5 ms·

The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

251 points by pseudolus 2y ago

silexia 2y ago
The FBI needs to be shut down. It was formed for a specific purpose that has long since gone away, but continues to accumulate employees, money, and power endlessly, like a cancer.
delichon 2y ago
About two years post-seizure, the bureau returned Martin's money—shortly after she filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit. But while the bureau may have hoped that would persuade her to drop it, she has continued with her suit, which was back in court last week and seeks a ruling that will prevent the FBI from proceeding with others as it did with her. Hero.
- wjnc 2y ago
  I've listened to a series of podcasts (More Perfect) where it became clear to me that in the US to get lawsuits go all the way to the Supreme Court, you need both a case (de jure) and a plaintiff that is marketable. This is not a diss on Linda Martin. Going forward with this case in a attempt to get civil forfeiture more constrained after getting your money back is heroic. Just saying that the US legal system needs heroes and that there is a selection mechanism in place for heroes.
  - UncleEntity 2y ago
    That's the Institute of Justice's jam, they have whole teams chipping away at things like this and qualified immunity -- pro bono as an added bonus.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
      Yeah they are all over it... https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/u-s-private-vaults-seizure-resources/ https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/u-s-private-v...
  - eesmith 2y ago
    Yes. And it's been this way for a long time. Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to move to the back of the bus. She was, however, more suitable for the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Refusal_to_move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Refusal_to_move Plessy's "violation" of the despicable Separate Car Act was staged, with the conductor and private detective part fully aware of the planning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy points out that the early test case planning included looking for a woman of "not more than one-eight colored blood" as the possible plaintiff.
    - onemoresoop 2y ago
      It’s also the timing that matters so it makes it more like the straw that broke the camel’s back. That also is part of making it more marketable.
    - cb321 2y ago
      Your historical examples are absolutely fantastic! A more fictionalized dramatization might be season 4 episode 9 of _The Good Wife_ trying to get a DOMA test case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4) which focuses on the need to lose at the initial trial because SCOTUS is part of the appellate court system. (And, of course, you probably need to lose at state-level appeals as well.)
- peterlada 2y ago
  Wasn't this a story broke by Politico?
jmyeet 2y ago
Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft. Worse, it should be slam-dunk unconstitutional (unreasonable search and seizure, due process) but thus far courts have done what they do most of the time: sided with law enforcement. The legal justification is so laughably bogus too ("the money has no rights"... yeah but who does that money belong to?).
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Fines and seizures that skirt the protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases by being penalties for civil infractions are legalized theft. Civil asset forfeiture is a blatant violation of the 4th so depending on how exactly the seizure went down the laws of the jurisdiction it's larceny, robbery, armed robbery, etc. But people give the government too much benefit of the doubt hence the discussion being anchored around "legal theft".
- BirAdam 2y ago
  The USA is post-Constitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the government to create the FBI and therefore the 10th should apply. As the FBI does exist, along with all of the other alphabet soup agencies, we can see that the Constitution no longer truly holds power.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    Who would enforce federal laws if there were no federal law enforcement agencies?
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      Almost every cabinet level department ALSO has its own US Marshals already.
    - UncleEntity 2y ago
      The states? In the early days of the U.S., the first federal criminal code, the Crimes Act of 1790, enumerated 23 federal offenses and established punishments for each.
potato3732842 2y ago
>The warrant, which agents misled a judge to obtain, A huge fraction of FBI missteps that make the news involve this fact pattern but it's never actually what causes the misstep to blow up and make the news. You don't need to know statistics to know what this implies about the prevalence of said fact pattern.
- dmix 2y ago
  We're also supposed to trust the secret FISA courts are honest and self policing.
ajb 2y ago
Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive. In other countries, seizures go to general revenue, which means that the incentive to do it is diluted enormously. This is especially a problem with small police forces, or small polities where fines become a large proportion of revenue. You'd think that for the FBI the incentive would be diluted, given how huge they are, but maybe there is some institutional incentive there. I would argue that breaking the incentive is the best way to stop this,as opposed to fighting the detail of seizure justification (although the concept of 'criminal property' without charging the owner should be limited too)
- potato3732842 2y ago
  General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their mansions, etc but that requires making it socially unacceptable to support the status quo which means shunning those that do (i.e. basically what happened with racism in the 60s and homosexuality in the 00s) which is hard.
  - f_devd 2y ago
    If the last few years should have showed anything it's how little the elected officials typically care about balancing, let alone create excess, budget.
    - spwa4 2y ago
      Exactly. Even Trump, whose main policy promise was reducing spending, is currently 12% over budget (4% budget increase requested from congress + 8% that he's actually overspent so far)
    - Yeul 2y ago
      Well there was that Tea Party movement. But the reality is that America is addicted to spending more money than comes in.
nuclearpengy 2y ago
The whole concept makes no sense at all. Sickening.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
The problem here is nobody will be fired and no one will go to jail for this. It’s like the government is suing itself and paying its own fine to itself. For cases like this a corporation or government body should not be allowed to be an abstraction. The right thing to do is not go after corporations but individuals. It’s unfortunate we don’t do this and I think we should.
