I am not an expert and I won't pretend to have ever worked in the banking industry in any way.
I used to gamble a bit on midgets who ride horses in circles. You learn an awful lot about taxes and cash and banks doing this. This knowledge comes from doing your taxes, talking to tellers at the track, talking to tellers at the bank, talking to managers at the track, and mangers at the bank. I will leave out the other gamblers who make my tin foil hat look a bit small and thin.
Basically my opinion is that you can do about anything you want if the money is being tracked. Close out a big bank account and get the money in a bank check of some sort and you can use it for a down payment for a house, buy a car, buy a gun, or buy some collectable whatzit. No one really cares.
Cash is where folks get goofey.
Basically my opinion is that the old 10k number is history.
These days anything odd is what folks look for and are expected to catch. Since this applies to cash, that is where things come into play.
I figure if someone normally withdraws 20 dollars a week and suddenly starts messing around with hundreds or low thousands, that will catch some attention.
I am saying in this post that I don't know if I am right.
But I heard an awful lot from all sorts of different folks at different tracks and different banks to be willing to say things did not get tighter after 9/11/01.
I like cash and since it is always drawn from my account I do not worry about it. There is always a papertrail for legal stuff, what they want to check is if there is a lack of a paper trail and they have to flag you to do that.
Depending on how the money was deposited for the check the original article is about I figure that could explain it all, or perhaps some of the posters here are correct that there was no real problem it was more a matter of timing.