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The FBI seized safe deposit boxes knowing ‘some’ belonged to ‘honest citizens’
- jaywalk 5y ago"It is better to let 100 guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer." We've come a long way.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoYes we have, now all 101 are guilty of whatever the government proclaims you are guilty of.
- danlugo92 5y agoNot your keys, not your money ;).
- TheGigaChad 5y agoBut Crypto Bad, am I right HackerNews cucks?
- igammarays 5y agoCrypto is not magically above government powers. The government can still put you in jail until you hand it over.
- Claudus 5y agoI actually had crypto in an online Russian exchange that DHS seized and lost basically everything I had in it as a result. Not sure what I am supposed to do about that.
- FDSGSG 5y agoIf it's a significant sum you should speak to a lawyer, you may be able to claim those funds back from law enforcement. Liberty Reserve claims are seemingly being processed (after 7 years), I don't see why BTC-e would be treated very differently. If it's a very large amount, you could be able to negotiate a success-based fee where the lawyers will cost you nothing unless you get your money. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/a-light-at-the-end-of-liberty-reserves-demise/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/a-light-at-the-end-of-li... It will take a long time for you to see that money, but there's a good chance that it'll be worth even more by then.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoLooks like the company behind the safe deposit boxes was pretty shady: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgwwb/criminals-hid-guns-cash-drugs-in-iris-scanning-vaults-in-a-strip-mall-feds-say https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgwwb/criminals-hid-guns-ca... Some quotes: >According to the DEA, the company encouraged drug dealers to stash controlled substances in its safe deposit boxes, advised its customers on how to avoid government scrutiny, used a nearby gold business to help its customers launder money, and facilitated drug deals inside the business. >To access the vaults, customers had to use an iris and hand print scanner. The keys they used to open their vaults were unmarked so the employees and law enforcement couldn’t know which key goes to which vault. "Since we don't know your name we can't provide information on your box to anyone,” Steven Gregory, prescient of U.S. Private Vaults, said in a 2012 commercial. >In retrospect, U.S. Private Vaults’ advertisements are telling. “I’ve heard horror stories about individuals who have lost everything when their bank safe deposit box was frozen due to court order or a tax lien,” an actor said in one commercial. “At U.S. Private Vaults, I never have to worry about anything like that. My personal information is never shared or stored in a big bank computer system.” >“Employees of defendant [U.S. Private Vaults] would conduct counter surveillance of the neighborhood and warn customers when they observed law enforcement,” the indictment said. If employees figured out the cops were on to them, “they would attempt to warn the customer, delay law enforcement, or even remove all but a nominal amount of cash from the box for the customer, to prevent law enforcement from discovering and seizing the bulk of the cash.” Given all of the above, I can see why the FBI thought it needed to seize everything. As long as they are giving stuff back to their rightful owners, I don't see that much of a problem.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoreason.com is a libertarian magazine that promotes a " gubberment always big, always bad" ideology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)
- Clubber 5y agoWell in this case as well as civil forfeiture, it seems they've got a point, wouldn't you agree?
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt's cherry-picking to suit an agenda. Where are the articles on the devastating effects of under-regulation?
- nobodyandproud 5y agoOkay, but unchecked what will happen is the heavy-handed defanging of the FBI rather than creating strong accountability, because it’s easier to defund (see IRS). We’ve had four years (or really, 20 years) of deregulation. We already known it sucks. Right now, it’s tax payers who are largely accountable for law enforcement officers who stretch or violate the law and constitution. And it doesn’t get much attention because most of us are unaffected (so far). How do you maintain strong law enforcement at all levels—and make no mistake, we need it—but also maintain discipline?
- salawat 5y agoA broken clock is still right twice a day.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoLibertarianism is a manufactured ideology to suit the billionaire class, the aspiring billionaires, and those with privilege to usurp the social contract with hyperindividualism and rejection of collective duty. Ultimately, libertarianism is a utopian anarchist fantasy promoted by Koch/Cato that doesn't scale. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself. - James Madison
- jws 5y agoThe article doesn't address a significant issue, when the FBI executed their warrants and shut down the private vault company, what should they have done with any stored boxes not named in the warrant? Left them in an unguarded building with no legal way for the owners to access them?