- logicchains 2y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head. A huge number of the problems in society today stem from how acting for a government or corporation allows people to get away with doing bad things that they'd be punished for it acting as an individual.
  - energy123 2y ago
    It's about aligning incentives effectively. The fear of jail time for incorrect behavior will work better than anything else.
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  I always thought it should go one step further. If I'm a government official (politician, judge, police officer, etc) and I commit a crime the damage goes much beyond the damage that would have been incurred if a private citizen had done the same. It undermines societies faith in the system as a while which is ultimately so much worse. The punishments should be accordingly.
hiatus 2y ago
The warrant explicitly limited the search and forbade a search of the deposit boxes. They not only ignored that but seized items in boxes they were specifically told not to search. How are these agents free from criminal charges?
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  > How are these agents free from criminal charges? Because they investigate themselves? I remember reading an article where they showed up with money counting machines and evidence techs to process the loot. They 100% knew what they were doing and thought there would be no repercussions because only criminals "hide" assets in private vaults.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Because the rules aren't really the rules, they are window dressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception Search Lexus/Nexus for 'Good faith'. A lot of searches, failure to protect chain of custody, etc just get allowed because 'good faith'.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
Civil asset forfeiture needs to go.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
For better or worse, that old case ( yes, it is a 4 year old case ) made circles in finance, banking and aml communities. At the time, I did not hear much of a 'it has gone far enough'. Quite the contrary, if you are listening to what is happening in that realm, you have to look no further than US bank ( only singling them out, because they quite openly say it ) and their push towards greater 'information sharing' and 'partnerships'. It is not getting better.
egorfine 2y ago
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a sort of bank or a financial system where money couldn’t be moved without the owner’s explicit permission? Like, at all. Perhaps the rules could be enforced with code, and with digital signatures required for any ledger changes. Would be nice if it were globally distributed in a p2p fashion with no government having a say. If only such a system existed.
- yakz 2y ago
  The rules would be enforced with a gun, same as they are now.
- harimau777 2y ago
  That works great until the user's explicit permission is coerced or scammed out of them. In those situations it's nice to have the protections of a conventional financial system.
  - egorfine 2y ago
    Agreed. But wouldn't it be nice to have a choice?
  - hiatus 2y ago
    Those protections exist with significant limitations in the conventional financial system. See the widespread abuse of Zelle as an example.
- layer8 2y ago
  Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
kittikitti 2y ago
This is why I recommend people look into Monero (a cryptocurrency) as a form of currency and savings. I've had my bank accounts frozen for no reason and I don't trust this system anymore.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
FreebasingLLMs 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
The article conveniently leaves out USPV was a major money laundering and drug distrbution point and all the contents were seized by warrant in the furtherance of the investigation. It appears the owners are cooperating with the FBI and the org plead out. https://beverlypress.com/2022/03/beverly-hills-private-vaults-company-guilty-of-federal-money-laundering-charge/ https://beverlypress.com/2022/03/beverly-hills-private-vault... The original district court ruling upheld the FBI's proceures and it wasn't until 2024 that the 9th Ciruit reversed (some) of that ruling. https://www.foxnews.com/us/judge-sides-with-fbi-in-86m-beverly-hills-private-vault-seizure-prompting-lawyers-4th-amendment-outcry https://www.foxnews.com/us/judge-sides-with-fbi-in-86m-bever... https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/115736960.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/115736960.h...
- bb88 2y ago
  A major nitpick here. The contents of the safe deposit boxes were seized __without__ warrant -- which the warrant did not include. Once they had her money the FBI argued it was civil asset forfeiture. USPV may have been a criminal organization, but if you enter into a contract with such a group, typically you wouldn't know it's a criminal organization. I guess you could call up the FBI and say, "Hey I'm going to open a safe deposit box account with USPV. Are you guys actively investigating them?" And if you do that, they will probably not answer you if there is an ongoing criminal investigation.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
    Oh there's lots of nits to pick on this case and the 9th Circuit dug into some of it. The original warrant stated that it was for "inventorying" the contents for the purposes of an investigation (preserving evidence). They grossly exceeded the scope fo the warrant and now have to deal with 17 lawsuits if I remember correctly. I abhor civil asset forfeiture as it is set up today. I remember all the fights over it in 1980s over the drug lords, but it had a lot of public support back then and it still does to some extent. Personal anecdote: I almost had several thousand in cash seized on I-70 in Ohio. It's legal but grey and it happens. Good luck getting your cash back. Only thing that saved my money (actually my grandfathers estate... I was selling his vintage stereo gear in Kentucky) was me being white, not sketchy, and being active military. But only barely. There may or may not been a $100 that got miscounted.
ck2 2y ago
Could be worse. You could be kidnapped to a foreign torture prison and your head shaved by the federal government. Just because you have a tattoo they insist is gang related but is actually just a disability symbol. No hearing, no representation, just disappeared into another country you have no association with. Those 250 people they sold to that infamous El Salvador prison? Yeah they've been going through them and they keep finding people that had no gang association.

