5 ms·

So now you can take my money if I keep it in cash and travel with it, or if I deposit it to a bank in under $10k increments, and if it's more than that, that's

by cbanek 10y ago

So now you can take my money if I keep it in cash and travel with it, or if I deposit it to a bank in under $10k increments, and if it's more than that, that's also suspicious. I guess just having money is suspicious these days... we're all supposed to spend it on fancy phones. Overall, it just feels like the IRS felt jealous of the civil forfeitures.

gefh 10y ago
The article hints that civil forfeiture may be the mechanism used here as well - if i had to pick a single policy to change in the USA it would be civil forfeiture. It just seems so glaringly unfair, surely both sides of the aisle could agree on this one
- stevenwoo 10y ago
  The problem is police departments across the country use civil forfeiture to fund day to day activities and it's a policy that gets a candidate the support and endorsement of law enforcement at the municipal and state level. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-wish-list-when-deciding-which-assets-to-seize.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-... The situation was depicted in the fictional TV show The Shield fifteen years ago but it turns out, the truth is not worse than the crazy stuff they told in those fictional stories.
helthanatos 10y ago
Nope. Only the government and those who fund the government are allowed. Luckily, I don't have much money for them to take.
somethingsimple 10y ago
> So now you can take my money if I keep it in cash and travel with it What do you mean by that? Just curious.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Having cash can be suspicious and there's cases where agents just confiscate the money until you prove it's "clean". There was an article here years ago where they did this to poker winners - even had a website where cops traded tips. Follow target around, wait for some cause to pull them over, then take the cash.
  - HashThis 10y ago
    This violates our constitution and our rights. The government is out right stealing. They are criminals for stealing. We can't excuse it.
    - ferentchak 10y ago
      No man it's fine. They target the money not you and money doesn't have rights. /cry /sarcasm
mc32 10y ago
Those things are not illegal per-se but can be signals of things resulting from illegal transactions. So, they are more a heuristic --but not following procedure because it can be used to evade detection is made illegal. The one thing I don't understand is why some of those figures rarely keep up with inflation. I think they should. 10,000 isn't what it used to be.
- nhebb 10y ago
  From the article: > The IG took a random sample of 278 IRS forfeiture actions in cases where structuring was the primary basis for seizure. The report found that in 91 percent of those cases, the individuals and business had obtained their money legally. That's not a very good signal. Even if the numbers were reversed and 91% had obtained their money illegally, I'd say that a 9% false seizure rate would still be way too high.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I agree it's a rough tool and one they likely could replace with better tools in this day and age. And one hopes they would.
    - HashThis 10y ago
      It isn't okay to use a rough tool to steal. The IRS is stealing from people. They need proof people have this money illegally or they are an outright criminal who is stealing.
  - elastic_church 10y ago
    And HSBC routinely circumvented all capital controls made to protect us from gangs and terrorists, for gangs and terrorists. This law only targets compliant civilians.
- paulmd 10y ago
  > they are more a heuristic This is kind of an ironic claim on a community that believes so strongly in "black boxes" like machine learning. Golly, if their heuristics point in a particular direction isn't that a ~signal~ with predictive power and market value? Take heed of this the next time you extoll the virtues of blind inference - whether human or machine. Maybe the next time it'll be _your_ soap dispenser that doesn't recognize black people. Or redlines black people and keeps them from getting a credit card, or mortgage, etc. Because the reality is - there are all kinds of signals like these that are real. People in certain areas are more likely to be poor, to default on their loans, etc - that's a real signal, just like these high-value financial transactions. People doing big transactions in cash are way more likely to be involved in crime - just like people in certain areas are way more likely to default or whatever. But relative risk says nothing about the false positive rate. People do cash transactions all the time, legitimately. Poor people manage to pay their mortgage without defaulting all the time. Also - the reason people are trapped in that area in the first place is social, and economic. The decision to value a particular signal - or trust a model that blindly ignores confounding factors - ultimately lies with you, the human creating the model. Never hide behind it. The machine is just a machine, it just does math for you. It only calculates the model you tell it to. If you let your model be racist, that's on you. You designed it that way. You designed it to be racist. The creation of the "black box" model is one of the scariest things we've done in the last couple decades. Because now, nobody can tell you why it happened, it just was a bunch of neurons that attributed various weights to factors in your profile. If you're lucky they'll even be able to tell you what some of the weighting factors might be (but usually not). And now it's nobody's fault, it's just ~the model~. It's a blatant abdication of any responsibility for the faults or consequences of your work.
nannePOPI 10y ago
This is happening in all western countries, it's just a way to strip normal people of any kind of power.

