She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag for around a decade.

Is it possible that such a New Yorker could have all those things while barely making in the middle-class? Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income, e.g. maybe she or her husband worked at Goldman Sachs before their current careers, or come from rich families.

I too assumed that $50k was too big of a cash draw for any non-business account, but it didn't seem like a stretch to imagine that she fit the bank's profile of a wealthy customer (esp. at her young age). Patrick knows far more about the financial system than I do, so I have to assume his skepticism was founded in what he thought were widely applicable hard-coded rules and policy. I wish he would have spent a fraction of his word count telling us the assumptions/knowledge about bank rules that he had been misinformed on. Because this year-long multi-thousand dollar fraud investigation of his couldn't have just been because he didn't imagine a NYMag financial columnist might be wealthy?

From the article:

> When recounted these same statements, my friend Byrne Hobart, who has actually lived among this social milieu before, laughed knowingly and said “Ah, family money.”

It wasn't a misrepresentation; it was just vague, and the author read it wrong.