Frozen or stolen? BofA customer struggles to get money back

• Key insight: A gold dealer’s 18-month ordeal reflects the few protections customers have when banks decide to freeze or close their accounts.
• Supporting data: Kyle Horn’s account had a balance of $49,527 when Bank of America froze it in April 2025. 
• Expert quote: “If [Bank of America] is right, every bank may take a customer’s money, decline to investigate, and hide behind fine print indefinitely and without consequence. And if a lawsuit like this one cannot stop it, nothing will.” — Georg Capielo, attorney for Bullion Standard

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Early on the morning of March 11, 2025, Kyle Horn woke up to a text message saying his bank account contained less than $100. Concerned, he signed into his Bank of America commercial account, and saw a negative balance of $456,000.

“I panic and I’m screaming and I’m yelling to my wife, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?'” Horn, the owner of the precious-metals dealer Bullion Standard in San Diego, California, recalled to American Banker.

He ran downstairs to his home office and began frantically calling Bank of America for an explanation. The account in question was for wire transfers from customers, so the balance often fluctuated — but never like this.

Eventually, Horn said, he reached BofA’s wire department, which finally offered an explanation: Two customers had accused his business of fraud, so the bank debited the allegedly stolen funds. It was now Horn’s responsibility to prove his innocence.

This was the beginning of a long ordeal that Horn said would ultimately shut down his store for weeks, cost him an estimated millions of dollars in sales, ruin valuable business relationships and shutter a bank account that held about $50,000. In April 2025 Horn sued BofA, and since then he’s been battling the nation’s second-largest bank to get his money back.

“If [Bank of America] is right, every bank may take a customer’s money, decline to investigate, and hide behind fine print indefinitely and without consequence,” one of Horn’s lawyers, Georg Capielo, wrote in a court document. “And if a lawsuit like this one cannot stop it, nothing will.”

A Bank of America spokesperson declined to provide comments for this story. A person familiar with the matter said the closure of Horn’s account was related to multiple fraud claims, and the return of the $50,000 is pending the resolution of the lawsuit.

It’s a case that raises a number of difficult questions: How much legal leeway do banks have to freeze or close their customers’ accounts? What rights do those customers have? And when a business is unwittingly used as a pawn in a scam, should it be liable for what was stolen?

“It’s not like they have these really hard-and-fast duties,” Ricky Sluder, head of fraud solutions at the anti-money-laundering software company Quantexa, said regarding businesses’ obligations to block scams. “It gets a little muddy.”

The freeze sets in

For almost a week after seeing his negative balance, Horn said, he spent hours every day on the phone with Bank of America, providing evidence that the two disputed sales were legitimate: transcripts of phone calls with the customers, signatures of receipt for their purchases, tracking information for the packages, etc.

“All the while, we are completely shut down, because 85 to 90% of our business is wire transfers to pay for these very large orders,” Horn said. “And without that capability we’re dead in the water.”

On March 17, BofA finally reached a conclusion: There had been fraud — but not by Bullion Standard — a bank representative allegedly told Horn over the phone. The two customers, who were both elderly, had fallen victim to scams that duped them into buying huge amounts of gold and then handing it off to the scammers. Horn’s business was not the perpetrator, so BofA unfroze his account and returned the money.

But the relief did not last long.

“Everything seemed to be okay,” Horn said. “And then 10 days later, boom!”

On March 27, Bullion Standard’s account was frozen. In a letter, Bank of America said it had done this “because we detected suspicious activity” that the bank would need to investigate. The freeze came at an awkward time, Horn said — just after a customer had placed a large order for platinum, which now could not be completed.

Then, on April 1, BofA fully closed the account. Horn lost all access to it, along with the $49,527 trapped inside.

“At this time, any remaining balance won’t be returned to you,” the bank wrote in an April 9 letter.

Once again, Horn and his staff began furiously calling BofA’s customer-service representatives. What he heard back, he said, was confusing: Some representatives said the investigation would finish in a few days; others said it would take until June or July. And some, puzzlingly, said the investigation related not to the platinum sale, but to one of the earlier gold purchases — which Horn thought had already been cleared.

“Everybody had a different answer,” Horn recalled. “And our business is shut down again. We’re just sitting back, watching it all burn down to the ground.”

At that point, Horn applied for an account at another bank, but the application process took weeks. In the meantime, he said, Bullion Standard couldn’t pay its bills. It couldn’t take new orders. Its platinum customer was furious. And on April 2, 2025, it missed out on a historic opportunity for the precious metals industry, when President Trump announced a raft of new tariffs that sent gold prices soaring.

“I estimate, just based on all the emails and customer calls we fielded, that we missed out on in excess of $8 million of bullion business during those two weeks,” Horn said.

Exasperated, Horn filed suit against Bank of America on April 11, 2025. Eighteen months later, the money in Horn’s account has still not been released.

Bank of America “took nearly $50,000 from a small business owner on an unsupported fraud suspicion, conducted no investigation, disclosed nothing, refused every demand for return, and has now held that money for over a year,” Horn’s lawyers wrote in a rebuttal to BofA’s motion to dismiss. “[BofA’s] motion asks this court to be the next institution to look away. It should not.”

The bank’s side

In its own defense, BofA has put forward a simple argument: Horn accepted the risk of having his account closed when he signed up for it. In its motion to dismiss the case, the bank submitted a full copy of the deposit agreement Horn allegedly signed when he opened his account.

“You or we may close your checking or savings account at any time without advance notice,” the contract says.

Horn’s lawyers have called this an effort to use fine-print terms and conditions as cover to “steal” a customer’s money.

But bank advocates say lenders have not only a right to close accounts, but often a responsibility to do so. Under numerous anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism laws, banks and credit unions are sometimes legally obligated to shut down accounts when a crime is suspected.

“Such decisions are never random, rash or automatic,” Heather Trew, a senior vice president at the American Bankers Association, has written. “They represent banks’ efforts to do their best, quickly, with limited information, and they are rooted in an important legal and regulatory framework designed to protect our financial system and U.S. national security.”

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BofA has remained tight-lipped about its motives for closing Horn’s account — in court documents, the bank’s lawyers have mainly focused on its right to do so, not its reasons. But according to Quantexa’s Sluder, it’s conceivable that BofA was trying to comply with rules and regulations.

“I don’t have the facts, but I don’t think they’re just going to do it willy-nilly,” said Sluder, who previously worked as an FBI investigator. “My guess would be that they are following their internal bank policy under what might be a suspicious transaction, or law enforcement has guided them to freeze that account pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.”

To Horn and his lawyers, BofA’s argument feels a bit one-note.

“We’ve all read the deposit agreement,” Horn said. “The only thing it says is, ‘If we close your account, we can freeze it.’ That’s it. It doesn’t say indefinitely. It doesn’t say for 18 months. It doesn’t say under what circumstances.”

As of October, after multiple motions by BofA to dismiss the case and counter-motions by Bullion Standard, the two parties are waiting for the judge to decide whether the lawsuit can move forward.

If it does, and if Bullion wins, Horn hopes the impact will go beyond just his business. In addition to the damages he’s seeking, he’s hoping the case will spur new legislation to protect customers’ rights in cases like his. Among the hoped-for measures are new call centers specifically for questions about closed or frozen accounts, as well as a 14-day limit on the investigations of them.

“This is no longer about a $50,000 freeze,” Horn said. “I want banking reform, so this can never happen to somebody again.”