Funding new bank accounts with money orders
 

Anyone ever had any issues funding a new account with money orders? I’m thinking of opening a bank account and funding with $3-5k in money orders. Would be weird if they accepted them and opened the account, then closed down the account shortly afterwards for suspicious activity. Just trying to see if anyone has had any experience with this?

Never opened an account with 3-5k of MO. I usually open the account with 500 to 1000 in MOs and season them for a few months. When seasoned, 3-5k of MO per week is the throughput. Stick with the smaller local banks. Wells Fargo still requires a manager to approve a MO deposit of 1k after a month.

I recently opened a throw away checking account to run MOs through (and to take advantage of a new account bonus :p) and they put an 10 day hold on the MOs I deposited the first 30 days, but no real issues, YET! Let's hope never.

This is the type of thing where people feel like all is well in their first 6 months and then suddenly out of no where the dominoes begin to fall. First a warning, but then the account is closed anyhow(money held longer than reasonable), then because your chex report gets marred other institutions start looking at you closely. Then cards become effected. Then, applications get denied. Just be aware of risks and use great restraint. Remember, to ms'rs a few thousand is nothing, but to others that's a lot even in a month, not to speak of weekly. Sloooow.

Curious if you've seen data points, what do they report on ChexSystems as far as the closure of the checking due to money orders, does it normally prevent future banks from approving you for new checking accts, makes them monitor your acct?

I never been put on chexsystems myself but I have experience with chexsystems. When you go to open an account, chexsystems is ran. Chexsystems either says YES or NO. If the results says NO, the bank won't open an account for you. The manager at the bank can override the chexsystems but most likely they will say NO too because they are basically putting their job on the line to override the system. If it's NO at 1 bank, it will be NO at another bank.

ChexSystems reports are sort of like a credit report for bank accts, they don't just have yes or no, they have inquiries, prob acct opened and closed, and how they were closed. I'm sure if the acct was closed from the bank with a remark as fraudulent or something like that, no bank will open another acct for you for X amount of years. But there might be other type of negative remarks and/or closures that might have different kinds of impacts, besides the NO from all banks that you're referring to.

For instance, some banks might just deny an acct because you have too many new accts recently, I routinely see such reports on forums.