Banking
The bank froze our funds and asked us to prove where they came from.
A freeze of this kind is a compliance hold, not a legal seizure. An institution's monitoring flagged something (an inbound amount out of pattern, a counterparty or geography outside the declared profile, a first crypto-related credit, an adverse media hit) and its obligations require it to establish source of funds, and often source of wealth, before it can move the money. Until the file is satisfied, the money is not the institution's to release.
Requests fail on evidence, not on honesty. Source of funds means the specific origin of this particular credit, traced document by document: the invoice or contract, the payment or settlement record, the processor or exchange statement showing the same amount and date, the bank leg. Source of wealth is the broader story of how the business or the individual came to have money at all. Screenshots, partial exports, unsigned agreements, and explanations without a document behind them prolong the hold rather than ending it, and each incomplete answer resets the review.
Delay carries its own risk. An unresolved review may be escalated into a suspicion report and closure, and where an exchange is involved the assets can stay locked while the market moves against the client.
How LTB Resolves It
LTB assembles the file the compliance team actually needs, in the order they read it: an activity and flow explanation consistent with what was declared at onboarding, then a traced chain for the specific credit (contracts, invoices, processor or exchange settlement records, wallet history where relevant), then the wider source-of-wealth evidence, with tax filings and financial statements that corroborate rather than contradict it.
That file is submitted through the institution's compliance escalation channel rather than the relationship manager, and pressed on a documented timeline. Where the process itself has failed, LTB escalates to the regulator or ombudsman, acting directly across the EU and through local counsel elsewhere. Release is made by the institution; in parallel the practice arranges a verified alternative account with a bank in its network so operations continue and the funds have somewhere clean to arrive.
Questions
Frequently Asked
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Whether you were referred to LTB or found the practice directly, the first conversation is confidential and without obligation.
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