What Happens When Wise, Payoneer, or Mercury Freezes Your Account

Most expats do not think about account freezes until the day they cannot move their own money. By the time it happens, they are already exposed.

It plays out the same way every time. Someone's Wise account gets flagged during a routine review. They have $4,000 sitting in the account that they cannot touch. Rent is due in three days. Their landlord in Medellin doesn't accept excuses, and definitely doesn't accept "my fintech platform is reviewing my account." They have a backup card but it's linked to a Canadian bank that charges $7 per ATM withdrawal plus 2.5% conversion fees. Their only other option is asking a friend to float them cash and hoping the review clears before the situation gets worse.

The mistake was not using Wise. Wise is excellent. The mistake was assuming Wise was a foundation rather than a dependency. When that dependency broke, everything downstream broke with it.

This article is about what actually happens when one of these platforms freezes your account, why it happens far more often than people admit, and how people who stay solvent design around that risk instead of arguing with it.

Account freezes rarely look dramatic at first. A transfer fails. A dashboard shows a warning. Sometimes it's framed as a routine compliance review. Other times there's no explanation at all.

What changes immediately is access. Outgoing transfers stop. Cards stop working. Incoming funds may still arrive but you cannot move them. Support becomes asynchronous and slow. There is no phone number. There is no escalation path that matters.

We've seen this exact scenario play out. A freelancer had been using Payoneer for three years without a single issue. Then he received a larger than usual payment from a new client, around $8,500. Within 48 hours his account was under review. He submitted every document they asked for. Invoices, contracts, ID verification, proof of address. The review took 11 weeks. During that time he had no access to roughly $12,000 in his account. He missed a tax payment. He borrowed money from family to cover living expenses in Paraguay. When the review finally cleared, there was no apology, no explanation, just access restored and a generic email saying the matter was resolved.

At this point most people make the same mistake. They treat the freeze as a misunderstanding that can be resolved quickly if they explain themselves well enough. In reality the outcome is usually binary. Either the platform clears the review on its own timeline or it exits you entirely. Arguing your case rarely speeds this up.

Fintech platforms are not banks. They are regulated money transmitters operating under risk models that prioritize platform survival over individual convenience. When your behavior deviates from what their models expect, your account becomes a liability.

Common Triggers

• Sudden increases in volume
• Changes in geography
• Inconsistent IP or login locations
• Business activity running through personal accounts
• Repeated crypto on and off ramps
• Receiving funds from platforms that are themselves under scrutiny

None of these require wrongdoing. They only require mismatch.

Expats trigger mismatches constantly without realizing it. You move countries. Your spending pattern changes. Your income source shifts. Your counterparties are no longer domestic. What feels like normal life progression looks like elevated risk from the outside.

Consider a Canadian who had been living in Mexico for eight months. She was using Wise as her primary account, receiving CAD from clients in Toronto and converting to USD and MXN as needed. One week she logged in from a coffee shop in Oaxaca using the cafe wifi. The next week she was in Mexico City on a different network. The week after that she flew to Vancouver to visit family and logged in from there. Three countries, three IP addresses, three weeks. Her account got flagged. She wasn't doing anything wrong. She was living her life. But to an algorithm watching for unusual patterns, her behavior looked indistinguishable from account compromise.

When a traditional bank reviews an account, there is often a relationship manager or at least a branch level escalation path. Fintech does not work that way. Reviews are centralized. Decisions are algorithmic first and human second. Support agents do not control outcomes and often do not see the underlying flags.

If your account is frozen, you are no longer a customer. You are a case. Cases move slowly because speed creates regulatory exposure. This is why you see phrases like "we are unable to provide further details" and "this decision is final." It is not personal. It is structural.

The most frustrating part is that you often cannot fix it by being cooperative. You submit documents. You wait. You submit more documents. You wait longer. The timeline is not based on your urgency. It is based on their internal queue and risk tolerance.

People spend weeks crafting detailed explanations of their business model, their income sources, their reasons for living abroad. In most cases those explanations disappear into a support ticket system and have no measurable impact on the outcome. The review either clears or it doesn't. The detailed explanation is for the customer's peace of mind, not the platform's decision process.

Wise is one of the best tools available to expats. It is clean, transparent, and genuinely useful. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Wise feels like a bank because it behaves like one most of the time. But it is still a fintech platform operating under strict transaction monitoring rules.

