Last year, I called into my bank and was connected with a call centre agent who refused to identify me because it was impossible that I could be Kara because my voice is “male.” This call centre agent hung up on me after answering every possible security question correctly.

I’m a trans woman and frequently deal with micro aggressions as a gender ambiguous person with a deeper voice. However, afterwards I couldn’t log into my online banking because this agent marked my account as a “possible coercive account takeover.” This 10 minute interaction started a domino effect causing almost all of my banking and credit products being suspended. This sent me into a panic seeing my accounts fall one by one and not be able to do anything because I was accused of being under duress. Over the subsequent weeks and months, I launched investigations, spoke to Ombudsman(s), and talked to legal counsel.

The post mortem is that this agent submitted an phony fraud notice that was not caught by internal systems and travelled up to my credit bureau. This report then alerted every other financial institution and lender to investigate my activity. The only thing I could do is let these investigations go their course. During this time, multiple institutions revoked access to my online banking, suspended my debit cards while some institutions just closed my accounts entirely. My credit cards had their limits significantly reduced and a few were cancelled. And lastly, my credit score went from the low 800s to mid 300s.

It is incredible how one person could cause so much damage without guardrails requiring secondary authorization, oversight, or to have their actions be reviewed by another employee before being ratified.

This experience made me very optimistic on the future of decentralized money.

But as scary as this experience was, I don’t feel comfortable putting the entirety of my wealth on the chain yet. I’m hesitant because crypto moved on to other areas before building truly safe custody solutions. In most regions, financial institutions are governed by laws and regulations that require a certain level of compliance and in the event something happens, customers are protected in some form. This exists in many forms throughout the world but for example in Canada, we have CDIC insurance for up to $250,000 per bank account, CIPF insurance for up to 1 million dollars of investments, and card issuers have fraud protections in case your card is mishandled.

None of these guardrails exist in crypto and this makes even me, a “crypto native” (I hate this phrase) uncomfortable. It is my goal to explore these areas and work on new solutions so that one day maybe I can trust the chain with more than a few Ethers worth.

Just a note, I am trying to get out of the habit of being a perfectionist. If you come across anything that could use some correcting, please email k@opossum.dev.