Of course they should be able to. I'm saying that the totality of the story (spending $30,000, which represents all of your money, when you're unemployed, to buy a vehicle in cash from a stranger who lives 1,000 miles away) is suspicious.
- Person is unemployed and so needs to find the best deal on everything. The best deal happens to be far away.
- person needs a vehicle so he can get to a job
- person has bad credit and/or is unbanked
- person is not in a position to buy a $14,000 loan ($30k @ 20%, prevailing rate for "deep subprime" used car loans per Experian)
This person is spending their last money to invest in their next job. How would you move the money if you don't have a bank?
Richer people buy cars from other states all the time, for example by paying CarMax or a dealer a transfer fee to move the car for them (and thereby are not getting the best deal as the dealer takes a margin).
You don't need a $30,000 truck (which, again, represents your life savings) to get to work. Just the cost of collision insurance and the cost of flying to Columbus and driving it back to New Orleans would wipe out any putative savings obtained.
Again, I'm not saying the cops should have seized his money. I'm explicitly saying they shouldn't be able to do that. I'm asking if there's a middle ground between "cops can arbitrarily decide to seize any cash you're carrying" (status quo) and "there is no amount of cash that a person can possess which triggers reasonable suspicion of illegal activity" (what many people here seem to be advocating)