Wise freezes are most common when volume increases, when accounts are used for mixed personal and business activity, or when users rely on Wise as their primary account while living outside their original jurisdiction long term. Many people get years of smooth usage before anything goes wrong. That history does not protect you when a review starts.

Someone we advised had been using Wise since 2019. Five years, no issues. He moved from Canada to Panama, got residency, opened a local bank account, kept using Wise as his bridge for receiving CAD from Canadian clients. Then he started a small consulting side project and invoiced a few clients through the same Wise account. Mixed personal and business. Within two months his account was under review. He had over $9,000 frozen for six weeks during the review. His Panama rent was $1,400 a month. His local bank account had maybe $800 in it. He ended up withdrawing cash advances from a credit card at painful interest rates just to stay current on rent.

Payoneer is often treated as a professional grade solution, especially for freelancers and platform workers. It is more tolerant of international flows, but it is also tightly integrated with platform compliance. If an upstream platform changes its risk posture, Payoneer accounts feel it quickly.

In another case, a consultant was receiving payments through Upwork into Payoneer for two years. No issues. Then Upwork updated their payment policies and started flagging accounts with non-US addresses receiving payments to US Payoneer accounts. His Payoneer account got restricted within a week of the policy change. Not because he did anything different. Because Upwork did.

Mercury gives the impression of a traditional US banking relationship, but access is still conditional. Activity that drifts away from the expected profile of a US based business can trigger review. Foreign residency, operational complexity, or unclear source of funds all increase scrutiny.

Mercury has also tightened requirements over the past year. They now explicitly state that your principal place of business cannot be a registered agent address, PO box, or UPS box. If you formed a Wyoming LLC with a registered agent address and assumed that was enough, you may find yourself locked out when Mercury's compliance team takes a closer look.

None of this means these platforms are bad. It means they are not designed to be single points of failure.

Freezes are not rare. They are a feature of the system. The real risk is designing your financial life so that one freeze becomes an existential problem.

People who get into trouble usually have one primary account, one card, one inbound rail, and no local fallback. When that breaks, everything breaks. Rent, utilities, payroll, subscriptions, even the ability to move money to safety.

Take someone in Colombia who had been living in Medellin for 18 months. She was receiving all her income through Wise, spending through the Wise card, and had about $200 in a Bancolombia account she rarely used. When her Wise account got flagged, she had exactly $200 accessible in Colombia and a Canadian bank account she couldn't easily access without paying massive fees. Her rent was $1,100. She had to fly back to Canada, withdraw cash, fly back to Colombia, and pay her landlord in person. The flights cost more than the rent.

People who stay operational do something different. They assume freezes will happen eventually and plan accordingly.

The pattern is consistent. They separate functions. One platform for receiving. One for spending. One for holding buffer liquidity. They keep at least two active rails in different jurisdictions. They avoid mixing personal and business activity. They test withdrawals periodically instead of assuming access will always be there.

Practically this looks like: Wise for receiving client payments, a local bank account for rent and utilities, a US bank like Mercury or Lili for holding a buffer, and maybe a crypto position that can be liquidated in an emergency. If any one of those breaks, the others keep working.

They do not chase loopholes. They do not lie about residency. They do not rely on VPNs to maintain access. They accept that compliance is the cost of staying inside the system and design their setup to absorb friction without collapsing.

People who do this well follow a pattern. A remote business owner in Paraguay keeps three months of living expenses in her local Paraguayan bank account at all times. Her Wise account is for receiving and converting, not storing. Her Mercury account holds her business buffer. If Wise froze tomorrow, she would be annoyed but not endangered. That's the difference between a system and a dependency.

A Plan B is not about evading rules. It is about not being trapped by single points of failure. Fintech platforms are powerful tools, but they are not neutral utilities. They are private systems with asymmetric control.

At PlanB Expat, the goal is not to help people fight platforms after a freeze. It is to help them design setups that do not require panic when a review happens.

If reading this makes you uncomfortable, that is usually a sign that your current setup is more fragile than you thought.

Do not ask whether Wise or Payoneer or Mercury will freeze accounts. They do. Ask whether your financial life survives when one of them does.

If the answer is "I'd figure it out" or "it probably won't happen to me," you are carrying more risk than you realize. The time to build redundancy is before you need it, not after you're standing in a foreign country with frozen funds and rent due in 72 hours.

Build a compliant stack that works for your situation, not a workaround you hope survives scrutiny.