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Financial Responsibility == Terrorism?
An anonymous reader writes "Capital Hill Blue is reporting that recently a retired Texas schoolteacher and his wife had a little run in with the Department of Homeland Security. The crime? Paying down some debt. From the article: 'The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522. And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable. [...] They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified.'"
This isn't surprising. I work for a regional bank. Every employee is required to undergo training to know "what to look for". Doesn't matter if you are a teller, or a computer help desk operator. Anything over a certain dollar limit must be reported. As time goes on, the threshold has lowered. Pay off your house early? Gets reported. Large deposit? gets recorded. And anything overseas gets more scrutiny than J-Lo's panty lines.
The training creeped me out. the uber-patriotic person assigned to train our group was so into it. 3/4 of our group thought it was great... bringing down meth dealers who weren't smart enough to structure their money better. In fact, however, structuring is a crime as well... Go just below the radar one too many times, and you can be charged, eevn if there is no illegal activity behind the generation of money.
And, I would be wise to post AC (I won't, so this message might get more credibility) as advising someone how to avoid setting off the bells and whistles is a crime too.
We don't live in 1984, but we might be at 1983...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The original article came from the Providence Journal via Scripps Howard.
Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up.
Enough said.
The real story here is that the Department of Homeland Security is also responsible for credit fraud. One of the scams people pull is to steal a number, write a bogus check to the credit card company for that card (which guarantees the credit will be there), and then spend the amount that was written on the check before the check is cashed (and detected as bogus).
The auto-trip flag for this is that when a large payment comes in that's many multiples of the payee's normal history, the credit card company will hold the payment until the check clears, which is within 10 days at the outside.
In other words, this has nothing to do with terrorism, the fascist Bush regime, the gestapo at DHS, or any other Orwellian fantasy you can cook up. It's an arguably poor fraud prevention measure, nothing more.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Funny you mention Waco. Just last weekend I was talking to one of the neighbors of the Dividian compound. Not members. Neighbors. Their telling of the story is that other than some target practice, which is a common activity in the area, the Dividians were a quite group that didn't bother anyone. Per their telling, some neighbors go annoid with the noise from target practice, and called the cops. The Sherrifs went out, and had the whole thing sorted out well before the Feds showed up. The guns they had were legally purchased and delivered via FedEx.
Based on this, and what I saw on the news, sometimes when you are not doing anything wrong, you DO have something to worry about.
They set it up like it's some sort of idea that all flights into the US require all US citizens to be recognized and accounted for, so that if it goes down? or something like that? that they can know for sure who was on board, and can start contacting people ahead of time?
AVIATION DISASTER FAMILY ASSISTANCE ACT OF 1996
Obviously you haven't been doing much traveling. Check out Cuba, Nicaragua, Israel, Croatia (until recently), etc. No matter where I've been the U.S. has always welcomed me back with open arms compared to some of the places I've traveled.
I can understand such things as these places, and I'm certain that there are states with more crazy control laws than the US. Truth be told I've only been to EU states, where customs consists of two doors, one green, the other red. If you walk through the green one, and you don't look suspicious, and you're not randomly selected, there's absolutely no questions. Just grab your stuff, and walk through.
The US meanwhile dictates that you declare everything that you're bringing into the country and puts you in long lines where the customs people ask generally more prying questions about where you're going, and what you were up to than in Europe. This last time, my whole interaction with the entrance process in Germany was:
Passkontrol: What is your final destination?
Me: Düsseldorf
Passkontrol: *looks odd for a sec, shrugs unnoticably and stamps passport*
No customs interaction.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
This same thing happened to me. I inherited some money when my mom died, so a couple of months ago, I paid off my $7500 credit card balance, I mailed them a check for the full amount. About a week later, the payment still wasn't credited, so I called them and they said it takes 7 to 10 days for such a large check to clear. Yeah right. They told me to call back if it wasn't credited after 10 days. It wasn't, I called back again, they said if it wasn't credited after 14 days, call back again. It wasn't, I called back again. THIS time, I insisted they get a 3 way call with my bank to confirm the check had cleared. They credited my account during the phone call.
But after reading the article about the guy who got turned in to Homeland Security for paying $6500 on his JCPenneys account, now it all makes sense. I saw another version of this news article, it said the "bank security act" requires credit card companies to report large payments. I can't find any such law, there's a Bank Security Act of 1974 but that far predates the existence of Homeland Security. The closest regulation I can find is the requirement to report cash transactions larger than $10k to the IRS.
