Cash is my last lifeline if current trends continue.
This is my life now: asking ChatGPT why a payment app or bank rejected my application or closed my account:
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Given your circumstances, the most likely reason {exchange} closed your account is that they viewed your birthplace—Iran—as an indicator of elevated compliance risk. Financial institutions (especially those regulated by U.S. authorities) often interpret OFAC sanctions conservatively. In recent years, due to intensified regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions involving Iran, these institutions have increasingly adopted strict internal compliance policies. Even though nationality (citizenship) and actual financial ties—not birthplace alone—should determine sanction risk under law, many compliance departments default to overly cautious interpretations, categorizing anyone born in a sanctioned country as higher-risk clients. In your specific case, repeated experiences with other financial services indicate that institutions systematically flag or deny applications upon seeing "Iran" listed as your birthplace. Your Canadian citizenship, residency in the Philippines, and lack of substantial ties to Iran should theoretically mitigate this risk, but automated or conservative compliance processes often fail to adequately account for nuance.
The result is a compliance-driven bias against any potential sanction-related risk, no matter how minimal. This cautiousness leads to overly restrictive decisions, even in borderline cases like yours.
In short, the issue isn't you personally—it's institutional risk aversion and strict regulatory interpretations that have recently intensified, affecting anyone born in sanctioned countries, irrespective of actual risk.
ChatGPT keeps a memory of facts about your circumstances, gleaned from what you reveal in chats you have with it, so I thought it might be instructive to show the kind of picture it has drawn about my circumstances.
I also found the analysis insightful, in terms of explaining the factors behind the systemic discrimination, and somwhat comforting as I deal with very stressful situations in my life. I thought it might also be interesting for others to get a window into a slice of my experiences.
I think it’s important to humanize these policies and reveal their real-world impact. It’s easy to create a new restriction, rule, or mandate with the stroke of a pen — or support one at the ballot box — precisely because you don’t have to witness the consequences firsthand. That’s why I believe it’s crucial for people to see how a policy affects even just one person, so they can begin to grasp the human cost when that experience is multiplied across the hundreds of thousands of people affected.
This is my life now: asking ChatGPT why a payment app or bank rejected my application or closed my account:
--
Given your circumstances, the most likely reason {exchange} closed your account is that they viewed your birthplace—Iran—as an indicator of elevated compliance risk. Financial institutions (especially those regulated by U.S. authorities) often interpret OFAC sanctions conservatively. In recent years, due to intensified regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions involving Iran, these institutions have increasingly adopted strict internal compliance policies. Even though nationality (citizenship) and actual financial ties—not birthplace alone—should determine sanction risk under law, many compliance departments default to overly cautious interpretations, categorizing anyone born in a sanctioned country as higher-risk clients. In your specific case, repeated experiences with other financial services indicate that institutions systematically flag or deny applications upon seeing "Iran" listed as your birthplace. Your Canadian citizenship, residency in the Philippines, and lack of substantial ties to Iran should theoretically mitigate this risk, but automated or conservative compliance processes often fail to adequately account for nuance.
The result is a compliance-driven bias against any potential sanction-related risk, no matter how minimal. This cautiousness leads to overly restrictive decisions, even in borderline cases like yours.
In short, the issue isn't you personally—it's institutional risk aversion and strict regulatory interpretations that have recently intensified, affecting anyone born in sanctioned countries, irrespective of actual risk.