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This raises a question: why carry that much cash with you? Two things can be true at the same time: cops should not be seizing cash from folks on the side of th

This raises a question: why carry that much cash with you? Two things can be true at the same time: cops should not be seizing cash from folks on the side of the road without clear evidence of a crime, and it looks shady as hell if you are traveling with $18k in the backseat of your car.

garciasn 3y ago
He wanted to vacation, gamble, buy legal cannabis in CO, and maybe buy a new car. It said as much in the article.
adrr 3y ago
Seems like victim blaming like “why was wearing such a short skirt”. It’s not against the law to carry cash.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  It seems like it is de facto against the law to carry cash, if it’s legal for the police to confiscate it.
dmitrygr 3y ago
> why carry that much cash with you? Because I am a citizen of this allegedly free country and I just might want to!
grogenaut 3y ago
Why should I not have cash on hand? I just redid my deck and fence. I paid Time+Materials. Guy brought me the materials and the receipts, I paid cash for the materials upfront. That was $35k in materials, in several $10k chunks. This happens all the time in the real world. The guy does several jobs at a time. My wife was concerned about us having that much cash in our safe. This contractor is doing it all the time probbably 5x that amount and it's all legal. Bought several cars over the years, in cash. Why would I do a cashieres check? Who would take it except where a bank instantly validates it. Did the title transfer at the dmv, seller got cash so knew he wasn't getting screwed, DMV moved the title right there and validates it all so I knew I wasn't getting screwed. Those were $~15k each. Motorcycle? $8k cash.
- nraynaud 3y ago
  In the EU with have a working banking system that does transfers very well and very fast. (Actually, for 35k, I’ll need to lift some thresholds with my banker)
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    good for you, not everything is about the EU. Not every transaction needs to be tracable
- raincom 3y ago
  There is a fight against cash; here, the govt forces private actors (banks, car dealerships, jewelry stores, casinos, etc) to report to the govt, any cash entering/exiting the system > $10K. Govt hates any untraceable monetary instruments, as people can use cash to do 'bad' things: tax evasion, paying under the table, evading child support payments, supporting bad people, etc. If some thing is used for both good and bad deeds, govt wants to make it hard for the good deeds.
civilitty 3y ago
This country is full of people, both native and recently arrived, who wouldn't trust $18 dollars to a bank, let alone $18,000. 18K is "shady as hell"? Might as well get rid of habeus corpus completely. Better question is: This is fucking America, where by all accounts money is speech. Why the fuck is anyone taking someone's property without due process in violation of the Fifth Amendment?
- jfengel 3y ago
  Because we love it when cops beat up people we don't like.
sowbug 3y ago
For the same reason people use VPNs, buy burner phones, have two Gmail addresses, sign up for porn sites with fake email addresses, delete web cookies, and walk through white neighborhoods while Black. Because we live in a free country, and we ostensibly get to be "shady as hell" but still be left alone.
jrflowers 3y ago
Cars are sometimes sized in civil forfeiture, so let’s apply that to cars! This raises the question: why drive a valuable car? Two things can be true at the same time: cops should not be seizing cars from folks on the side of the road without clear evidence of a crime, and it looks shady as hell if you are traveling in an $18k+ car.
qingcharles 3y ago
Some people prefer cash, some have no bank accounts (mostly immigrants, homeless, those released from prison). My landlord just got hit head-on by a drunk driver and had to refuse an ambulance because he had a stack of rent cash in his truck and was too worried about it. Almost all civil in rem forfeiture cases never go to court because they start with a civil process that requires the claimant to file a bunch of complicated paperwork just to initiate the court process to dispute the forfeiture. Then they have to go to court, usually for months or years, to fight the forfeiture, where the prosecutors are going to try to drown you in discovery procedures and interrogatories and requests to admit that any normal person is not going to comprehend without paying tens of thousands to a lawyer to deal with. Checkmate. I beat one of these on my own, and I spent probably 100 hours in court watching thousands of cases and got to learn a whole lot about how these work. The prosecutors would regularly lie to me and tell me the judge wasn't coming when I would turn up to court and I would sign a waiver for a continuance until I figured out their tricks. In the end I would sit in the court and help people negotiate settlements, which really made the prosecutors mad. I had figured out that the prosecution would settle most cases by giving 80% of the money back to avoid trial. In my own case they filed the forfeiture in the wrong county and so they lacked jurisdiction "ab initio" as they say in Rome.
UncleMeat 3y ago
There was a CAF case where the proceeds of a house sale were seized. Six figures. The person involved didn’t trust banks and so worked in cash. They had the documentation of the sale. All it took was a cop saying “people sometimes traffic on these roads” to steal six figures in cash.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
About five years ago, I was moving apartments, and some of my coworkers offered to help me. I decided to withdraw about $100 to buy them pizza or something in gratitude (spoiler alert: they didn't accept any material gratitude.) So I went to an ATM that belonged to a local credit union and I withdrew 5 $20 bills. Then I popped into a pharmacy, where I was a regular customer and the workers knew me, and I requested that they break the $20 while I purchased some candy or something inexpensive. The pharmacy technician looked suspiciously at the bill I gave him, turned it around in the light, asked a coworker what he thought, and he handed it back to me, saying, "This is counterfeit money. We can't accept it." A bit more context: this pharmacy was at a very busy crossroads of tourism, college students, and rambunctious homeless people. So I slightly freaked out but I promptly reached into my wallet and pulled out a second $20 and said "here, how about this one?" and each bill was roundly rejected in turn. They didn't say why or point out the deficiencies on them, they just flat refused to accept them as legal tender. So I got out of there and I took my wallet full of funny-money directly to my credit union. Hey, what do you do when you've just been caught passing $100 in counterfeit currency? You stick your neck out and try to get arrested or something? So I approached the teller window and I showed them the money, and explained how it was rejected. And the banker started examining it, and called over a second guy to check it out, and they scoffed and they said it's all real, don't worry about it. And then we had an interesting conversation about what a retail worker is really supposed to do when presented with counterfeit money. Of course I learned my lesson that day, and I was very silly to ever doubt the authenticity of the money. I am fairly well-versed in the common security features of American money, and I could tell just by look and feel that they were all present on these bills, so if they had been counterfeit, they were really, really good!

