FBI says seized fortune was criminals’ loot—owners say: Where’s the proof?
This was so much worse than I imagined. It was a physical dragnet at a private safe deposit box business and the FBI is trying to claim all the customer's belongings under civil asset forfeiture because a dog smelled marijuana. Meanwhile two legitimate businesses who cannot legally transact with banks were customers and the boxes were not airtight
This is brazen overreach and needs to be reigned in
Not directly relevant to the article, but it's probably a public service to have this here: If you're in the U.S., do not consent to a search! Ever!
If the police ask permission to search you, your car, or your house, say "I do not consent to a search". Followed by, "Am I being detained?" If the answer is "No, you are not being detained." then leave immediately (unless at your house, in which case go inside and lock the door).
Police are good at making you feel as if you have to consent. They might say, "We're going to search your car now." Makes it seem like you don't have a choice and it's happening one way or another, yeah? Well it's not the case. That was your cue to say, "I do not consent to a search". Saying "I do not consent to a search" might prevent a search or make evidence obtained during that [illegal] search inadmissible. Or it might be found that the police had probable cause or other reason to make the search legal, in which case you lost nothing.
Record + immediately upload such an interaction if you can.
As an aside, I appreciate like 90% of the work the police do.
Asset forfeiture is one of those things that sounds almost reasonable, usually because it's pitched as seizing Pablo Escobar's Lamborghini or similar. But in reality it's open to abuse, routinely abused (as mentioned here) and the Supreme Court should smack it down (well, maybe not this Supreme Court).
For example, abuse of forfeiture in Philadelphia [1]. There are cases where a teenager is arrested with selling small amounts of cannabis and then his parents have to repeatedly fight to not have their house seized as the proceeds of crime.
In the very minimum, asset forfeiture should require a criminal conviction. If you, the government, want to seize $1 million as the proceeds of drug trafficking, you should be required to convict someone with trafficking $1+ million in drugs. And I don't mean "street value" of drugs in their possession.
Anything less should be ruled as unconstitutional by virtue of being an unreasonable search and seizure.
[1]: https://whyy.org/articles/inside-the-philadelphia-das-side-h...
It's not enough that the FBI return the money and assets they stole here. There need to be penalities, in the form of compensation to the people they inconvenienced or forced to pay for a lawyer, and in the sense of professional or criminal consequences for the people who decided to conduct this theft.
The article says that asset forfeiture requires only a "more likely than not" standard of evidence, which seems terrible, but there's no indication that standard has been met. Most money isn't the product of drug trafficking. Seeing rubber bands and having your dog bark in the presence of the money may be slight evidence of drug dealing, but not enough to overcome the low prior.
In short: If you are carrying cash you have to worry less about a thug stealing it and worry more about cops stealing it.
Note: Assets stolen by law enforcement through CAF far exceeds assets stolens to home burglaries in USA.
Don't worry, Politifact looked into this, and it isn't possible for the federal government to be seizing things from safe deposit boxes, because that would require a search warrant, which obviously isn't going to happen. Pants on fire.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2013/jul/26/chain-emai...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.The FBI's story doesn't even sense. They justified it by saying it was too much cash, and a dog smelled drugs on the cash - both of which they couldn't have possibly known before raiding the safe deposit box. I don't think that selling legal items counts as probable cause for them to have searched it.
This is just the natural progression of giving any government organization power. Civil asset forfeiture was originally created to attack organized crime but much like the patriot act, once a group gets power they are going to use it as they see fit and are going to fight tooth and nail against giving it up. Every time power is given it is expanded and used in ways the original law did not envision.
>Police justified the searches in some cases by saying the driver was nervous or “their carotid artery was pulsating.” In one case, troopers seized $50,282 after a traffic stop and charged the owner of the vehicle, who was not present at the time. In another, they took $525 from a passenger. Judges ultimately dismissed the charges in both cases, finding the searches were illegal. The state returned the $525 but kept $20,000 in the other case.
>The state returned the $525 but kept $20,000 in the other case.
>kept $20,000
https://www.inquirer.com/crime/spl/pa-state-police-traffic-s...
I don't see myself ever needing to carry that much cash, but if I did, my carotid artery would be "pulsating" too.
Quite honestly, you're seeing the difference between reasonable doubt, needed to secure a conviction, and probable cause, in this case the bullshit justification of the police to seize the assets because there is some likelihood of an offense occurring.
The onus is not on the police to prove a crime has been committed and the "innocent until proven guilty" system has flipped to where the accused now needs to move heaven and earth to verify he is innocent.
In all likelihood this is just a cash-grab by the cops and I would be suspicious whether all of the funds were entered as evidence or if some of it has "accidentally" been lost in transit.