- 34679 5y agoAttempt to identify the owners and return the boxes without opening them.
- ascagnel_ 5y agoSerious question: how do you do that when the organization running the boxes was selling anonymized services? There's a Vice News article on this same event that's been shared elsewhere in the comment thread, and that article includes an advertisement the company put out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5AJh_j-GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5AJh_j-GE The company is openly marketing itself as refusing any form of identification in order to provide total anonymity. Aside from the one user who claims they added identifying data to the exterior of the box, how do you propose identifying the owner of an otherwise-featureless box without opening it?
- nybble41 5y agoYou post a public notice saying where the deposit boxes are being held at the original physical location, the company's web site, the local papers, and any other likely locations. If anyone shows up claiming to own one of the boxes you follow the same authentication procedures the original custodian would have used. Then you leave them in private to unlock the box and remove their property. At no point during the claims process should the temporary custodian attempt to open any of the boxes or observe their contents, as that would be abusing their power to search presumably innocent parties outside the scope of the warrant. If sufficient time (decades, at least) passes without any claim after proper notice is given, the property can be considered abandoned. At that point someone may attempt to open the box by force.
- 5y ago
- ur-whale 5y agoYour tax dollar at work.
- hirundo 5y ago> Various chain emails over the past seven years have warned readers about the possibility of Homeland Security seizing items like gold, silver and guns from their safe deposit boxes at the bank. This isn’t possible without first obtaining a search warrant, since those boxes are private property. And banking officials told us random seizures just aren’t happening. We rate this statement Pants on Fire. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jul/26/chain-email/homeland-security-can-seize-safe-deposit-boxes-wit/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jul/26/chain-emai... Perhaps it's still just a conspiracy theory with respect to the DHS rather than the FBI. It doesn't seem to be out of line with civil asset forfeiture policy, other than it being from safe deposit boxes rather than vehicles or luggage. > Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
- gowld 5y agoPlease read the article you linked. "forfeiture" has surpassed burglary; and most of that is criminal forfeiture, after a conviction, returning stolen property or paying a fine. The biggest single chunk is what Bernie Madoff stole.
- hirundo 5y agoHere's the conclusion of the article after reviewing those details, including Madoff: "Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. "
- gruez 5y agoThe implication that the author wants to make is that the cops are worse than the criminals, and that's the conclusion most people will make on first reading of it. However, after further inspection that's totally acceptable, because cops mostly (?) go after bad people, whereas criminals mostly go after innocent people. It's like saying "police are responsible for more kidnappings (aka. arrests) than criminals". Technically true, but misleading.
- mistrial9 5y agoCalifornia seized many thousands of bank "Safe Deposit" boxes as being "unattended" during a fiscal crisis a decade+ ago. It caused a lot of commotion in certain legal circles, but was not in the mainstream news much. (details on request)
- rolobio 5y agoDetails please! I haven't heard about this.
- gruez 5y agosounds like escheat? https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159 >QUINN: Yes. We forget about retirement accounts, insurance policies, safe deposit boxes. When you forget about stuff like that, after a certain amount of time, the state is able to step in, take ownership of your unclaimed stuff and hold onto it until you can come and claim it.
- hirundo 5y ago> Not-So-Safe-Deposit Boxes: States Seize Citizens' Property to Balance Their Budgets (2008) https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4832471&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4832471&page=1
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoWow that is so messed up. I think why the bank settled for that one lady was because they just gave her valuables to the state without notifying her. The bank completely forgoed everything about ethics and likely couldn't tell a judge with a straight face "she was an inactive customer" when she has written documentation from them that she was. Also, California throwing that in the general fund? And people think democrats have their back? A democratic legislature enacted those policies to actively steal from their constituents even faster.