251 points by pseudolus 2y ago

The FBI needs to be shut down. It was formed for a specific purpose that has long since gone away, but continues to accumulate employees, money, and power endlessly, like a cancer.

delichon 2y ago

About two years post-seizure, the bureau returned Martin's money—shortly after she filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit. But while the bureau may have hoped that would persuade her to drop it, she has continued with her suit, which was back in court last week and seeks a ruling that will prevent the FBI from proceeding with others as it did with her. Hero.

wjnc 2y ago
I've listened to a series of podcasts (More Perfect) where it became clear to me that in the US to get lawsuits go all the way to the Supreme Court, you need both a case (de jure) and a plaintiff that is marketable. This is not a diss on Linda Martin. Going forward with this case in a attempt to get civil forfeiture more constrained after getting your money back is heroic. Just saying that the US legal system needs heroes and that there is a selection mechanism in place for heroes.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  That's the Institute of Justice's jam, they have whole teams chipping away at things like this and qualified immunity -- pro bono as an added bonus.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
    Yeah they are all over it... https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/u-s-private-vaults-seizure-resources/ https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/u-s-private-v...
- eesmith 2y ago
  Yes. And it's been this way for a long time. Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to move to the back of the bus. She was, however, more suitable for the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Refusal_to_move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Refusal_to_move Plessy's "violation" of the despicable Separate Car Act was staged, with the conductor and private detective part fully aware of the planning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy points out that the early test case planning included looking for a woman of "not more than one-eight colored blood" as the possible plaintiff.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    It’s also the timing that matters so it makes it more like the straw that broke the camel’s back. That also is part of making it more marketable.
  - cb321 2y ago
    Your historical examples are absolutely fantastic! A more fictionalized dramatization might be season 4 episode 9 of _The Good Wife_ trying to get a DOMA test case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4) which focuses on the need to lose at the initial trial because SCOTUS is part of the appellate court system. (And, of course, you probably need to lose at state-level appeals as well.)
peterlada 2y ago
Wasn't this a story broke by Politico?