> The FBI also said a dog had smelled unspecified drugs on Ruiz's cash.
What do warrants even prove at this point? That a cop went down a list of increasingly convoluted excuses and picked an attractive looking one?
Civil forfeiture is an outgrowth of the war on drugs (which was itself an outgrowth of anti-black racism). Just like NSA spying is an outgrowth of the war on terror. I doubt we will be able be able to end civil forfeiture until we end the war on drugs.
Everyone below who advocates abolition of civil asset forfeiture is correct.
The "justification" for it is: a criminal can amass vast sums of money, then use it to buy so many top lawyers that he or she is untouchable.
That may be a problem, but "fixing" the problem requires harming so many people who haven't committed any crime that the fix is worse than the problem. A serious criminal will keep the assets safe from law enforcement, i.e. not in a strip mall "bank."
Why not just require everyone to use a public defender? That would fix the "problem" too. (That was a joke, in case you're wondering.)
In an ideal world, seizures should be escrowed until a proof comes to light. And if innocent, they amount to a loan so the entity who did the seizure should pay interest along with the restitution.
(Sadly in reality even when innocent, it's hard to get the assets back without a legal battle.)
EDIT: typos.
Actions like this are what losing the moral high ground look like. It’s hard to support a government that pulls stunts like this.
"In civil forfeitures, no criminal conviction is required. The government just needs to prove that it’s more likely than not that the money or property it seeks to confiscate was linked to criminal activity."
Wow... I had no idea. This feels like some third world country shit.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-often-...
So it’s likely anyone could have cash with traces of narcotics on it and tip off a dog.
Didn’t they also find that a majority of the drug dogs get signals from handlers to act like they found something? Seems like they find stashes of cash and use the trace amounts of drugs on money or the “trick the dog into signaling” technique to cash in.
There is an old joke. Robbery, except with a badge instead of a gun.
The FBI agents who authorized this should be fired. This thing is a complete joke.
Non-walled link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/fbi-says-fortune-seized...
Institute for Justice is attempting to fight this "unlawful [...] seizure" : https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/ .
How about the FBI man up and seize the Sackler's $11B, eh? It's easy to pick on the small guy while the whale goes unpunished.
A friend is taking a criminal justice course and her professor said that if you defund the police they'd just stick to dirty tactics like seizure and aggressive ticketing to keep the coffers full. I am inclined to believe. Not that I don't want those guys to have to think twice about how to best spend their budget.
Forfeitures also really help out the DA office. If you take all the persons cash, freeze their assets and kick them out of their home -- good luck getting decent legal counsel. Defense attorneys know if you are covered in forfeitures - it will be difficult to see any of their bills paid.
Not your keys, not your property.
The trick was to make sure to only rob poor people with asset forfeiture so nobody could be bothered to care.
Can we add "Defund the FBI" to the national narrative?
Just a reminder that if you carry cryptocurrency on a hardware wallet or a brainwallet (memorizing some phrase that can recover your private key), the feds can't sieze those funds no matter how much they want to.
undefined
Everyone one of our 3 letter government agencies need to wiped clean. They're just strong-arms to do whatever bidding the elites want.
Guilty until proven innocent.
It's bizarre to me how voters don't understand the importance of keeping tight restraints on law enforcement and government in general.
The government's effort to track ever-smaller transactions at banks will lead to more abuses of power.
https://fee.org/articles/treasury-department-seeks-to-track-...
Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking: https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...
NO implication Joseph Ruiz is doing anything morally or legally wrong, here. Just a warning:
Hoarding cash (the technical term for putting money in a safety deposit, or under your bed) is a really bad way to save.
The current inflation rate is 5.3%, that means you lose 5.3% of the value of any savings each year. Prior to the pandemic, you could get in the region of 2.5% interest in a long-term savings account. That would cut your loss to 2.8% per-year. Currently you'll struggle to get anything over 0.5%, but it's still something. There are options that involve risk that might get you net-positive in the long-run.
FWIW US Private Vaults was clearly marketing to criminals:
"PRIVATE"- Complete Privacy, Unlike a Bank - You Keep Both Keys ... - No Photo ID Requiredhttps://web.archive.org/web/20210121142123/https://usprivate...
> Ruiz’s income was too low for him to have that much money, and his side business selling bongs made from liquor bottles suggested he was an unlicensed pot dealer
And he could have put $30 in Dogecoin 6 years ago and had $60,000 by the time of seizure. Or $30 in a random token this year like NFT-art.finance and made the same.
https://poocoin.app/tokens/0xf7844cb890f4c339c497aeab599abdc...
The government has no control of the money supply and has no basis to assume anyone can't have something by looking at their job and income
If this is what they reported to the judge, their whole case should be wrecked and the judiciary should curb stomp the entire practice