- tim333 5y ago
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoIf the fed's "A-team" is getting into these kinds of messes then what does that say for all the B-rate agencies (AFT, DEA, etc) that get all the people who couldn't get jobs at the flagship agencies? Edit: Removed comment unnecessarily insulting to ugly strippers
- ryanmarsh 5y agoNow imagine what the Tuesday afternoon strippers at the ATF, DEA, etc. etc. are up to. The ATF is busy 4am porch-stepping on law abiding gun owners, shooting their women, children, and dogs in the process.
- Bancakes 5y agoFun fact: the ATF regulates even flashbangs in local/state police. You have to register them and report each used grenade. What a tumorous agency.
- wavefunction 5y agoI am in favor of that. Anything that provides more independent oversight of police since they can't seem to self-regulate.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoHow about we disallow municipal police forces from owning fucking military-grade equipment instead?
- freshair 5y agoThat's fine by me, I like it when cops have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. If one of us wanted to fuck around with grenades, we'd have to do the paperwork for each one. Why should that rule be any different for the police? I don't like it when police get exempted from these laws. Why are they allowed to buy post-86 machine guns? The rest of us have to buy machine guns registered prior to 1986 or get a machine gun manufacturing license. Pre-86 machine guns are very expensive at auctions, but since the police are exempt from this they are allowed to buy comparably dirt-cheap machine guns brand new. Make the same rules apply to them, and if that means they can no longer afford machine guns, so be it. And all the better if that excess paperwork stops them from using grenades too.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fossuser 5y agoSafety Deposit Boxes are a bad idea and you shouldn’t use them: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box... I think they’re some sort of pre-internet relic people thought offered more security than they do. Today it seems like banks don’t care about them and don’t want to be in the business. You’re probably better off just having a fire safe box under your bed.
- ransom1538 5y agoRemember you can insure a safety deposit box.
- christophilus 5y agoIf you own your home, there are a great many places to hide valuables that are unlikely to be found by an average burglar. If you're being targeted by a sophisticated burglar, you've probably got other problems, anyway. Garden beds, somewhere in your crawlspace, beneath a compost pile, etc are all fine places to stash things. It might be time to go back the good ol' days of treasure maps (only half joking).
- NDizzle 5y agoMe, personally, my wealth is in the my wood scrap storage in the loft of my shop. Great returns on investments this year alone!!! Cash under the mattress is now antiquated. It's all about lumber, baby.
- stickfigure 5y agoMy wealth is buried in a field on my property. Gold, diamonds, cash! It's spread out in a configuration similar to where you would put piping for lawn sprinklers. Email me for a schematic and hours that I will not be home.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoAs a slob, my valuables are safely tucked away under piles of junk. Security through obscurity works wonders in the physical realm.
- TheBlight 5y agoNote to self: Don't keep hardware wallet seed in "safe" deposit box.
- gruez 5y agoThe benefit of cryptocurrencies is that you can use a multisig solution so the compromise of one storage location doesn't cause your stash to become compromised.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoUhh... wouldn't you password protect the volume and have multiple copies in different safety deposit boxes, offsite vaulting-type providers, and a couple of hidden places too? Somethings like large amounts of money are worth the trouble to secure.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoUse Shamir's Secret Sharing to distribute really important secrets among many people, and still have a tolerance for some people being unavailable. https://iancoleman.io/shamir/ https://iancoleman.io/shamir/
- kemonocode 5y agoHaving property the feds can't easily seize sounds like something only criminals would want (after all, I'm an honest citizen- I got nothing to hide, surely a bank would be safer than my home) up until it happens to you.
- ssalka 5y agoso you wouldn't mind if the feds just seized your stored wealth? note, being a citizen in good standing with the law does not necessarily prevent this from happening. I don't understand why you would want it to be easy for your property to be seized. Lastly, the "I got nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy - as Snowden has said, it is analogous to being against freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
- colejohnson66 5y agoOP is saying it sounds like that, ”until it happens to you.”
- rideontime 5y agoReread the entire comment you replied to.
