Frozen US bank account -- sometimes doing nothing is best

A lesson that I've found in my life which obviously doesn't always work, is that SOMETIMES the best solution is to do nothing and wait.

The trick is to be wise and/or lucky enough to pick those situations.

So in this case I had a complication with a U.S. bank account (I won't go into the boring details of how that developed as it can and does happen to expats for a variety of reasons). This is a bank where I have been using faux U.S. residency details over decades with success before. I'm sure if I came out as an expat to them they would close the account so I'm very careful with my communications with them.

Well of course after it was frozen there was a very red message when logging into online banking that I needed to call to resolve.

I didn't call. I figured such a call would have been a very high risk of being outed as an expat.

The account has about 1,000 which for me anyway wouldn't be tragic to lose. If the account had a much bigger balance I probably would have called.

Much later I get an email saying you need to logon to your account to read an important message.

I did not.

So much much later I got an email saying I must logon to my account within 30 days or the information in it will no longer be availalble. Before I could see the account but just not do anything with it.

So this time, they got me, I had to logon.

SURPRISE.

The red warning message was now gone.

The urgent email that I was told I must read long ago did not exist.

The issue that previously was related to the account being frozen was fixed by them with no action by me.

I couldn't have predicted this but it turned out to be yet another case where doing nothing worked out better than doing something.