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FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes
- theflyingelvis 4y agoFederal prosecutors want to keep key details about the planning and execution of the March 2021 raid at U.S. Private Vaults out of the public's sight.
- qclibre22 4y agoMail box theft is up, too: "Mail theft is on the rise nationally; so are check washing scams" ( https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/25-investigates-mail-theft-is-on-the-rise-nationally-so-are-check-washing-scams/ar-AAZXNh7 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/25-investiga... ).
- Kkoala 4y agoMaybe you should read the article :)
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoIf they had good and justifiable reasons to search all the boxes they'd have told everyone back in 2021 when it happened. They didn't and they went fishing anyway because they knew they could get away with it. Nobody will even get a slap on the wrist because the organization intentionally spreads responsibility so thin that it's "nobody's fault". The legislature and the courts permit the continued existence of this structure because some animals are more equal and this is a feature not a bug.
- muaytimbo 4y agoIt wouldn't matter if it was "somebody's fault." In a two tier society like the US (the govt class vs the productive class) the government class protects their own with made up legal doctrine like "qualified immunity" which gives them carte blanche to steal, rape, and murder the productive class. If the blame were to lie with one single individual at the FBI who committed multiple crimes effecting this illegal search that person would still not be held accountable by the courts, the FBI, nor any other government agency.
- vkou 4y agoQI doesn't protect the government, you can still sue it for violating your rights. QI protects agents of the government, you can't personally sue a cop for violating your rights. (Either because he was following illegal orders, or because he's an idiot who doesn't know/doesn't care about the law.) You are correct that QI was a legal fabrication, and is in its current form an incredibly poor one at that.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> QI doesn't protect the government, you can still sue it for violating your rights. Sure, QI doesn't protect the government, but sovereign immunity does. > QI protects agents of the government, you can't personally sue a cop for violating your rights. Yes, you can. And you can win in some cases. But, if they were within the scope of non-discretionary job duty, even if illegal, though, they are protected by absolute immunity, if their act was an illegal exercise of discretion but not within a pattern unambiguously previously litigated as such, they are protected by qualified immunity. > You are correct that QI was a legal fabrication It is no more or less a “legal fabrication” than, say, the exclusionary rule.
- mikeyouse 4y agoThe place was apparently owned by an extremely shady criminal who's on wire admitting to laundering millions of dollars for customers of his safe deposit boxes and a litany of other crimes; https://www.thedailybeast.com/co-owner-of-shady-beverly-hills-business-us-private-vaults-had-extensive-criminal-empire-feds-allege https://www.thedailybeast.com/co-owner-of-shady-beverly-hill... The business recently pled guilty to laundering for drug traffickers: > The company admitted that it recruited drug traffickers as customers and used the illicit proceeds to run the business. It also acknowledged that people at the company sold cocaine, arranged drug deals at the store and instructed customers how to structure cash transactions to dodge currency reporting requirements. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-03/beverly-hills-store-admits-to-using-safe-deposit-boxes-to-launder-drug-money https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-03/beverly-...
- refurb 4y agoThat might all be true, but that's not the argument of the article? The argument is that the FBI is not being transparent about the process that led to the seizure. It's hard to hold the government accountable when you don't even know what the government did.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoThat doesn't justify the search and seizure of all his customers' property without due process.
- mikeyouse 4y agoThere's clearly a balance to be had - but if millions of dollars in ill-gotten cash and property in the boxes were his (as he's admitted) then of course the Feds are going to seize those and any others with unknown provenance. It's not like this was a bank, it was in a strip mall. Judges have been siding on behalf of people who haven't been accused of crimes, and they've had their property returned (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-26/judge-rules-against-fbi-beverly-hills-raid https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-26/judge-ru...) which of course is proper.
- bragr 4y agoOne 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.
- willcipriano 4y ago> 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?
- bragr 4y ago>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.
- barelysapient 4y agoThis 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)
- HWR_14 4y agoActually, 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.
