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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

One interesting and troubling aspect of this that I read in other reporting is they asserted a lot of the cash seized was drug money on the basis of drug contamination, but the FBI has deposited at least some of the cash into trustee accounts at financial institutions so no longer has the physical cash to test, thereby making it impossible to test again and show that it was just, for example, trace cross contamination from the boxes rented by the cannabis dispensaries to store their cash. To me that seems like borderline destruction of evidence.

I think the only reason this hasn't completely blown up in their face is they did manage to nab some shady characters, but the ends don't justify the means.

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> One interesting and troubling aspect of this that I read in other reporting is they asserted a lot of the cash seized was drug money on the basis of drug contamination

Civil asset forfeiture is generally used under this premise - that having large sums of cash suggests some criminal intent.

But of course, that only makes sense on the surface if you're out in public with it. (There are of course, many reasons you would have a large sum of cash in public other than drug deals.)

Seizing cash which is in a safe deposit box is a few steps further, which raises the hairs on the back of my neck. What is next? Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?

>What is next? Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?

that is how Al Capone was taken down, isn't it? That is the reason government pushes you to use banks by in particular attacking even very modest cash piles. And you do have that $10K bank transaction limit triggering law enforcement check.

Tax Evasion, rather different. It was based on their visible wealth, not snooping on their accounts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Tax_evasion

https://youtu.be/G56VgsLfKY4

Even the Joker wont take on the IRS.

What's funny is, the IRS really actually does want you to declare all money to have taxes paid.

Even the stuff which is from criminal activity.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17

That is, presumably, someone else's problem if you report money received from money laundering or bribes.

In Canada, the CRA (our IRS) is allowed to tattle on you if the crime they suspect could be “serious criminality”, defined as could involve a sentence of 14 years or more.

So when we legalized marijuana, most of the possible infractions have sentences up to 14 years and that’s no coincidence.

Bringing marijuana across a border? Up to 14 years!

Making an extract? Up to 14 years!

Sharing with a minor? Up to 14 years!

Isn't the 10K the reporting threshold for the bank?

(vs actually triggering any sort of law enforcement check on that particular transaction)

US banks are generally required to report all cash transactions over $10K. However, they're also supposed to report smaller cash transactions that look suspicious. Like if you deposit $5K cash today, and then another $5K cash tomorrow, then it's likely that the bank will file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with FinCEN.

Note particularly that attempting to shape your deposits to avoid SARs - by depositing on different days, or different banks - is itself a federal crime.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5324

In Canada that's the amount where your transaction get automatically submitted to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada). Abnormal smaller transaction patterns and suspicious transaction can also be reported to FINTRAC for analysis.

"FINTRAC analyzes approximately 19 million transactions per year. In 2017, FINTRAC made 2,000 disclosures to police forces." according to Wikipedia.

> Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?

Or less! Obeying the law is illegal!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

It does raise concern but also banks always monitor transactions looking for anomalies. So while this is physical inspection, it’s not far removed from what banks already do with electronic transactions.

It is quite far removed from what banks do.

For example, if a bank detects an anomaly, they report it. What they DO NOT do is transfer the suspicious funds to a police bank account.

What I'm saying is I think it _is_ a step too far. I also think it violates people's constitutional rights. But I don't think it's so different from already monitoring people's transactions.

A private organization monitoring transactions and reporting those to the relevant tax authority is "not so different" from police breaking locks open, taking cash without a warrant, and depositing it into the police bank account?

So just use a bank that won’t report it.

They are slowly arm-twisting those banks into reporting it.

Swiss banks ain't what they used to be. Cayman islands too.

Baffling. The bank can't keep your money if they think it's somehow ill-gotten, and the police can. It's a world of difference.

They only way a bank should send data to the government is if the government has warrant. The fact that this is not the case is a problem. Let's not normalize this overreach further.

Not what happens in reality. A transfer of $10,000 on a US bank account will trigger an IRS flag for example.

> Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?

Yes, an "Unexplained Wealth Order" in the UK. If you appear to have too much wealth you can be obliged to explain how you lawfully acquired it on pain of seizure.

But at least you do get to explain it.

That's correct. Unexplained Wealth Orders target amounts in excess of £50 000 (usually far in excess, they've been used four times so far, with total targets of 143 million pounds).

The UWO must target an individual who is either: Politically exposed (e.g. (ex)leaders and senior officials of a country and their families) or Reasonably Believed to be involved in Serious Crime (e.g. bank robbers) and whose wealth lacks an apparent explanation. If the target either can't or won't explain their wealth it may be seized.