- salawat 5y agoYou'll be amazed how quickly odd bedfellows kicks in when you really consider that a police force by definition is essentially a socially sanctioned criminal organization. We have proof that law enforcement can: -Steal from you. (Civil Asset forfeiture, no warrant required) -Apply excessive force with good odds of not having to explain themselves. -Lie to your face. -kidnap you -Utilize illegal/unconstitutional investigation techniques, then launder the evidence through parallel construction. We also have proof that LE is nowhere near as good or thorough as they should be regulating themselves. The "I have nothing to hide" is spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of an automated, impersonal system before. It'sall fun and games and justifiable until it's you caught in the civil rights blast crater. I'd prefer no one ended up as collateral damage. It is better criminals go free than innocents get caught in dragnets.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoThere’s a lot that worries me the these days. Covid, global warming, inflation. But nothing worries me more than the cultivated disinterest and lack of knowledge in American civil liberties in our country. People should read this story and see it as a brazen abuse of your 4th amendment rights. It should be upsetting, and worrying. It seems that our liberty is under attack on almost every front. The “speech is literally violence” crew, those that cheer the abuse of state surveillance because the target is a political enemy, and the “blue lives matter” crew who close their eyes to police tactics that are literally killing innocence people. These civil liberties are not additive qualities to the American constitution. They’re foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse.
- mindslight 5y ago> [civil liberties are] foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse By and large, civil liberties as defined haven't been removed. They've been superseded by higher levels of structure, because the Bill of Rights was narrowly framed as only applying restrictions to the bona fide "government". The modern censorship movement is focused on tech middlemen, which as the refrain goes, are "private companies". Freedom from state surveillance wasn't laid out in the founding documents (although the spirit is there), but even so the state is just buying cooperative access from third parties - qualitatively "the state" is best seen as including Equifax, Lexis-Nexis, Google, etc, but legally they're "private companies". And criminal police are independent conspiracies that the state has simply decided to do nothing about, akin to (and seemingly descended from) historical lynching + jury nullification. I don't necessarily know what a productive synthesis is, besides that legal fundamentalism won't get us anywhere. The problem is not straightforward decay, but rather a foundational framework that is increasingly inapplicable.
- rhacker 5y agoBack to under the mattresses folks.
- throwawaysea 5y agoI always assumed safe deposit boxes are the best way to store valuables. But I've seen a few incidents of banks getting robbed successfully in the last few years, including one near me, and then there is the potential for violations of civil liberties like this. Is there a better alternative? Are home safes actually anything more than cosmetic?
- caseysoftware 5y ago"The federal agents were armed with a warrant allowing them to seize property belonging to the company as part of a criminal investigation—and even though the warrant explicitly exempted the safe deposit boxes in the company's vaults, they were taken too. More than 800 were seized." Whether the warrant should have been issued is one debate worth having. But the other problem is that the FBI didn't even follow the terms of the warrant. If law enforcement (at every level) won't follow the law even in procedural matters, we're 100x worse off than most people thought. A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?"
- adolph 5y agoA rememberful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI ever not undertake clearly illegal activity? What investigations are actually clean?"
- Cosmin_C 5y agoAnd somebody may answer "The X-Files, probably".
- AlexandrB 5y ago> A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?" I don't think this matters at all. The FBI has been rife with controversy[1] and legally dubious actions[2] since just about their founding. Despite this, it's well out of the mainstream to ask if the FBI should exist and very few question whether people convicted by the FBI are actually guilty. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies#Domestic_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies#Dome... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoDefund the FBI really? You can read a history book to find out why the FBI was founded and why every country has its own variation of it.
- datavirtue 5y agoI think the vault company was storing illicit gains in the boxes and acting like they belonged to other anon private individuals (customers) so the FBI took them all and are awaiting the legitimate and illegitimate customers to claim the boxes to has it all out. Seems legally dubious but were they just to let them continue hiding behind their "customers?"
- univalent 5y agoThis isn't seizure. They violated the warrant. This is simple theft.