- tomohawk 4y agoIJ has been fighting this. https://ij.org/press-release/security-deposit-box-owners-step-forward-to-demand-fbi-return-property-seized-without-a-warrant/ https://ij.org/press-release/security-deposit-box-owners-ste... https://ij.org/press-release/fbi-offers-to-return-property-to-some-security-deposit-box-owners-maybe-sometime-in-the-next-few-weeks/ https://ij.org/press-release/fbi-offers-to-return-property-t... https://ij.org/ll/fbi-vaults-over-the-constitution-to-illegally-search-and-seize-safe-deposit-boxes/ https://ij.org/ll/fbi-vaults-over-the-constitution-to-illega... EDIT: > Everyone has the right to contract for a safe, private place to store their property. That’s what Jeni Pearsons and Michael Storc wanted for their retirement nest egg. But now Jeni, Michael, and hundreds of other innocent people must fight to keep what’s theirs after the federal government broke into their safe deposit boxes, rifled through their belongings—and stole them all. > Jeni and Michael live in Los Angeles. Seeking to diversify their savings, they bought a few hundred dollars of silver whenever they had extra cash. To keep their property safe, they rented a safe deposit box at a California company called U.S. Private Vaults.
- Meekro 4y agoThis is the most important comment in this thread. If this kind of abuse bothers you, you should donate to IJ. They do amazing work in protecting people you've never heard of, from abuses that never make the news. And they win. A lot.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoWhy is our society so incapable of providing a small box for people to store their valuables? Banks are trying to drop the concept almost entirely. These private storage companies are kinda sketchy (https://www.bluevaultsecure.com/ https://www.bluevaultsecure.com/ is anotehr one near me). Where are people supposed to store physical copies of backups and yubikeys outside of the house safely?
- backtoyoujim 4y agoYou could mail them to the FBI, I suppose.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoThis needs an app, or might even be a great use case for that weird DAO stuff - SneakerRAIDBnB. Fundamental is that your data should be encrypted and duplicated before you give it to your host so if someone tries to read your data, they just get random numbers, and if someone breaks your devices, you give them a bad rating and move on to the other nodes in your BnB RAID.
- uoaei 4y agoThis reads like a Markov chain trained on HN comments.
- viggity 4y agothis whole story makes me so mad I can barely see straight.
- paulpauper 4y agoThis is why safe deposit boxes are not safe. Not only can they be easily searched by law enforcement, but they occasionally get robbed, cleared out, misplaced, etc. Why would you trust the bank to keep anything safe? look at the history of bank runs all around the world. Don't keep more than a few thousand dollars at the bank, imho.
- mysterydip 4y agoWhere else should you keep it?
- notch656a 4y agoI met a guy that had a bag of goodies on him at all times, even when he was pretty much naked. This was in the third world. I assume it was filled with gold. Might have been safer for him than the bank. I did not ask him why he did not use one, but I'm guessing it's better I never found out the answer.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoMy father in law stored some gold/silver in a box buried in the woods, its GPS coordinates were written down. We dug it up a few years ago. Security by obscurity.
- nradov 4y agoNo you can safely keep much larger amounts of money in an FDIC insured bank. Real regulated banks have the strongest protections against theft, fraud, and insolvency that you'll find anywhere. The issue is where to store small, valuable physical items? Some bank branches no longer even offer safe deposit boxes, and for those that do the legal protections are much more limited than a checking or savings account. Some people can install a good safe in their home, but that's not practical for renters and there's still a serious risk of loss due to theft / fire / natural disaster.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt's worth noting if you are sued for any matter no matter how frivolous, any attempt at withdrawing the money is illegal. just something to keep in mind. your money is effectively a bond. Your risks are far greater than the bank failing.
- dogman144 4y agoAfter reading a long form interview with a FBI Whistleblower out of their Minneapolis counter-terror office (will link if I find it), working in another part of the govt myself in a previous life, and having some exposure to FBI tech recruiting and related programs, I am convinced large parts of the FBI are horribly inept at providing their core competencies in a changing world. They display the dangerous balance of huge scale and access with an inability to hire well outside of key roles (legal for people trending DoJ, special agents in flagpole jobs, etc).
- mox1 4y agoSince you are in govt, you surely know the DoJ lawyers and district attorneys approved every step of this. So it’s not like a random FBI agent or even office decided to do this, it was assuredly brought high up into the DoJ and approved. Let’s not forget that federal or local judges then approved the warrants. So it’s more accurate to say the federal persecution machine did this, not just the FBI.
