what is a 'security guard'?...

and yellowsub may have gotten lucky...and lots of people get lucky on a daily basis carrying lots if cash and chips across the country flying around... but the one time they catch you s the one time you will lose most/all of your roll....so, as always, do it at your own risk...

ive taken 20k cash to vegas through metro (airport) in detroit...they opened my bag, looked at it and without hesitation gave the bag back to me

or commerce not vegas

Skier it is idiots like you that have allowed the world to become the no freedom having, police state it is. DEA isn't an important job, those guys are the biggest pricks on the planet, all they do is go around locking up more people so that we have to pay more taxes. As much as i hate Viffer, he does more for the economy than 50 DEA turds!!! Have you ever seen how much money he throws away on clubs, strippers and shopping??? He is like an economic stimulus if i ever saw one. And if you think the DEA is so important then why don't you join the DEA instead of playing magic cards and online poker.

It would be interesting to see what would have happened if you gave a false name and they checked id.

nice bro, i can tell you're really well thought on this. do you have a blog I can read? or maybe a weekly newsletter I can subscribe to?

i had a run in with the feds at chicago midway around march last year.

i was flying from omaha to midway and then midway to philly. i had about 80k in cash from the wsop circuit event stuffed in my laptop bag that i always carry when i travel. omaha always has random security checks and for like the fourth time in a row i get picked for the search. i go through the whole process and then have to wait for this tsa kid to search my laptop bag. i sit there and watch him begin searching through it and im just waiting for his reaction to the money cause i know its gonna be a problem to some degree. he begins searching it and then sees the pouch where the money was in and his eyes bulge out of his head. he looks up at his partner who was searching someone elses bag directly in front of him and says something. the partner giraffe necks it to see whats in my bag then immediatly turns around and they both look at me and then akwardly look away fast. after hes done the kid who search my bag (hes about 25 id say) comes up to me and is like "do you know how much money is in that bag!?". i say yes 80k. hes asks where it comes from and i tell him its from a poker tournament and then surprisingly he gives me my bag and lets me go on.

this is where it gets interesting. i land in midway and have like a two hour layover so i walk around aimlessly from one end of the airport to the other and then stop somewhere in between at a less crowded gate. this gate that i stopped at was on the opposite wing of where my gate was. so i sit down and go online, start reading some 2+2 when this badge just flashes in front of my screen and i look up and there are these two, plain clothed cops standing there and they ask "are you michael martin?". I say yeah and they say "we need to ask you a few questions, we're part of the midway anti money laundering unit". im like ok. so we walk a few steps away to an empty gate kiosk and they start asking me some bull**** questions i cant recall what they were but i knew that they were obvioiusly curious about the money from me being stopped in omaha. so i ask if this is about the money and they are surprised that i was aware they knew. they were like yeah and i told them how im a poker player and all that stuff. at this point they seemed to believe me but asked if i had anyway to prove it so i actually went online to hendon mob and showed them the tournament result and they asked how can we trust this site so i showed them a few more and then they were satisfied. the next five minutes or so they were more interested in my career than the money, even asking if i was interested in hiring security. but apparently midway airport has a bad money laundering problem and they said the only legit people who usually carry that kind of cash on them are jewlers.

what i thought was crazy is that these guys had either been following me from the time i landed or had been watching me on video because i literally walked from one end of the airport to the other and then around some more. it probably looked a bit shady me not actually sitting at my gate an hour and fifteen minutes before my flight. guess i lucked out.

ditto to this, don't feel so bad now though. must be a 'young person with no job who travels a lot' flag or something. i thought they specifically thought i was up to no good.

ya this is true as i did the same thing about 3 weeks later. totally regret it now but at the time it seemed like it wouldn't be such a big deal. one key thing tho is we both had tax forms and payout slips from the Rio so I am not really sure we wouldn't be able to easily avoid any problems with DEA etc as we had IRS forms accounting for every penny. now that's not to say we couldn't have obviously been robbed if some1 knew

lol ***** u got rolled

Great to see our Federal employees are out there combatting POKER TERRORISM. Really warms my heart to know I'm protected from these excessive-money-carrying CRIMINALS.

Maybe it was the purple hair that made you stand out David? LOL

(Yes, I know you only did it for the NBA Finals last year. IMO, you should've gone with CELTIC GREEN tho hahaha)

its probably a leak as a poker player to be capable of logic this absolutely ******ed

Sorry to have read about this. Best of luck in getting your money and watch back.

Word, the whole "war on drugs" is a fraud.

