Bryan Sequeira Gets Shutdown by Chase, Complains to Business Insider, Revealed to Have Scammed Americans

I just read a lengthy piece by Business Insider on a Chase Bank shutdown for Bryan Sequeria. Normally I wouldn’t put people’s names in something like this, but Bryan decided to go to Business Insider to complain, provide all his details for the article, and a nice wedding photo because the shutdown happened on the day of his wedding. The article is linked below:

As it turns out, Bryan Sequeira defrauded millions of Americans by working as a Project Manager for an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) company that did the “Volkswagon Emission Testing” of EMRs. When an EMR is certified for use by the federal government, much like when a car is certified for emissions testing, it undergoes a test. Bryan Sequeira was found by the US Government to have personally known that the EMR he was working for was built to defraud the testing system.

The US Justice Department’s findings are here:

It was defrauding testing in many ways, most of which don’t negatively impact Americans’ healthcare directly, except one important point. Medical interaction warnings were not built properly. Normally, if your physician places a medication order, the EMR system will check against all other medications you are taking for negative interactions. Except for the EMR that Bryan Sequeira oversaw, which only performed the interaction check against the handful of drugs that the “emissions-testing equivalent” system was known in advance to perform.

The US Government found five people responsible. Three C-level executives/founders, Bryan Sequeira the project manager who oversaw development, and one developer/coder who did the coding. It was so egregious that the government demanded a fine of $15,000 paid personally by Bryan Sequeira.

The interest of the Business Insider piece to us on Fragile Deal is that Chase and other banks are now using Reputational Tracking scores to monitor clients and if you get sued by the Federal Government for healthcare fraud, your banks will notice and may close your accounts.

How is this actionable to us? We need to take control of what information we share on the internet. While we may not be defrauding the public and putting patients’ lives at risk like the company Bryan Sequeira project managed, it’s possible you’re posting a tweet or facebook post that triggers such systems and get you shutdown.

I’ve been a proponent of avoiding social media for years, and think this is a just a start of bank shutdowns that may extend to social media posts. Did you post a picture of you drinking too much on a holiday and then commenting about driving later? Your car insurance company might shut you down. It’s all within the realm of high liklihood as banks and insurance companies build out additional information models.

There’s a reason that last week a big news article came out regarding rankings of college degrees and #1 was actuarial science where the median pay of a new grad in actuarial science was over $100k/year right out of college.

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On further thought, what if there was no reputational scoring model used. What if he wrote a personal check from his Chase Bank account to the US DOJ for $15k and that triggered it.

There’s no reason to write a 5-figure check to the US Department of Justice unless it’s a fine/penalty. And if I were running a bank, and it were legal to discriminate based on this, I’d discontinue business relationships with someone who just wrote a 5-figure check to the US DOJ.

Imagine you found out a contractor you were considering hiring to do a $100k remodel on your house just wrote a $15k check to the state Contractor Licensing board. Without seeing any additional information about the situation, I’d be very hesitant to have this contractor do any work for me just based on writing the $15k check alone.

Or perhaps the $15k check didn’t trigger an automatic shutdown, but a manual review of him in the news, which led to the DOJ case, and then reviewing the news manually resulted in the shutdown. No reputational tracking needed, still just based off the check writing.

How is this actionable to us here on FWF 2.0? If you write a check for more than $1,000 to a government agency that generally only accepts large checks for purposes of penalties/fines, then I would do so from a credit union that isn’t your primary one.

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Uh who?

He was BrianBrianBrian on FW.

Or just not commit fraud in the first place.

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Considering the other things mentioned in the article (the sex industry) and not mentioned (the firearm industry) that could get you booted that are perfectly legal, it’s not that simple anymore. Consider a bakery that doesn’t want to bake a certain type of cake. I could see Chase or BOA or another bank ending their relationship because of “reputational risk” along those lines too.

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Yeah those could be concerns. But is there actual evidence Chase or other banks are booting customers for stuff like that? Or is it just conjecture in the widely speculating article ?
I don’t know if that stuff is a real risk or just stuff people are worrying about. But in any case if you’re engaged in what some people would consider amoral or unethical or just unpopular business activity then yeah, maybe better safe than sorry to not mix those business operations with your personal accounts.

My reply was specific to the circumstance of writing checks to the DOJ. I don’t know of situations where we’d be writing checks to the DOJ that are innocent but who knows…

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I wonder if Chase is just closing accounts for unprofitable customers? Like the types that pay off their balances in full every month and don’t pay interest.

Or perhaps they consider not US citizens to be a high flight risk (run up cards, return to their home country, don’t repay the balances, and no consequences since credit score doesn’t follow them).

They could also be looking at people sending remittances to foreign countries and be concerned about AML and KYC laws.

While my personal experience was a while back (became US citizen since), it depended a lot on your equity in the US. After purchasing our first home with 20% down, pretty much nobody cared about our citizenship status. Despite having about the same credit score, targeted offers credit lines went from like $1500 to $10-20k over a 6 month period. I’m still not sure why since you could easily open those high credit lines, sell your property back, and then rack up debt before going home, and before they do a financial review. But I guess actuarial numbers don’t estimate that sequence of events as very likely compared to other benefits they expect from extending higher credit to borrowers with high scores.

Back to OP’s article, I think it can only reinforce the case against coupling your online persona with your real life one. But in the case of Brian Sequeira, Chase probably had plenty of data from news coverage. I’m sure that the big banks have bots parsing publicly-available news to find reference to their account holders.

Scanning social network information is only a natural extension of that. Imagine someone asks for an increase to their credit lines. Wouldn’t you want to know what happens in their lives to evaluate how much of a risk that represents for you as lender? If they’re giving out this kind of info freely on facebook, why not use it huh?

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It looks like he was accused, but they settled.

You know, the guy with the big trees.

Possibly the beginning of a slippery slope: BoA hates guns :slight_smile:

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Uh, maybe, uh, bribe?

You use cash for that.

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Link?