This is all so much bullshit I can't believe it. It's some sort of secret law, or more likely Homeland Security has duped banks into playing along with an imaginary law, just to get more data on totally innocent people. I am infuriated. I can't wait to see what happens when I try to board an airplane, now that DHS thinks I'm a terrorist, I bet I'm on the No Fly List.
The story sounds real enough to me. But the spin is very misleading.
.. activity .. has actually been going on for a long time now. The only new thing is that the Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the Department of the Treasury. Otherwise, the story is one that could have happened anytime since credit cards became popular.
Ever since the Secret Service was created in 1865, its primary duty has always been to investigate counterfeiting and financial fraud.
One of the main indicators of fraud is unusual financial activity. For example, if you make a single deposit of a very large amount of cash at a bank (more than $10,000, IIRC), then the bank will notify the Secret Service, and they will probably investigate your action. There are other things you can do which attract their attention.
From the story, you'd think that this is some new form of overreaching by the federal government enacted since 9/11. But this particular
Read about the Smith Act passed in 1940. Admit you're a member of the Communist party, a party which was equated with meaning "overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence", and you could go to jail. Nearly 200 members of the Communist Party stood trial, and many were convicted, just because they were members of the organization, not because of any other action.
Also, the famous "Hollywood Ten" never said they were or were not part of the Communist party, yet they were convicted for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted.
Go back a little further and look at the Red Scare of the '20s, where things were even worse.
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/mar01bender.htm
Except CHB didn't write the content. They reprinted it from a Rhode Island Scripps Howard newspaper (the retired couple lives in RI). Perhaps you'd like to accuse Scripps Howard of liberal bias?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I'm assuming from the way you worded your post you're a US citizen. If you're not a citizen, well, the following only really applies to citizens and you can read about how the US so warmly treats its citizens that travel there.
The US does NOT welcome you back from a trip to Cuba with welcome arms unless you either have a license to travel there from OFAC, or if you went there quietly and never mentioned it to immigration.
If you go to Cuba without a license (eg to visit your dying grandfather), and are honest enough to tell immigration about it when you come back into the USA, you get a big Illegal CUBA stamp on your passport, and then get a friendly threatening letter from OFAC a few months down the line. Sometimes they'll 'nicely' let the problem disappear for a $10,000 fine. That's a nice pair of welcoming open arms there, pal.
And the open arms aren't necessarily guaranteed even if your travel to cuba is licensed. I've travelled to Cuba twice, both time perfectly legally as licensed with OFAC. One of those times we first flew to Canada, then to Cuba. Believe it or not that was the easier way to go. The more difficult way involved flying to Miami first, and then dealing with the absolute worst set of red tape I've ever dealt with in any travel. If going out wasn't bad enough, coming back through Miami was absolutely horrible, when my girlfriend and I didn't join in the immigration official's anti-communist tirade, he sent us and our luggage to be hand-inspected for evidence of illegal farm visits. Again, nice open arms there.
And to anyone reading this, if you are issued a license to go to Cuba, think seriously about going through Canada (or Mexico) first, instead of flying through Miami, it will really make your life much easier.
make world, not war
The original $10,000 threshold for reporting cash transactions is from 1970. A few tweaks have been made over the yers, but no big changes until 2001 and the anti-patriot act.
Anarchists never rule
These would initially go to the fed who would pass them on to DHS, IRS or whoever. The whole thing makes the financial institution err on the side of over-reporting. Not raising an SAR on something that turns out to be an issue (i.e., that Egyptian's down payment for flying lessons) will dump the FI in deep trouble with the regulators.
In most cases the problem can be sorted with a quick call for a reason and a source of funds. In this case it should have been clear that the people had other funds and they were looking to pay of their debt. With a reasonable explanation, all should have been quickly settled.
Oh, I do AML/KYC systems for a largeish bank so this is why I can comment.
See my journal, I write things there
Transactions of at least $5,000 that the institution knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect have no business or apparent lawful purpose or are not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage and for which the institution knows of no reasonable explanation after due investigation.f
http://www.epic.org/privacy/rfpa/
http://www.fincen.gov/sars/sars_by_numb_issue5.pd
It's a crime to shoot someone while hunting if you're drunk. Good thing the police didn't get to question him until 14 hours later, guess we'll never know.