garciasn 3y ago

He wanted to vacation, gamble, buy legal cannabis in CO, and maybe buy a new car. It said as much in the article.

adrr 3y ago

Seems like victim blaming like “why was wearing such a short skirt”. It’s not against the law to carry cash.

zarzavat 3y ago
It seems like it is de facto against the law to carry cash, if it’s legal for the police to confiscate it.

dmitrygr 3y ago

> why carry that much cash with you? Because I am a citizen of this allegedly free country and I just might want to!

grogenaut 3y ago

Why should I not have cash on hand? I just redid my deck and fence. I paid Time+Materials. Guy brought me the materials and the receipts, I paid cash for the materials upfront. That was $35k in materials, in several $10k chunks. This happens all the time in the real world. The guy does several jobs at a time. My wife was concerned about us having that much cash in our safe. This contractor is doing it all the time probbably 5x that amount and it's all legal. Bought several cars over the years, in cash. Why would I do a cashieres check? Who would take it except where a bank instantly validates it. Did the title transfer at the dmv, seller got cash so knew he wasn't getting screwed, DMV moved the title right there and validates it all so I knew I wasn't getting screwed. Those were $~15k each. Motorcycle? $8k cash.

nraynaud 3y ago
In the EU with have a working banking system that does transfers very well and very fast. (Actually, for 35k, I’ll need to lift some thresholds with my banker)
- grogenaut 3y ago
  good for you, not everything is about the EU. Not every transaction needs to be tracable
raincom 3y ago
There is a fight against cash; here, the govt forces private actors (banks, car dealerships, jewelry stores, casinos, etc) to report to the govt, any cash entering/exiting the system > $10K. Govt hates any untraceable monetary instruments, as people can use cash to do 'bad' things: tax evasion, paying under the table, evading child support payments, supporting bad people, etc. If some thing is used for both good and bad deeds, govt wants to make it hard for the good deeds.

