as the MO eventually clear and they get the funds, no one at my CU will know or care if a phone CSR at moneygram could confirm the MO was genuine the same day I brought it in or the next day for that matter. That being said, when I have gone to CU Service Center branches, or regular bank branches, while I'm out of state and they don't know me, they often don't even check the security features or ask any questions. So it's not as though you're guaranteed or even likely to have problems if you don't have a good relationship with your friendly paper recycling center. But if you do, you are pretty much guaranteed not to have this problem.

Are there a bunch of reports of checking account shutdowns due to too many MO deposits in some thread I'm unaware of? It's natural to get questions for such unusual activity but in my experience telling the truth about why you purchase and deposit so many MO works well. Why would they care about your MS? They aren't the bank issuing the CC, just the bank you want to deposit large sums of money with. It's in your mutual interest that they accept your MO. And if you were laundering money, you wouldn't be the guy brazenly depositing large amounts repeatedly at the same branch, you'd be the guy with multiple bank accounts that tries never go to back to the same branch too often.