The Hegelian Dialectic
The same can be said for "the war on terrorism." Like blitz said, the goal is to have a 1930's fascist style police state here in the USA.

And this is where he failed. l2exercise ur rights.

when that happens i'm hiding out at blitz's. dan's got enough guns and ammo to show those fascists what's what.

yo ****** skier was talking about airport security not DEA.
not to mention your whole post was pretty LOL ******ed.

LOL is that Florida Dan, the hot-head chump who challenged me to a heads up match the other night at the B? Well looks like you just might get your wish. I just got word of some other hotshot kid wanting to play he HU and I accepted. We're working out the details but it's gonna be sometime soon (at the Wynn of course). Lemme know if you're still in town so we could put this baby to rest.

Joe

Can someone point to the law that is referred to in the above quotes? The DEA can confiscate belongings based on a vague suspicion/"profile"? And with no receipt?!

viffer, how bad was the drug charge from 8 years ago?

Lot of good info, good stories, and scary **** in this thread.

if i am not mistaken it is called asset forfeiture

http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/assets.html

OK, I do not understand why people go to such lengths to not declare the money. It doesn't go to anyone like the IRS or some ****. I understand if you don't wanna be carrying that much money, but if you are, it's really not that big a deal.

Of course now I pretty much have to declare the money when I leave the country because when I went to London in September I didn't see anywhere I was supposed to declare the money when leaving the country. When I got there the British gave me all sorts of ****, and at one point I thought that they weren't going to let me in... and since then whenever I leave/enter the country I get detained and searched.

As far as traveling domestically is concerned, one time, a while back, I was leaving my home airport in Tulsa heading for Vegas and got random searched and I told them before they even looked about the money but then they sent me to some DEA agents, who questioned me for a long time and eventually they let me go when I told them to google me and they found my tourney results. I just can't imagine how furious I'd be in Viffer's situation, ****ing ridiculous what this government can do...

I was aware of these type of laws, but I assumed they were the result of convictions, or, like actually committing a crime.

+1... either don't carry too much cash with you, or if you do, report it before they find it on you...it's that simple...

and it seems like this is/has been happening a lot more to a lot more people than we originally thought or knew...

I am not a lawyer, so I can't dig up the exact law that applies, but i have been involved in legal and government related work and am pretty certain of what I wrote...and there are hundreds of examples of federal agents stepping out of bounds and doing practically anything they want, especially post 9/11, and ESPECIALLY when it has to do with money, terrorism, money laundering, or even a very very remote hint of it or possibility of it...not that it applies to viffer, but they could care less...and the burden of proof is no longer on the government or its agents, but on the suspects to prove their innocence...our constitution basically has been turned upside down...

read this article...not related to this case, but talks about DEA agents, and how they stage crimes and crime scenes and the tactics they use is deemed illegal by some courts, but they are upheld ultimately by higher courts...

http://www.november.org/stayinfo/bre...A-DEARuse.html

This one time last year...

I was flying back to Montreal from Amsterdam, and while waiting for my luggage in baggage claim, a few Canadian customs guys were walking around our carousel with drug dogs. One of the dogs came up to me and sniffed around at me for a bit and moved on.

After I get my back, three plain clothed officers came up to me as I was walking out and flashed a badge and said (in classic quebecois accent) "excuse me guy, we noticed dat the dog took an interest in your bag, did you see dis?" and i say "uhhh no" or some ****. They ask if I have any drugs on me, and I of course do not. The guy says "well sorry, but the dog is never really wrong so we will have to see about that."

They then pull me into some back room and make me empty my pockets and open up all my bags. At first they are being very rude and telling me to shut up and are making a huge mess of all my stuff. They start asking questions and ask me why I was in Amsterdam if I go to school in Montreal and I explain the whole poker thing. Gradually their questions move from investigative to curiosity, and they are barely looking at my bags anymore. At one point these guys are asking me how much money I make and how much I have ever won in one tournament, and then the one thing that actually looks suspicious in my bag gets uncovered. It was a big white bag which at first glance looked like it could have had a brick of coke in it. It was sealed shut by a bunch of tape and on the inside there was a bunch of white clay looking things (some plates and **** I got in Italy as souvenirs). The guy stops the conversation and looks at it and says "whats dis?" I say "just some plates and things I got in Italy." He doesn't even take a second glance and throws it back in and stops searching my stuff about halfway through all my luggage. He then tells me to pack up my stuff and I'm free to go. He says good luck in poker.

<3 canada.