civilitty 3y ago

This country is full of people, both native and recently arrived, who wouldn't trust $18 dollars to a bank, let alone $18,000. 18K is "shady as hell"? Might as well get rid of habeus corpus completely. Better question is: This is fucking America, where by all accounts money is speech. Why the fuck is anyone taking someone's property without due process in violation of the Fifth Amendment?

jfengel 3y ago
Because we love it when cops beat up people we don't like.

sowbug 3y ago

For the same reason people use VPNs, buy burner phones, have two Gmail addresses, sign up for porn sites with fake email addresses, delete web cookies, and walk through white neighborhoods while Black. Because we live in a free country, and we ostensibly get to be "shady as hell" but still be left alone.

jrflowers 3y ago

Cars are sometimes sized in civil forfeiture, so let’s apply that to cars! This raises the question: why drive a valuable car? Two things can be true at the same time: cops should not be seizing cars from folks on the side of the road without clear evidence of a crime, and it looks shady as hell if you are traveling in an $18k+ car.

qingcharles 3y ago

Some people prefer cash, some have no bank accounts (mostly immigrants, homeless, those released from prison). My landlord just got hit head-on by a drunk driver and had to refuse an ambulance because he had a stack of rent cash in his truck and was too worried about it. Almost all civil in rem forfeiture cases never go to court because they start with a civil process that requires the claimant to file a bunch of complicated paperwork just to initiate the court process to dispute the forfeiture. Then they have to go to court, usually for months or years, to fight the forfeiture, where the prosecutors are going to try to drown you in discovery procedures and interrogatories and requests to admit that any normal person is not going to comprehend without paying tens of thousands to a lawyer to deal with. Checkmate. I beat one of these on my own, and I spent probably 100 hours in court watching thousands of cases and got to learn a whole lot about how these work. The prosecutors would regularly lie to me and tell me the judge wasn't coming when I would turn up to court and I would sign a waiver for a continuance until I figured out their tricks. In the end I would sit in the court and help people negotiate settlements, which really made the prosecutors mad. I had figured out that the prosecution would settle most cases by giving 80% of the money back to avoid trial. In my own case they filed the forfeiture in the wrong county and so they lacked jurisdiction "ab initio" as they say in Rome.

UncleMeat 3y ago

There was a CAF case where the proceeds of a house sale were seized. Six figures. The person involved didn’t trust banks and so worked in cash. They had the documentation of the sale. All it took was a cop saying “people sometimes traffic on these roads” to steal six figures in cash.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

About five years ago, I was moving apartments, and some of my coworkers offered to help me. I decided to withdraw about $100 to buy them pizza or something in gratitude (spoiler alert: they didn't accept any material gratitude.) So I went to an ATM that belonged to a local credit union and I withdrew 5 $20 bills. Then I popped into a pharmacy, where I was a regular customer and the workers knew me, and I requested that they break the $20 while I purchased some candy or something inexpensive. The pharmacy technician looked suspiciously at the bill I gave him, turned it around in the light, asked a coworker what he thought, and he handed it back to me, saying, "This is counterfeit money. We can't accept it." A bit more context: this pharmacy was at a very busy crossroads of tourism, college students, and rambunctious homeless people. So I slightly freaked out but I promptly reached into my wallet and pulled out a second $20 and said "here, how about this one?" and each bill was roundly rejected in turn. They didn't say why or point out the deficiencies on them, they just flat refused to accept them as legal tender. So I got out of there and I took my wallet full of funny-money directly to my credit union. Hey, what do you do when you've just been caught passing $100 in counterfeit currency? You stick your neck out and try to get arrested or something? So I approached the teller window and I showed them the money, and explained how it was rejected. And the banker started examining it, and called over a second guy to check it out, and they scoffed and they said it's all real, don't worry about it. And then we had an interesting conversation about what a retail worker is really supposed to do when presented with counterfeit money. Of course I learned my lesson that day, and I was very silly to ever doubt the authenticity of the money. I am fairly well-versed in the common security features of American money, and I could tell just by look and feel that they were all present on these bills, so if they had been counterfeit, they were really, really good!