Account terminated over a money laundering suspicion: the three working days cover only the transfer

When your own account stops executing transfers without warning and a termination letter from the bank lands in the post shortly afterwards, one very practical question comes first: how long does this take, and who decides? The short answer is that two entirely different clocks are running. For a single reported transfer, Germany's Money Laundering Act (Geldwäschegesetz, GwG) sets a hard deadline of three working days. For a block on the whole account and for termination of the contract, that deadline does not apply, because both rest on different legal grounds. Confuse the two clocks and you are waiting for a date that never comes for your account.

The occasion for this guide is a notice from BaFin, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, dated October 20, 2026. The regulator warns in it about job offers under which workers are to accept third-party payments into their own domestic bank account and forward them on instruction or exchange them for crypto assets. That activity triggers anti-money-laundering procedures at every bank, and at the end of that chain, in many cases, comes termination of the account. How the scheme itself works we described at length in August: Read Entire Article