TD WebBroker ISA (Investment Savings Account). | Page 6 | Investing | Discussion forum

I'd certainly never have any use for an Amazon gift card. Again, just a promotion for Amazon, who probably provided them for free.

I'm happy to see the TD fine, as we do need to keep the laws enforced.

The real corporate culture crime at TD is their abusive promotion and unrequested fee-earning service policy, and its aggressive sales quotas.

More details are in the FinCEN press release and in the consent order.

Something went seriously wrong in their two US subsidiaries TD Bank, N.A. and TD Bank USA, N.A. The consent order noted that the two US subsidiaries spent around 1/10 of what their peers spent on anti-money laundering compliance:

E. TD Bank Failed to Implement and Maintain an AML Program

… As described more fully below, TD Bank [TD Bank, N.A. and TD Bank USA, N.A.] failed to devote sufficient resources to BSA compliance, and refused to invest in improvements to address such gaps when they were deemed too costly, thus allowing illicit activity to flow through the Bank.²¹ TD Bank vastly underinvested in its AML compliance efforts, with TD Bank knowingly spending an order of magnitude less than its peers. Additionally, the Bank’s AML staffing was not proportionate to its size, risk profile, and ongoing compliance concerns: during the periods of TD Bank’s most acute issues (including those related to backlogs from insufficient staffing), AML spending remained flat. As explained below, when a host of significant AML compliance issues arose during the Relevant Time Period [from at least 2012 through May 9, 2024], the Bank consistently chose to address them in the least costly way possible, even if it meant ignoring failures and refusing to meaningfully remediate issues and prevent recurrences. …

RetirEd said
mordko: A gift card is like a $5 chip gift from a Las Vegas casino. You can't really use it without spending more. And I won't do business with Amazon in any way. I even block their ads specifically.

The reason that so many promotions now use gift cards is that their providers supply them either for free or at a strong discount to drive more purchases. I learned this from research institutions supplying them as rewards for participants.  

Ok, but I spend thousands on Amazon, have been for years and to me $50 in Amazon cash is just cash. And if you can’t use it you can give it to someone who can because 85% of Canadians use Amazon at least once per month. And what you buy is stuff like socks, food, tools and books.

Its nothing like casino. More like the internet. There will be some people who don’t use it but when a bank has a website its to promote itself rather than to promote the internet.

Amazon is, in my view, an abusive monopoly that is destroying the world of retail. It is one of the biggest data collectors and abusers, if not the biggest, in the world. And it is a leading practitioner of price discrimination - one almost never gets the same price twice, or the same price as others... or even knows how that price compares to what others are charged. On top of that, its delivery practices involve gig-work contractors and wasteful disposal of packaging materials.

But my original point is that replacing payments with gift cards tied to a particular retailer is a way for the retailers to profit and the payers to minimize or avoid payment.

mordko: if you can’t use it you can give it to someone who can

...and thus lose the promotional value or rebate I was due? That is my whole complaint!