half these posts are ridiculous. comparing dea agents at an airport to the gestapo in nazi germany in the 1930s is quite a strech.
Asset forfeiture is a complicated issue. In this case, I would assume that this would be determined a criminal forfeiture. This requires a conviction because the forfeiture is in effect a 'punishment' for the crime. This is an extremely powerful weapon for law enforcement to weaken and attack the assets of drug enterprises and other money laundering organizations.
On the other hand, if the dea characterize this seizure as a civil forfeiture, they would not need a conviction and could temporarily seize the items. There is a defense specifically for 'proceeds of illegal activity' which is called the innocent owner statutes which would entitle Viffer to get his watch and money back.
Of course, there might be some examples out there of zealous DEA agents who confiscated some poker pros roll in some airport which never got returned, but if you hire a lawyer and proceed correctly, i think there is almost zero chance viffer wont have his items returned.

The point is, he shouldn't have to hire a lawyer and prove his innocence and run through a bunch of hoops to get his possessions back. They should be the ones having to do some proving before seizing possessions on a hunch.

I think the lesson here is to pay for everything by credit card and just never take your cash out in plain sight for everyone to see.

Perhaps for some; I have long arms.

wait so, they were the REAL DEA or the fake ones? If they r real ones, was there any cameras or anything to prove that they took all ur stuff?

....awesome

This. What if that was his rent/food/travel money? WTF is he supposed to do then? In that case, those two douchebag agents just seriously f-ed with somebody's life.

Justice Souter's dissent in Illinois v. Caballes (not to mention your story) should put to rest the myth that drug dogs are infallible (or even generally accurate):

"The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction. Although the Supreme Court of Illinois did not get into the sniffing averages of drug dogs, their supposed infallibility is belied by judicial opinions describing well-trained animals sniffing and alerting with less than perfect accuracy, whether owing to errors by their handlers, the limitations of the dogs themselves, or even the pervasive contamination of currency by cocaine."

I would go much further than Souter does here, and include "deliberate mishandling" as a huge factor that leads to drug-dog false positives. By this I mean the cop does something intentionally, like a special command or hand motion, to make the dog react as if there was a "hit." If police trainers can train dogs to paw and bark at objects when they actually detect narcotics, it would be trivially easy to make the dog do the same when a police officer makes a subtle hand motion, or uses a "magic word" in conversation. Of course police have enormous incentives to search anything they can, on the off chance they find contraband. After all, departments receive funding (and individual cops receive promotions) based on arrests, convictions, amounts of contraband seized, etc. But, that pesky exclusionary rule would get those convictions overturned if not for the dog giving a justification, false or otherwise, to search.

Basically, drug dogs are an end-run around the 4th Amendment, which, as I said earlier, has effectively been repealed judicially.

updates viffer?

This is ridiculous that more than one of you have had to google your name and show the authorities your tourney results. What should the cash games players do? Tableratings lol?

Another interesting thing to remember is that any time you are traveling internationally, the US governement has the right to seize your laptop when you re-enter the country, and you have to give them all your passwords and information how to de-encrypt any files you have. They then either confiscate all your electronics or make a copy of your hard drive.

A lot of law firms or companies that do a lot of intellectual property work have stopped allowing their employees to fly into the united states with their actual laptops, and instead use blank workstations and VPN to their data.

I'm sort of surprised this hasn't happened to someone yet.

Are you serious? How are they suppose to know he's a poker player and not some drug trafficker? It's their job to question people like Viffer who travel excessively, have drug related charges and who for some unknown reason to them carry large sums of cash.

Sorry.
Welcome to rolled city
Population - you.

yeah ive heard of this, i read something on how to prevent it. maybe encrypt ur whole hd? idk

but im surprised noones gotten ****ed by this ridicolous rule

thats really really scary. they cant make u give up ftp and pstars passwords though can you? thats not a file or anything and theres nothing to de-encrypt or whatever. if they can though, thats really messed up. i hated international travel enough as it was, this isnt making me wanna leave the US any time soon.

If you encrypt it and don't give the password they will seize it. Many cases of this.

Buy a travel laptop that has nothing important on it. Wipe any details before you travel. This is what companies do.

they took your Rolex, that's ridiculous.
i could only imagine how many rich people this happens to, and how these guys are pocketing/splitting what they cinfiscate/steal from legitamate people.
sickening. not to mention, most these DEA/customs/airport workers are bitter because their lives are pathetic, and a 19 year old kid has more money than they've made in 10 years.

I'm sure they can find out a reason to force you to give them any passwords they want. If you're really paranoid about this you should either do 1 of 2 things.

1. Have a contingency plan if this were to ever happen ie. immediately call a trusted friend to have them change ur passwords

or
2. Install truecypt with a hidden operating system. What this does is that you have 2 passwords. One password to enter your real operating system that you use and another to enter a decoy operating system. So if someone forces you to give up ur password, you give them the password to enter the decoy operating system (which also destroys your main operating system at the same time) and they know no better. Though you'll probably need someone with moderate to expert computer knowledge to set this up for you.

Story has made it to #3 on reddit, with a link to another site:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/com...mugged_by_dea/
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131341.html

so what are they going to do if you wont give them the encryption password? lock you up for what?

Just for the sake of sharing a customs story that's the opposite of most in this thread:

Coming back from Niagara last year or the year before, crossing the border in a taxi. Customs agent asks me what I do ("professional gambler") and how much money I am carrying (about $250).

"You're a professional poker player and you only have $250 on you?" mocking me before letting me through.

Can't win with these guys.

The point is that they shouldn't be doing this in the first place. If they feel like investigating him for the unusually large amount of cash, fine, but carrying a large amount of cash isn't illegal and they shouldn't be able to seize it without hard proof that it came from drug trafficking.

The war on drugs has resulted in a whole host of unjust laws that make this kind of conduct legal. It's a waste of tax dollars, manpower, and time. Legalize, regulate, and tax it.

questionable but probably not allowed to access stars/tilt or anything, here is a story about it, there is other stuff if you poke around google

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/07...ating-lap.html

something kinda similiar happened to me one time when I was picked up on a warrant for unpaid tickets, the sherriff put me in his car and was about to take me to the station and he patted me down and took 5-6K for 'evidence' I made him give me a receipt and I had to track down the arresting officer personally to get him to release the cash and they made me meet him in one of those interogation rooms and he tried to sweat me on where I got the money and what it was for, eventually I got short of patience and just put the receipt in front of him and told him I was there to pick up the money and not for answering questions, and they gave it to me like 20 minutes later

these were only Santa Barbara County sherrifs not sure what the feds will have you do to get your chedda back I'd consider getting an attorney myself