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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

Civil forfeiture is fucking bullshit and should not be legal. Cops steal more money from Americans than burglars do.

Civil forfeiture is the only way to recover funds from scammers overseas. They will never be in US court or if they are it will be many years later. Go on RECAP and you can constantly see multi million dollar seizures for business email compromise, investment scams, etc. If it was only seized at time of conviction there would be basically no justice for victims. Yes, I agree that the typical case (median forfeiture is only a few thousand dollars) has more elements of government overreach in it than we should be comfortable with. But I don't think the practice should be eliminated entirely.

biggest theft every single year is stolen wages by employers from employees

Sure, but this clear whataboutism? But also inexplicable whataboutism?

I think that his point was, if you want to fight against sanctioned stealing then there is a more effective target to attack.

Larger, sure, but it's not obvious to me the resources would be better spent on labor law violations than on egregious forfeitures? They're both pretty piecemeal, small-dollar fights that in aggregate take billions of dollars each out of people's pockets.

Mostly I was shocked/amused at the juxtaposition of apparent opinions. "Cops are abusing people? Well what about about the employers abusing people?" is just a weird stance to take?

  > Mostly I was shocked/amused at the juxtaposition of apparent opinions. "Cops are abusing people? Well what about about the employers abusing people?" is just a weird stance to take?

Possibly. But focusing on a small target yet ignoring a large target then complaining "whataboutism" is a common tactic when harming the target, not the started goal, is the motive for action. Though in this case I don't suspect that your motive is to harm the police, your grey comment suggests that enough other people do.

Wage theft and civil forfeiture are both bad! And not so disproportionately so either, like $15b/yr to $3-7bn/yr. Which is why it’s so funny/weird/disingenuous to reply to “forfeiture should be illegal” with “wage theft is worse”. Why bring it up?

i agree, i was just being conversational

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