Does this mean that someone with a $10K credit card could be picked up and have their assets stripped? What about those business guys with oversea bank accounts that are undeclared? I wonder if anyone would use this law to stop political opponents..
If you've ever bought a car or house, or really made any purchase over $10,000, your bank filed a report to the government with every detail they know about you and every detail about the transaction made. That's not paranoid delusions, that's publicly known law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_intelligence#Unite...
The Currency Transaction Report only covers cash transactions. That means green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them, not electronic money in a bank account.
Deposit or withdraw cash, buy money orders or cashiers checks with cash, buy a car or house with cash, and if it's over $10,000, it gets reported.
But if you write use a check, credit card, ACH or wire transfer, that's not cash and the bank doesn't have to file a Currency Transaction Report.
That's because these transactions are already in the banking system, so there's already a good audit trail of what money is moving where.
In the US, there is also this thing called Suspicious Activity Reports. They are triggered with any transaction >$3,000 (typically cash-equivalents; but that can be wide reaching). There are some requirements where banks must report but there is also the discretionary part. This is where banks can be held liable for not reporting suspicious activity. Because of that, it is safe to assume most banks report every transaction above $3,000 of any type.
But let's face it, most bank databases probably have something like this going on; GRANT SELECT ON Transactions TO USGOVT
As for the undeclared accounts, theoretically this should be covered by the FBAR form that US citizens are supposed to file if they keep money in foreign banks. I'm not quite sure how involved the IRS gets in investigating undeclared accounts, but as of right now it looks to be on the honor system. When I filed my FBAR, it didn't even ask for any real verification of the assets I claimed in a foreign account, it just asked for the total value and to plug in the calculations to see if I owed anything.
As for using this as a weapon, highly doubtful. The bill mostly modifies existing law to either modernize it or to add punctuation for clarity purposes, and the counterfitting/laundering claims are pretty straight forward. For example, for counterfitting, they want to add the clause:
“ Whoever, with intent to defraud, has custody, control, or possession of any material, tool, machinery, or other equipment that can be used to make, alter, forge, or counterfeit any obligation or other security of any foreign government, bank, or corporation; or”.
Basically, unless they were already doing some pretty suspect stuff, you'd have to go through a lot of work to set up a condition where you could attack an opponent with it. Same with the "funding terrorism" sections; the burden of proof it looks for is pretty high to use this as a political weapon, when shitposting on twitter and facebook would probably be just as effective.