jmyeet 2y ago

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft. Worse, it should be slam-dunk unconstitutional (unreasonable search and seizure, due process) but thus far courts have done what they do most of the time: sided with law enforcement. The legal justification is so laughably bogus too ("the money has no rights"... yeah but who does that money belong to?).

potato3732842 2y ago
Fines and seizures that skirt the protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases by being penalties for civil infractions are legalized theft. Civil asset forfeiture is a blatant violation of the 4th so depending on how exactly the seizure went down the laws of the jurisdiction it's larceny, robbery, armed robbery, etc. But people give the government too much benefit of the doubt hence the discussion being anchored around "legal theft".
BirAdam 2y ago
The USA is post-Constitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the government to create the FBI and therefore the 10th should apply. As the FBI does exist, along with all of the other alphabet soup agencies, we can see that the Constitution no longer truly holds power.
- hiatus 2y ago
  Who would enforce federal laws if there were no federal law enforcement agencies?
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    Almost every cabinet level department ALSO has its own US Marshals already.
  - UncleEntity 2y ago
    The states? In the early days of the U.S., the first federal criminal code, the Crimes Act of 1790, enumerated 23 federal offenses and established punishments for each.

potato3732842 2y ago

>The warrant, which agents misled a judge to obtain, A huge fraction of FBI missteps that make the news involve this fact pattern but it's never actually what causes the misstep to blow up and make the news. You don't need to know statistics to know what this implies about the prevalence of said fact pattern.

dmix 2y ago
We're also supposed to trust the secret FISA courts are honest and self policing.

ajb 2y ago

Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive. In other countries, seizures go to general revenue, which means that the incentive to do it is diluted enormously. This is especially a problem with small police forces, or small polities where fines become a large proportion of revenue. You'd think that for the FBI the incentive would be diluted, given how huge they are, but maybe there is some institutional incentive there. I would argue that breaking the incentive is the best way to stop this,as opposed to fighting the detail of seizure justification (although the concept of 'criminal property' without charging the owner should be limited too)

potato3732842 2y ago
General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their mansions, etc but that requires making it socially unacceptable to support the status quo which means shunning those that do (i.e. basically what happened with racism in the 60s and homosexuality in the 00s) which is hard.
- f_devd 2y ago
  If the last few years should have showed anything it's how little the elected officials typically care about balancing, let alone create excess, budget.
  - spwa4 2y ago
    Exactly. Even Trump, whose main policy promise was reducing spending, is currently 12% over budget (4% budget increase requested from congress + 8% that he's actually overspent so far)
  - Yeul 2y ago
    Well there was that Tea Party movement. But the reality is that America is addicted to spending more money than comes in.

nuclearpengy 2y ago

The whole concept makes no sense at all. Sickening.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

The problem here is nobody will be fired and no one will go to jail for this. It’s like the government is suing itself and paying its own fine to itself. For cases like this a corporation or government body should not be allowed to be an abstraction. The right thing to do is not go after corporations but individuals. It’s unfortunate we don’t do this and I think we should.

logicchains 2y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. A huge number of the problems in society today stem from how acting for a government or corporation allows people to get away with doing bad things that they'd be punished for it acting as an individual.
- energy123 2y ago
  It's about aligning incentives effectively. The fear of jail time for incorrect behavior will work better than anything else.
ajmurmann 2y ago
I always thought it should go one step further. If I'm a government official (politician, judge, police officer, etc) and I commit a crime the damage goes much beyond the damage that would have been incurred if a private citizen had done the same. It undermines societies faith in the system as a while which is ultimately so much worse. The punishments should be accordingly.

hiatus 2y ago

The warrant explicitly limited the search and forbade a search of the deposit boxes. They not only ignored that but seized items in boxes they were specifically told not to search. How are these agents free from criminal charges?

