So a dollar bill is an inexpensive (on the scale of crime) sheet of paper pre-printed with a unique number that's somewhat difficult to forge. If you rip it up, that number won't be used again.
How are they making use of this feature set? I'd like to see a diagram with arrows and stuff.
Took me a bit to understand, courier doesn't have the bill, the drop does.
Boss: "Courier, deliver this money to <address>, code is 12345678"
Courier: at <address>, "Hey Drop, what is the code?"
Drop: "Code is 12345678"
Courier: "That's correct, Here's you're money"
Drop: Tears bill in half and hands part with serial number to Courier as proof
Is this really that surprising? Having more than roughly $10,000 cash in the US is nearly illegal, in that you're guilty until proven innocent and the police can just take it until you prove that it was obtained legally. You may not be charged with a crime, but you're still going to lose the money. The courts are slowly inching away from this unconstitutional insanity, but a duffel bag of cash is still going to end up turning into a new Hummer for whatever local police squad finds it.
Hah. So years back, I was going to buy a car. Went to the bank and they wanted (what I considered to be) a ridiculous service fee for a cashiers check. Fine... I'll take cash from my account! Ah, need a couple days to do that sort of thing... I, was miffed and stubborn as hell... so I did just that. Came back, got fingerprinted, and picked up my pile of cash to go buy the two year old 996.
The dealership, when time came to close, absolutely freaked when I pulled out the cash. Another set of IRS forms... and sorted it after several phone calls.
People here show concern over digital privacy and net neutrality etcetera but that's just tightening the noose, because apparently they've already put one on the bare basics.
> Having more than roughly $10,000 cash in the US is nearly illegal
Where are you getting that from? [1] There is nothing even close to being illegal to possess in the US any amount of cash. There are laws to prevent illegal activity and against structuring (attempting to deposit below some limit to avoid disclosure).
Now to what appears to be your point having $100,000 in cash in open display in your car when you are stopped by the police will definitely raise suspicions. But then again so will many other things that are not illegal but might raise suspicions depending on the context of where they appear. (Walk into a bank with a toy pistol vs. walk around your friends backyard with a toy pistol).
[1] And what is 'nearly illegal' is that like 'nearly pregnant' (the classical example actually 'pregnant' or 'not').
It's pretty easy to become a suspect for walking while black, smelling like marijuana, resisting arrest, driving suspiciously, having a dog respond to you…
Has anyone ever just withdrawn cash from their bank account that was obviously from a legitimate source and had it seized by police and not been able to get it back?
Because the way people talk about civil forfeiture is as though this happens all the time, but ostensibly there's not supposed to be a problem if the cash is traceable.
Stories about civil forfeiture abuses that I've read don't delve into whether the victim actually was able to prove the source of the money in a normal way.
I think the civil forfeiture cases involve what sounds like a contradiction: people who are relatively poor with a large sum of cash.
The problem is that this cash is essentially their entire savings. Which means their ability to fight the forfeiture is limited, and the arresting police can infer that. Rich people tend not to need to have even that amount of cash: they can take advantage of the normal banking system to transfer money. And if they were stopped, it's easy to infer that someone is at least rich enough to quickly hire good lawyers to fight the seizure.
However, with that said, I think caymanjim was being intentionally unspecific to prove a point. It's not against the written laws to have large sums of cash. But if such cash represents most of your wealth, and you're transporting it across certain areas, you're at the mercy of various law enforcement who may overstep their actual authority.
A tangent, but why can’t a “poor” person with $10,000 use banks? I am unaware of any income requirement to open a bank account. In many states, even illegal aliens can’t open bank accounts. I’m not sure I understand why the poor can’t use banks. I was poor once with credit in the low 500s and I’ve always had bank accounts.
They can. Why they are less likely to is, I believe, an area of active study. A 2017 study by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation cites the two main reasons as trust and fees (page 4): https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/2017/2017execsumm.pdf
Most physical banks charge you fees for having a checking account, fees for overdrafting, etc. If you don't pay one of those you can be banned from banking by Chexsystems.
Do you really think most banks charge monthly fees for having a checking account?
I just checked and the bank I had an account with for many years requires $50 deposited to open an account and no minimum balance or monthly fee, includes free checks and debit card.
The credit union I use now has no minimum balance, no monthly fee, and no fee for writing checks. You have to deposit $1 for a share of the credit union, which you get back if you close your account.
My impression is these days they are making over 2% on deposits absolutely risk free, so they better not charge anything.
Yes, any big bank with a lot of branches absolutely charges you. It's very easy to get deals like online banks (more reliable than credit unions BTW) but those don't provide services like depositing cash some people need.
I wasn't talking about online banks, which I know nothing about. I was talking about ordinary everyday banks and credit unions, which allow you to withdraw money from shared networks[1] of ATMs nationwide for free. Like, this is a thing, you don't have to have $20,000 in a Bank of America account to get free checking and you don't need a nationwide branded ATM/branch network. You don't have to have direct deposit either. Or be white. I've literally been in banks and have seen with my own eyes how it works.
