Listen.
You asked the question. Can they garnish my business account.
So let me answer it. Straight. No dance.
No.
Not the way you are picturing it.
A merchant cash advance company cannot walk into your bank and freeze your money. They cannot point a finger and say give me that account. Garnishment, levy, restraint, those are weapons of the court. To hold those weapons they must first sue you. Serve you. Win. Get a judgment with a judge's name on it. Only then can they send a restraining notice to your bank, a levy, a garnishment to whoever holds your money.
So the word you typed, garnish, that comes later. If it comes at all.
You understand?
But now I must tell you the other thing. The thing that is keeping you up.
They do not need garnishment to reach into your account right now.
Because you let them in.
When you signed, somewhere in that contract, you gave them an ACH authorization. A standing key to your bank account. Every day, every week, they reach in and take. That is not garnishment. That is not the court. That is the door you opened with your own hand. And it feels like garnishment. It bleeds like garnishment. But legally it is a different animal, and that difference, that difference is everything.
Hold that.
Now. The second account. The one they don't know about, the one you're thinking of moving the money to. You're asking, can they touch that one too?
Direct answer. Not by ACH. They can only pull from accounts you authorized. A second bank, a fresh account they never had the key to, they cannot just debit it.
But.
The moment they get a judgment, a judgment reaches everything. Every account with your business name. They serve a levy, the bank freezes it. The new account, the old account, does not matter to a judgment. A judgment is a net, not a fishing line.
So do not think the second account is a hiding place. It is a delay. Sometimes not even that.
Now you are sitting there thinking, fine. I will close the account. I will cut the cord. I will stop the bleeding tonight.
No. Listen again.
This is where the panicked man destroys himself.
Revoking the ACH, that is your right. You can write your bank, in writing, three business days before the next pull, and tell them stop. That is real. Federal payment rules let you do it. The bank can put a stop on it.
But hear me, revoking the ACH does not erase the debt. It only closes the door. And the man on the other side of that door, when he hears it slam, he reaches for his lawyers.
And here is the trap, the real trap. If you close the account, or move your card processing to a new account, or quietly redirect the money, the funder will not call it self-defense. They will call it fraud. Breach. Many MCA contracts list "closing your bank account" as an event of default in black ink. Some go further and scream fraudulent transfer, conversion, bad faith. Now you are not a struggling merchant. Now, in their telling, you are a thief.
And one more thing nobody tells the frightened man, closing the account does not even stop the money. Your card processor keeps dumping deposits into that dead account until you log in and change the settlement destination. You closed the door and left the window open.
So do not run. Running is how they catch you.
Now breathe. I want to give you something real to hold.
The reconciliation clause.
Look in your contract for it. Reconciliation. True-up. It is the most important sentence you own, and most merchants never read it.
Here is the secret of the whole thing. A true MCA is not a loan. They did not lend you money. They bought a piece of your future sales. They bought a percentage. And because it is a purchase of receivables and not a loan, that is the only reason they escape the usury laws, the interest-rate ceilings that would otherwise make their deal illegal.
But a purchase of receivables has to behave like one.
If your sales drop by half, the payment should drop by half. That is what reconciliation means. You bought fifteen percent of what comes in. Less comes in, you take less. That is the deal. That is the whole logic.
So if your payment is fixed, if it takes the same brutal number whether you made money or made nothing, if it is, like you said, more than I make,
then ask the hard question.
Is this still a purchase? Or has it quietly become a loan wearing a costume?
Because courts have looked at this. When the funder refuses to reconcile, refuses to lower the payment when sales fall, refuses to honor the true-up, judges have said: this is not a sale of receivables. This is a loan. And if it is a loan, and the rate is what these rates usually are, now the word usury walks into the room. And a usurious contract can be voided. The whole thing. Gone.
You hear what I am saying?
The thing that is killing you, the payment bigger than your income, may not be your weakness. It may be their breach. It may be the very crack that breaks their contract open.
So tonight, you do this. You request reconciliation. In writing. You send them your real bank statements, your real processor statements, your real receipts, and you demand the payment match reality the way the contract says it must. You document it. You keep the proof. Because if they ignore you, that silence becomes your sword later.
Now the house. You signed a personal guarantee, almost everyone does, and you are lying awake wondering if they can take your home.
Same answer as the beginning. Not directly. Not by ACH. Only through a judgment, and then a lien, and then, maybe, a forced sale. And whether they ever reach the house depends on where you live. Some states wrap your home in a homestead exemption so thick they can never touch it. Other states, and I will not pretend otherwise, give your home almost no shield at all. It varies. Wildly. By state. Check yours. Do not guess.
And the FDCPA, the law that stops abusive debt collectors from calling and threatening, do not lean on it here. It was built for consumer debt. Business debt mostly falls outside it. The funder is usually not a "debt collector" under that law. Some state laws still bite at harassment. But do not expect the federal shield. It mostly is not there for you.
So what is real, and what is bluff?
Real: the ACH pulls, today, right now. Real: a lawsuit, a judgment, then a levy on every account. Real: a confession of judgment, if you signed one, that lets them get a judgment fast, sometimes in a day or two, without even telling you first. Look for that clause. It is poison.
Bluff: the threat that they can drain your accounts tomorrow without a court. The threat that there is nowhere to turn. The threat that you have no defense. You have defenses. Reconciliation is one. Recharacterization is another. The shape of their contract may be their own undoing.
So here is your tonight.
Do not close the account in a panic. Read your contract, find reconciliation, find any confession of judgment. Pull your real numbers together. And before you revoke a single ACH, before you move a single dollar, you call a lawyer who fights MCA funders. One who knows your state. Because the right move done wrong becomes fraud, and the wrong move done in fear becomes a judgment.
This is not legal advice. I have not read your contract. I do not know your state. Your outcome lives inside those two things, the paper you signed, and the ground you stand on. Only a lawyer looking at both can tell you what is yours.
But the fear you walked in with,
put it down.
They cannot garnish your account tomorrow.
And the thing crushing you may be the very thing that frees you.
Now go. Quietly. And do it right.
This is the work Delancey Street does: a business-debt-only firm, attorney-backed, that settles merchant cash advance debt on a performance basis, with no fee until a settlement exists. The first call is a diagnosis, not a commitment, and it costs nothing.