UncleEntity 2y ago
> How are these agents free from criminal charges? Because they investigate themselves? I remember reading an article where they showed up with money counting machines and evidence techs to process the loot. They 100% knew what they were doing and thought there would be no repercussions because only criminals "hide" assets in private vaults.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Because the rules aren't really the rules, they are window dressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception Search Lexus/Nexus for 'Good faith'. A lot of searches, failure to protect chain of custody, etc just get allowed because 'good faith'.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

Civil asset forfeiture needs to go.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago

For better or worse, that old case ( yes, it is a 4 year old case ) made circles in finance, banking and aml communities. At the time, I did not hear much of a 'it has gone far enough'. Quite the contrary, if you are listening to what is happening in that realm, you have to look no further than US bank ( only singling them out, because they quite openly say it ) and their push towards greater 'information sharing' and 'partnerships'. It is not getting better.

egorfine 2y ago

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a sort of bank or a financial system where money couldn’t be moved without the owner’s explicit permission? Like, at all. Perhaps the rules could be enforced with code, and with digital signatures required for any ledger changes. Would be nice if it were globally distributed in a p2p fashion with no government having a say. If only such a system existed.

yakz 2y ago
The rules would be enforced with a gun, same as they are now.
harimau777 2y ago
That works great until the user's explicit permission is coerced or scammed out of them. In those situations it's nice to have the protections of a conventional financial system.
- egorfine 2y ago
  Agreed. But wouldn't it be nice to have a choice?
- hiatus 2y ago
  Those protections exist with significant limitations in the conventional financial system. See the widespread abuse of Zelle as an example.
layer8 2y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

kittikitti 2y ago

This is why I recommend people look into Monero (a cryptocurrency) as a form of currency and savings. I've had my bank accounts frozen for no reason and I don't trust this system anymore.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

FreebasingLLMs 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

The article conveniently leaves out USPV was a major money laundering and drug distrbution point and all the contents were seized by warrant in the furtherance of the investigation. It appears the owners are cooperating with the FBI and the org plead out. https://beverlypress.com/2022/03/beverly-hills-private-vaults-company-guilty-of-federal-money-laundering-charge/ https://beverlypress.com/2022/03/beverly-hills-private-vault... The original district court ruling upheld the FBI's proceures and it wasn't until 2024 that the 9th Ciruit reversed (some) of that ruling. https://www.foxnews.com/us/judge-sides-with-fbi-in-86m-beverly-hills-private-vault-seizure-prompting-lawyers-4th-amendment-outcry https://www.foxnews.com/us/judge-sides-with-fbi-in-86m-bever... https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/115736960.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/115736960.h...

bb88 2y ago
A major nitpick here. The contents of the safe deposit boxes were seized __without__ warrant -- which the warrant did not include. Once they had her money the FBI argued it was civil asset forfeiture. USPV may have been a criminal organization, but if you enter into a contract with such a group, typically you wouldn't know it's a criminal organization. I guess you could call up the FBI and say, "Hey I'm going to open a safe deposit box account with USPV. Are you guys actively investigating them?" And if you do that, they will probably not answer you if there is an ongoing criminal investigation.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Oh there's lots of nits to pick on this case and the 9th Circuit dug into some of it. The original warrant stated that it was for "inventorying" the contents for the purposes of an investigation (preserving evidence). They grossly exceeded the scope fo the warrant and now have to deal with 17 lawsuits if I remember correctly. I abhor civil asset forfeiture as it is set up today. I remember all the fights over it in 1980s over the drug lords, but it had a lot of public support back then and it still does to some extent. Personal anecdote: I almost had several thousand in cash seized on I-70 in Ohio. It's legal but grey and it happens. Good luck getting your cash back. Only thing that saved my money (actually my grandfathers estate... I was selling his vintage stereo gear in Kentucky) was me being white, not sketchy, and being active military. But only barely. There may or may not been a $100 that got miscounted.

ck2 2y ago

Could be worse. You could be kidnapped to a foreign torture prison and your head shaved by the federal government. Just because you have a tattoo they insist is gang related but is actually just a disability symbol. No hearing, no representation, just disappeared into another country you have no association with. Those 250 people they sold to that infamous El Salvador prison? Yeah they've been going through them and they keep finding people that had no gang association.