UWOs are supposed to be reformed to make them work even when you've paid lawyers to make the apparent ownership very opaque. Right now if you're benefiting from an opaque "trust" arrangement maybe spanning several countries it may be impossible to show how that wealth is really "yours" legally, without the co-operation you would have been required to show as part of the UWO.

In practice it often happens, as I understand it, that the UWO target decides the best way out is to just hand over the wealth, because the real answer to "Why do you have this wealth?" is "I did a bunch of crimes" and that is a confession of crime, for which you might do prison time, and either they don't trust lawyers or the lawyers they hired couldn't come up with another story that would hold water.

Sadly the current (Tory) and former (Tory, Tory, and Tory back many years now) UK governments have been much better at talking up their commitment to transparency than at actually taking any steps to prevent the UK (and especially London) functioning as a laundromat and dormitory for crooks to wash their dirty money and sleep comfortably knowing the people they stole from can't reach them...

Wow, this is pretty dystopian. "You have money that we didn't know about so you have to explain yourself, or we will assume you acquired it illegally and take it from you". That's not due process. That's not innocent until proven guilty. (Yes, I know UK legal standards are different than the US's, but I believe these things to be rights people should universally have.) That's not rule of law; that's rule by thugs.

I guess that's strictly "better" than the nearly-zero-recourse civil forfeiture travesty we have here in the US, but... still not great.

Almost every country has some form of this law. Sometimes the money is confiscated, other times it is treated as a taxable event at the highest rate possible, etc.

In what way is this not "Due process" ?

The presumption of innocence does not mean you're entitled to obstruct investigators. "But you haven't proved that I'm guilty" also doesn't work to stop detectives entering your home with a search warrant.

From OPs explaination, if you won't explain how you got the money it'll be forfeited. That's the opposite of presumption of innocence.

I'm ok with having large amounts of cash with no obvious legitimate source triggering an investigation, but that's not what's happening.

The UK doesn't have a 5th Amendment.

Yeah, because they don't really have an actual consolidated constitution, but the presumption of innocence is one of the principles of English Common Law (see Woolmington v DPP), as well as being one of the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

They just sneak past it by not actually sentencing you of a crime.

UK has parliamentary sovereignty, so any presumed common law right only exists until the Parliament passes a bill that effectively nullifies it.

If you target the very wealthy, it's a very tiny burden to make them do paperwork to explain the origin of their money. In a situation like that, you can achieve due process without presumption of innocence.

This can be used for values over £50000, though.

That's probably not a great threshold, but for now I'm more worried about where it has been used than where it could theoretically be used.

Suppose you have a $30k salary, and one day $10,000,000 million appears in your bank account. Maybe someone in your town was killed on the same day.

Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?

it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for inocme tax evasion -> he had access to absurd amount of wealth, and there is no way the could have aquired it legally.

Again - this is not what's happening.

Triggering the investigation is fine and reasonable.

Confiscating the wealth without evidence of a crime is the issue.

Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US is regularly confiscating not tens of millions of dollars, but mere thousands of dollars for the simple reason of it being in cash. And this case is even worse - the cash was not on anyone's person out in public, but in a safe deposit box, not doing anything in particular.

I think it's much better than Civil Asset Forfeiture. Civil Asset Forfeiture regularly ends up confiscating money that the owner can readily prove they have via legitimate means. This won't happen here. It's only if you can't come up with a good reason that your money will be confiscated (and that process is happening through a court not just with a random police officer).

The issue with CAF is not forfeiture of assets without evidence of a crime; with CAF there is evidence of a crime, but not necessarily evidence that the forfeited asset is related to the crime, with little or difficult legal recourse to recover the assets.

Sometimes the case is never brought to trial [1]; in other cases the owner of the assets is never even charged with a crime [2]. When the forfeiture creates a financial burden [3] or the asset has the potential for depreciation [3], the accused may have even a financial incentive to settle rather than go to trial.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31446215

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588268

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365463

[4] https://cre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/37_2_3_Federal_Fo...

>it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for inocme tax evasion -> he had access to absurd amount of wealth, and there is no way the could have aquired it legally.

Actually, it wasn't that Capone had "an absurd amount of wealth," the amount was irrelevant. Just ask J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others who weren't put in jail for being "too wealthy." It was because Capone didn't pay taxes on that income

In fact, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats "illegal" income[0] exactly the same way it treats "legal" income for tax purposes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_...

Suppose you live in a free country where innocence is assumed and guilt must be proven?

I'd much rather live in a place where that dang mobster that "no one can touch" gets a little rich and evades the law (until that day he doesn't), than to live in a dystopian totalitarian mega-state (e.g. China).

> Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?

Yes, very much so. It's very, very, incredibly dangerous to fall into the trap of allowing a system that asks someone to prove their innocence and that is exactly what your question is asking.