Requiring $50 in the account or $10 a month deposits to avoid the fee is still too much. Large overdrafts are also too much. The thing about poor people is they don’t have any money.
"The problem is that this cash is essentially their
entire savings. Which means their ability to fight the forfeiture is limited"
You're implying that people with reasonable documentation for the source of their cash can't just fill out some forms, but need to hire lawyers or something. Have you seen news articles or other sources describing such a situation?
I think the problem is that poor people transferring money typically don't have such documentation on them. (As was the case in the situations I just googled, which are easy to find. For example: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/17/8792623/civil-forfeiture-charl...) Most such seizures are also tied up with "suspicion" of drug trafficking, which means it's no longer a matter of proving the money is yours. You must now prove the money is not involved in your supposed drug trafficking.
All the high denomination notes (~80% of circulating currency) were demonetized in India on 8th November 2016. So all the money in the safe had to be taken to the bank to be exchanged.
And then taking out more than a limit of cash is a very lengthy process now.
So yes, it's not illegal to store cash but it's very difficult. And doing cash transactions above a certain limit are illegal.
Why? Because many business people in India don't pay taxes.
I'm not up to date on the issue but India had an issue with black money and people hoarding cash without reporting the income. The laws were passed to combat that IIRC.
Ensuring the code isn't reused, to put in a ledger, to avoid some kind of replay attack, having someone pretend to be the courier and get the key to then replay to the real courier. Dunno, probably many many things avoided by making the key not usable but still verifiable.
I can think of only one scenario when it would make sense to destroy the bill - if the Drop is still able to present the whole bill after the Courier says they delivered the package, that is a proof the Courier is lying or got played and didn't verify the code. Drop is the one who has motivation to keep the bill intact, Courier uses the bill as proof of delivery, and cuts it in half just to be safe that someone from the Drop won't stop them at gunpoint after the delivery, stealing the whole bill.
I'm not sure the drop retains half the serial number? GP claims the drop rips the bill in half, and hands the part with the (full, I seem to recall US dollar bills have the serial number on the bottom left) serial number to the courier. The courier can prove they delivered to the right drop, and the bill being ripped in half will ensure it won't be used again.
> I seem to recall US dollar bills have the serial number on the bottom left
Our money (US Currency) has two (of the same) serial numbers on each bill; one on the lower left and one on the upper right for dollar bills. Other denominations also have two; one on each side of the front of the bill, however they are in opposite places i.e. upper left, and lower right--at least the current bills in my wallet are that way.
In a criminal organization security and accountability are a more complex topic, but I would say that this way the one serial number the drop keep is a proof of identity, while the serial number the courier keep is a receipt.
But they can't use that specific one again, it doesn't matter if they take the bill to a bank and get new ones, because the serial numbers won't be the same.
It's actually pretty cool. So for starters there's disambiguation since all serials are unique, you won't have carriers knowingly delivering to the wrong drop assuming the drop keeps possession of the bill since it's globally unique. You have some plausible deniability if found, "it's just money in my wallet, picked up at mcdonalds" and it's easy to hide/dispose of. If you're really smart you could also list a handful of possible serials for extra plausible deniability and hold/disperse the others such that the mechanism is still very likely to work due to the difficulty of finding a particular bill in circulation. Even when caught you may have some additional protection when the goods being immediately exchanged are otherwise legal, legal in the absence of money changing hands or difficult to establish in the absence of money or another component.
Assuming the actual transaction is reasonably atomic, which it should be unless there's a fight or something, the the carrier can always prove that they delivered to the correct drop if they have a physical copy of the agreed upon serial while the drop can prove that they didn't receive a delivery if they can reproduce an undamaged copy of the whole bill. The ripping of the bill itself could plausibly serve as a step in a multi step process where the carrier may demand that the bill be ripped after the serial and goods are confirmed but before not yet exchanged so that the drop can't claim that a delivery was not at least attempted on the part of the courier. We could also do it with two bills, one from each party such that each party can have some proof that a transaction was or wasn't completed and with the right party in the case of a double exchange.
The upfront cost of forging passable $1 bills is too high to be economical to pull off just for these low volume transactions, especially after the logistical cost of injecting the bills or otherwise tricking someone to using a fake as well as keeping a copy on hand but even if you achieved that. You'd also have to contend with the fed's coming after you for forging currency if the bills you distributed ever got into public circulation in any significant quantity so it should be pretty secure as long as they're sourced from a fairly high volume location like mcdonalds or something.
The entropy might be somewhat useful too in bookkeeping like maybe using only bills ending with a 0 are for small cash transactions, 1 for large cash transactions, 2 is for drugs A, 3 for drug B etc... Entropy might be important but there are much easier sources.
How are they making use of this feature set? I'd like to see a diagram with arrows and stuff.