by cbanek 10y ago

gefh 10y ago

The article hints that civil forfeiture may be the mechanism used here as well - if i had to pick a single policy to change in the USA it would be civil forfeiture. It just seems so glaringly unfair, surely both sides of the aisle could agree on this one

stevenwoo 10y ago
The problem is police departments across the country use civil forfeiture to fund day to day activities and it's a policy that gets a candidate the support and endorsement of law enforcement at the municipal and state level. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-wish-list-when-deciding-which-assets-to-seize.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-... The situation was depicted in the fictional TV show The Shield fifteen years ago but it turns out, the truth is not worse than the crazy stuff they told in those fictional stories.

helthanatos 10y ago

Nope. Only the government and those who fund the government are allowed. Luckily, I don't have much money for them to take.

somethingsimple 10y ago

> So now you can take my money if I keep it in cash and travel with it What do you mean by that? Just curious.

MichaelGG 10y ago
Having cash can be suspicious and there's cases where agents just confiscate the money until you prove it's "clean". There was an article here years ago where they did this to poker winners - even had a website where cops traded tips. Follow target around, wait for some cause to pull them over, then take the cash.
- HashThis 10y ago
  This violates our constitution and our rights. The government is out right stealing. They are criminals for stealing. We can't excuse it.
  - ferentchak 10y ago
    No man it's fine. They target the money not you and money doesn't have rights. /cry /sarcasm

mc32 10y ago

Those things are not illegal per-se but can be signals of things resulting from illegal transactions. So, they are more a heuristic --but not following procedure because it can be used to evade detection is made illegal. The one thing I don't understand is why some of those figures rarely keep up with inflation. I think they should. 10,000 isn't what it used to be.

nhebb 10y ago
From the article: > The IG took a random sample of 278 IRS forfeiture actions in cases where structuring was the primary basis for seizure. The report found that in 91 percent of those cases, the individuals and business had obtained their money legally. That's not a very good signal. Even if the numbers were reversed and 91% had obtained their money illegally, I'd say that a 9% false seizure rate would still be way too high.
- mc32 10y ago
  I agree it's a rough tool and one they likely could replace with better tools in this day and age. And one hopes they would.
  - HashThis 10y ago
    It isn't okay to use a rough tool to steal. The IRS is stealing from people. They need proof people have this money illegally or they are an outright criminal who is stealing.
- elastic_church 10y ago
  And HSBC routinely circumvented all capital controls made to protect us from gangs and terrorists, for gangs and terrorists. This law only targets compliant civilians.
paulmd 10y ago
> they are more a heuristic This is kind of an ironic claim on a community that believes so strongly in "black boxes" like machine learning. Golly, if their heuristics point in a particular direction isn't that a ~signal~ with predictive power and market value? Take heed of this the next time you extoll the virtues of blind inference - whether human or machine. Maybe the next time it'll be _your_ soap dispenser that doesn't recognize black people. Or redlines black people and keeps them from getting a credit card, or mortgage, etc. Because the reality is - there are all kinds of signals like these that are real. People in certain areas are more likely to be poor, to default on their loans, etc - that's a real signal, just like these high-value financial transactions. People doing big transactions in cash are way more likely to be involved in crime - just like people in certain areas are way more likely to default or whatever. But relative risk says nothing about the false positive rate. People do cash transactions all the time, legitimately. Poor people manage to pay their mortgage without defaulting all the time. Also - the reason people are trapped in that area in the first place is social, and economic. The decision to value a particular signal - or trust a model that blindly ignores confounding factors - ultimately lies with you, the human creating the model. Never hide behind it. The machine is just a machine, it just does math for you. It only calculates the model you tell it to. If you let your model be racist, that's on you. You designed it that way. You designed it to be racist. The creation of the "black box" model is one of the scariest things we've done in the last couple decades. Because now, nobody can tell you why it happened, it just was a bunch of neurons that attributed various weights to factors in your profile. If you're lucky they'll even be able to tell you what some of the weighting factors might be (but usually not). And now it's nobody's fault, it's just ~the model~. It's a blatant abdication of any responsibility for the faults or consequences of your work.

nannePOPI 10y ago

This is happening in all western countries, it's just a way to strip normal people of any kind of power.