> it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for income (sic) tax evasion

Nearly the same is not the same. In other words, it'd be OK to check that the $10,000,000 dollar bank account owner did pay taxes on it. If not, well, ooof. But also, how do we know he had a $10M bank account in the first place? That info had better be obtained legally too.

> it'd be OK to check that the $10,000,000 dollar bank account owner did pay taxes on it.

Scenario:

John Doe has 10 million dollars appear in his bank account. No evidence that it was obtained legally and no evidence that any taxes were ever paid.

Option IRS/Alcapone - he goes to jail for Tax evasion

Option 'Unexplained Wealth Order' - UK government seizes assets because they should it could not be obtained legally. He is still free and out and about

If anything the option you are advocating is "worse" as in it is harsher.

It's not "you have money we didn't know about", it's "you have an amount of money that requires explanation".

It's more like "we see a lot of smoke coming out of your house, satisfy us there isn't a fire or we're coming in with the hoses". Viewing that through the "innocent until proven guilty" lens is like trying to argue the fire crew have to stay outside until they see actual flames

IANAL but I think throwing "innocent until proven guilty" around might not be valid outside of criminal justice.

Wait till you learn about ASBO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order

>What is next? Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?

The police? Shit, this is exactly what the youth are demanding now. Wealth confiscation is all the rage with Gen Z and younger millenials.

A congressionally passed wealth tax is not the same as the FBI doing asset forfeiture on secured valuables storage but you already knew that before you posted.

Oh I love this complaint - so it's cool if we leave younger generation with massive national debt, unaffordable housing and a climate disaster, but how dare they make any demands on us? Ungrateful little shits, should be happy we didn't send them into the coalmines!

>massive national debt

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're not for smaller government though, right?

Life experience has taught me that people who advocate 'small government' don't have my best interests in mind.

I am happy with the concept of 'small government', but typically folks who use it dont mean what I think it should mean.

They are happy to spend a lot of my tax money on the prosecutor that will charge me for jaywalking, but want to cut spending on the public defence attorney that will defend me from the very same 'small government' they advocate.

They tend to invoke 'small government should not interfere' when I ask whether a companies should be able to screw me over, but they want 'full force of the law' when I do anything they dislike.

You spent a lot of words attacking strawmen rather that just addressing the question. If you are as deeply concerned about National Debt as you claim, are you fully bought into the idea that we need smaller, more efficient government?

Because otherwise I can answer the same way you did and say that my experience is the people who complain the most about us burdening future generations with debt are the same ones demanding expensive far-reaching government programs for everything under the sun.

i diasagree with your comment on every level

Originally I expressed no opinion about national debt, I merely point out hypocracy of making demands of future generation, but acting angry and righteous when those generations make requests of us.

also I spesifically stated that I do not buy into ideology typically attached to 'small government'.

also the premise that the only way to deal with national debt is to have smaller government is wrong, we could have higher taxes or print money

Lastly the idea that smaller government is more efficient or cheaper is wrong too - industries where the government is the only buyer, like prisons, tend to do terribly when they are given to the private sector - it creates insentive for corruption and fraud and is actually harder to manage as a market than it is for a government to run them directly. In every meteic, from recisevism to in prison murder rate, private prisons do worse.

I love that your alternate solution includes printing money, which is why we have this astronomical inflation now. Inflation which is hurting the poor and middle class more than the wealthy.

Most money is contaminated with drugs anyway, it doesn't prove anything [1]. Even if the money was contaminated with excessive amounts of drugs, what does it prove? That the owner of the drugs had a drug habit? That the money originated from somebody who had a drug habit?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency

Any way to squeeze those drugs back out? Asking for a friend…

The median is 1.37 micrograms of cocaine per bill, so roughly six hundred thousand bills to get a gram of cocaine.

And even if you want to buy the most expensive gram of coke, remember that money likely has more literal shit on it than cocaine. There's a reason food service staff is trained to always wash your hands after handling money.

> There's a reason food service staff is trained to always wash your hands after handling money.

"... to always wash their hands ...", I presume?

That's probably better grammar. I think it works as is though, as their training is "always wash your hands."

Who cares what the median is, though I'm surprised it's not zero.

The average is much higher at 29 mcg, so each gram is a far more reasonable $35k. But the variability is enormous. Choose the right bills and it'll cost you just under $8k (and a fortune in acetonitrile, but you can recover that!).

"Results demonstrated that "92% of the bills were positive for cocaine with a mean amount of 28.75 ± 139.07 micrograms per bill"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency

> mean amount of 28.75 ± 139.07 micrograms per bill"

Can I get the one with the negative 110 micrograms in it?

The distribution of cocaine is probably not symmetric around the mean. Should that stop us from using statistical methods that rely on assuming it is?