- dogman144 4y agoI’m not in govt. but, based on past experiences, imo you’re misattributing structured intent to general bureaucratic haze. The “assuredly” part gives that away for me. The organizational prowess and intent that people assume is present there rarely is. It’s present when you get to certain teams and levels. More often than not It’s civil servant teams trying their best to replicate organizational processes taught in an MBA program.
- ampersandy 4y ago> it was assuredly brought high up into the DoJ and approved. The warrant was approved, but the issue at hand is that these safety deposit boxes were raided when "the warrant authorizing the raid explicitly forbade the FBI from seizing the safe deposit boxes or their contents."
- chociej 4y agoIIRC judges aren't exactly lining up to throw the book at the feds when they misbehave. I'd love to to hear from someone more well informed though -- do judges just look the other way?
- misiti3780 4y agoI was listening to the Tim Ferris / Balaji Srinivasan podcast the other day and Balaji suspects the US government will use civil asset forfeiture to steal bitcoin as it becomes more valuable in the future. Considering most people that own bitcoin use custodial services like Coinbase, and Coinbase uses safety deposit boxes to store their code wallets + keys, am I wrong in thinking the US government has the ability to identify all of the safety deposit boxes Coinbase uses and steal those keys? good podcast, actual reference starts here: https://youtu.be/FV5SqIm5e90?t=6239 https://youtu.be/FV5SqIm5e90?t=6239
- rolobio 4y agoBitcoin and it's ilk are the perfect tool for government control. At first I was on board (be my own bank? sure, they're corrupt) but then someone pointed out that the Fed will simply use the technology built by these people to create a fed-coin and we will all be forced to use it. I hope I'm wrong, sounds like a nightmare. Can't even give cash for a birthday present without being taxed...
- Dylan16807 4y agoThe gift tax exclusion is $16k per year, per gifter, per recipient, plus another 12 million dollars of lifetime exclusion. Tracking would not change that.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoAre you giving cash gifts of more than $16k as birthday presents?
- kelnos 4y ago> * Can't even give cash for a birthday present without being taxed...* Man, if you're worried about gift tax for birthday presents, I wish I was related to you and was a recipient. Quite a lot of money needs to change hands for those gifts to be taxable.
- mindslight 4y agoYou don't even have to go as far as the government making a competitor. Lacking the key ecash property of untraceability, Bitcoin's ledger is completely open to usurpation. Imagine a government-run fork of existing Bitcoin, that can decide whether a given transaction is allowed based on flow/wallet metadata (etc). The govt then mandates that public exchanges need to abide by this, and it's illegal for them to facilitate buy/sell transactions that aren't approved. Then the requirements for getting a transaction approved slowly ramp up, culminating in standard KYC surveillance.
- zionic 4y agoInteresting IRL case of "not your keys, not your coins"
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- _8j50 4y ago7-10 years ago I had a safety deposit box at chase, nothing important in it. But I put a small tape that breaks easy right at hinge that connecte the lid to the base of the box. Few months later I checked on it and it was broken lol. Make of it what you will.
- ahartman00 4y agoHow do you know it didnt break when you closed it? Or when you opened it?
- _8j50 4y agoChecked after closing and before opening iirc
- vonwoodson 4y agoOh, that mean old government. shakes fist mockingly
- Clubber 4y agoThis story has been doing on for a while. Here's a lawyer's take on it. UPDATE: FBI Warrant DID NOT Cover Deposit Box CONTENTS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXTV5xmIMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXTV5xmIMk Judge Shuts Down FBI on Safe Deposit Box Forfeiture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFh61CvhB80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFh61CvhB80 Feds Now Want to Keep Safe Deposit Box Contents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OVzbg5CM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OVzbg5CM0 Feds Still Fighting for Safe Deposit Box Contents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N79rkaKar0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N79rkaKar0
- 1-6 4y agoWhat happens to safe deposit boxes of those who are deceased? What if heirs aren’t aware, who gets to claim the contents of these boxes?
- mlcrypto 4y agoSatoshi Nakamoto already solved trustless store of value
- basicplus2 4y agoUnsafe Deposit Box
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI mean I understand -why- the FBI can raid these places, because they have a generic warrant and the safety deposit box companies don't fight it. Why aren't these companies fighting it though with lawyers, seems like any sane judge would turn down a warrant to search hundreds of safety deposit boxes.