I felt great no one could cowardly seize my account via some court order, but instead they'd have to kill me in the streets. If thieves are willing to kill you in the streets anyway, it doesn't much matter whether you have the money on you or not -- they'll just ransom you or kill you because you're broke.
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>Well, actually, they could get a court order to seize whatever is in your pockets while some burly men hold you down.
If people are going to come kill me in the street then come let it happen. Better than cowardly seizing it behind my back via locking a number in a database. And in the third world, it's typically a lot easier to find accounts than it is people.
I can't say I know what would happen, I've only been attempted robbed at gunpoint once. I wish I could say I kicked their ass, but all I managed to do was hurt them enough that we stalemated and they went off to find some other victim.
no court order needed! there are plenty of places where police can and will just take your money (always with impunity and sometimes even with some degree of legitimate warrant.) I'd call "carrying thousands in cash around the world" a poor strategy for keeping the government's hands off your money.
And nothing makes civil asset forfeiture easier than keeping your money in a domestic bank that the government knows exactly how much, where, and how to seize at any moment. Asset forfeiture is literally the worst argument for the banking system and debit cards over cash.
I don't think they can use civil asset forfeiture for a bank account. It can be locked up for a long time, but even that requires some sort of court order. Now, $10k in a suitcase, that now belongs to the police precinct unless you can sue and prove your cash is innocent.
'Federal civil forfeiture laws give the Internal
Revenue Service the power to clean out bank
accounts without charging their owners with any
crime. [ goes on to give many examples of bank accounts subjected to civil asset forfeiture ]'
There's a massive difference between drawing the attention of the IRS because you're making just-under-$10k transactions on a regular basis (which, first of all, requires you to even have $10k in a non-retirement account, which already puts you above most people), and happening to drive through a jurisdiction where the police like stealing from people, and having them confiscate your car and the contents of your wallet.
Factually, yes seizing/forfeiting a bank account is different than cash. You are correct, they are two different things.
Whether one is easier than the other depends on circumstances. Domestic bank accounts are easily found. Those who may want to seize them quite likely work in an office, down the street from a judge who will rubber-stamp if needed.
Seizing cash requires a lot more:
0) Willingness to engage in policing in the field rather than cowardly slob sitting in office searching for new victims.
1) Determining the person actually has the cash
2) Knowing where the cash is
3) Employing force against any persons resisting the seizure, and risking that person may employ self defense.
Seizing a bank account usually requires none of those above. You know where the cash is (the bank), the bank will tell you how much they have, and the bank employees aren't going to resist the seizure from the police. For all we know someone could bury cash somewhere and not even a metal detector is going to pick that up.
So you're correct. To me, the massive difference is a bank account seizure is just how much easier it is to seize. (and to most people, just how much more devastating it is)
>happening to drive through a jurisdiction where the police like stealing from people, and having them confiscate your car and the contents of your wallet.
It's worth noting it usually goes more along the lines of police asking someone if they have a "large amount of currency" and the person being dumb enough to answer in the affirmative and then being dumb enough to consent to a search. They have to ask a lot of people too to even get that far, so not exactly a fast or easy process. Sure there are all sorts of other scenarios, but seizing cash in the field randomly like this is a lot more work than some IRS agent sitting in their office, running some VBA script to find someone in a few seconds who had a couple consecutive transaction that ran above a sum of 10k.
There's more that's different to it than that, though.
Just as another couple examples:
- Civil asset forfeiture is something that local police departments around the country can do to people within their jurisdiction. Seizing a bank account is something only the IRS can do—and the IRS is known to be woefully understaffed and under-resourced at the moment.
- As I understand it, when the IRS seizes a bank account, that money doesn't go to the IRS; I believe it goes into some more general fund, but I'm afraid I'm not well-informed about that. Civil asset forfeitures go, in most cases, directly to the police department that seized them. That makes the incentives completely different. (Even if I'm wrong, and assets seized by the IRS go into its budget, that still doesn't create the same kind of incentive that we see with these police departments, given the number of stories of officers in these small podunk towns driving extremely expensive cars off the job and buying extremely fancy police toys on the job with the seized money. The IRS, being a much more supervised federal government department, is going to have to account much more clearly for its expenditures.)
This is a reply to notch: civil asset forfeiture works for cash and some possessions, but does not work for bank accounts. For the police to seize your bank accounts, they have to go through the courts.
You may want to read up a bit on how this stuff works.
You're very presumptuous. I have. Institute for Justice, one of the most active legal firms in this area will educate this on this matter [0]. Civil asset forfeiture is a non-criminal process where assets are forfeited civilly. If you think civil asset forfeiture is not used to seize bank accounts, you're mistaken.
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>Well, actually, they could get a court order to seize whatever is in your pockets while some burly men hold you down.
If people are going to come kill me in the street then come let it happen. Better than cowardly seizing it behind my back via locking a number in a database. And in the third world, it's typically a lot easier to find accounts than it is people.
I can't say I know what would happen, I've only been attempted robbed at gunpoint once. I wish I could say I kicked their ass, but all I managed to do was hurt them enough that we stalemated and they went off to find some other victim.