You are going to spend more on solvents, equipment and work to extract that than finding a dealer somewhere.

>so each gram is a far more reasonable $35k. But the variability is enormous. Choose the right bills and it'll cost you just under $8k

I assume a fair portion of the variability is in the bill amount, so the $35k dream is unreachable and the eight thousand bills likely requires mostly hundreds.

Maybe I should run all the bills through the wash, a new form of money laundering.

Not that new. Thankfully Australian dollar bills are plastic or I would have lost a few dollars over the years.

All the currency in circulation rubs up against currency that has been contaminated by drugs. It’s particularly an issue with one hundred dollar bills, which tend to set off the drug sniffing dogs.

https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/this-is-exactly-how-of...

Drug-sniffing dogs are set off by their handlers.

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...

> some cops jokingly refer to the dogs as "probable cause on four legs.

> And there are powerful incentives not to change how things are done, says Andy Falco, a former police K9 handler who now trains dogs and works as an expert witness for defense attorneys.

> "All [police departments] care about is how many cars you're pulling over, how much money is being seized because your dog alerted," he says, referring to departments that use civil asset forfeiture to keep money and other property found in cars after a K9 alerts to the scent of drugs.

> "They go, 'It's easy! All I gotta do is walk my dog around, and look for him to change his behavior slightly, and then we can go inside and sometimes we'll find a million dollars and then we can seize it!'"

> "There's been cars that my dog's hit on... and just because there wasn't a product in it, doesn't mean the dog can't smell it," says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer

They don't even have to be set off, just the presence of the dog allows them to say anything they like. Officer got a warrant to have me taken to a hospital to be "internally examined" all because they told a judge a dog "sniffed my butt" and they thought drugs might be up there. The dog never alerted and the officer even lamented in my presence that it was a "bad dog."

Not like the judge can ask the dog what happened.

Those quotes read identical to mob processes and tactics.

The American police is the most powerful gang in the country, not the least because they're largely immune to legal repercussions for the crimes they commit.

For example, this is not a murder, somehow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc&t=190s

If you do a swipe on any substantial amount of cash for drug traces it will end up positive unless it has just been minted.

> but the FBI has deposited at least some of the cash into trustee accounts at financial institutions so no longer has the physical cash to test

Does it go back into circulation at that point?

This is actually an interesting problem for collectors of old currency.

The government will deposit the face value of the currency as opposed to its collectible value. So someone who stored an old $1,000 bill doesn’t get the actual value of the bill (probably twice that on collectibles market)

Actually, a $1,000 bill is likely to be destroyed.

But that's the government's problem. Either they will have to pay the collectable value to the collector (if the property is to be returned to them) or not pay anything to the collector.

Well, it's also a "destruction of historical artifacts" problem.

I remember hearing about one of those cases. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-odd-truth-jan-16-2004/

> PINE LAWN, Missouri - Curtis Smith Senior wants his $1000 bill back. He carried the rare one-grand note in his pocket for 20 years. It was seized by police in the St. Louis suburb of Pine Lawn, when Smith was arrested during a traffic stop. Officials gave Smith a check last April in return, but he wants his really big bill. Now, the one-grand bill is in the City Hall safe of the mayor - who considers it novelty. Collectors say the bank note is worth much more than its face value. The $1000 bill was last printed in 1934 and was taken out of circulation in 1969. Officials say Smith can have the bill back, once it's no longer considered evidence. But they say he'll have to pay for it.

While it isn't available to borrow, here's what the search text of https://archive.org/details/banknotereport32n6krau/page/n11/... reports:

> The article was from the Jan. 24 edition of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, written by Heather Ratcliffe. It said that Pine Lawn, Mo., police had allowed Mayor Adrian Wright to “trade” $1,000 of his own money for a $1,000 note seized from Curtis Smith, who had been arrested on suspicion of dealing drugs and being intoxicated at the wheel of his pickup truck. Prosecutors did not file drug charges and ordered the money returned. Pine Lawn officials initially offered to pay Smith by check. They returned the-$ 1,000 note after a reporter inquired about the situation. Smith had carried the note around in his pocket for years as a novelty to show friends.

>Does it go back into circulation at that point?

Yeah presumably except any bills that may be too damaged/dirty/contaminated, which is the same for any cash, in which case it gets destroyed.

Why seize money only once?

Oh boy, you must have worked for Enron

Like 20+ years ago they were articles about people being prosecuted based on the only evidence their money in the wallet tested positive for drugs.

I recall one story where the lawyer asked the judge for a dollar tested it and it came back positive. Quote at the time was Something like 97% of all money has been exposed to drugs.

This is my memory of events, so take with grain of salt.

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