Isn't the idea to make the money look legit and pay taxes on it? I wonder how much the gov takes in on the deal.

so the Bernie Madoffs of the world should just go along unpunished?????

on a poker related note

OP facts stated by OP

ties up cashier line waiting for 1000 one dollar bills
ties up line again when exchanging them for another 1000

constantly up buying 200 in chips
holding up game while looking thru bills and constantly being reminded its his turn to act
seat empty 6 out of every 9 hands as he is an admitted butterfly.

No, he committed fraud, which is what he was convicted of.

I agree with browni that punishing activity which looks suspicious is wrong, you should punish activity which is actually criminal, not activity that merely looks criminal. But (with the exception of civil asset forfeiture, which is a blight on freedom and should be discontinued or largely eliminated as quickly as possible), the good news is that this isn't happening either. No individual is being punished for suspicious looking activity. Having a CTR or SAR filed on you does you no harm, you are not punished in any way for suspicious looking activity. It is only if FinCEN or a related government agency determines that you are violating actual laws that the punishment starts to come down.

(I guess you could make the argument that an individual might be harmed when, as in this case, he is banned from a room because a room doesn't want to deal with the paperwork he causes, but again, this isn't something that the Feds control, it is a business decision on the part of the business. They can ban him for any reason they want, except for certain protected reasons. Or they could not ban him. It is their choice, not the government's use of force.)

As for it being wrong to police financial transactions, I don't agree with that, but it is a nuanced argument. Police have a duty to investigate and pursue actual crimes, and some of those crimes are financial, and some of them are part and parcel with financial crimes to cover up the proceeds, ergo they absolutely should be monitoring financial transactions. I think the key question is mostly how much they should be allowed to force private institutions to do their dirty work for them, which is a much thornier question which really belongs outside this forum.

the government didn't punish OP
the casino did because he was a big disruption .
they are a casino not a bank and as a private business when a patron is disruptive they should have the right to ban them.

my Bernie point was that he was only caught by the government monitoring of transactions and if its a small inconvenience to me to catch scum like him then I'm ok with it

It's not clear to me that reason for the barring isn't mandated by the government. Depending on exactly what was going on and whether he provided necessary 8nformation they may be prohibited from transacting with him.

I agree with everything you said, except structuring comes to mind as another example of criminalizing suspicious activity, and yes I would argue that OP was harmed by these regulations, albeit indirectly, and he may have been banned anyway without them. Sorry if this discussion was too de-raily/political.

It was structuring that drew attention to Denny Hastert, who was using the money to pay off a blackmailer who was blackmailing him over his molesting of teenage boys when he was a high school wrestling coach.

Hastert sentenced to 15 mos. for structuring


--klez

Luckily the founding fathers accounted for this nuance when they wrote the constitution and put in a clause that covers it. The government must get a warrant to do this. The warrant must specify who the person is and specifically what they want to search for.

The idea that they should be allowed to just monitor all people at all times is ridiculous and totalitarian.

You are not criminally punished, but you are punished. And this is the legitimate part about browni's argument.

Having CTRs filed increases your chance of an audit. It's not without consequences.

I neither deny that being scrutinized is harmful nor that the scrutiny is harmless. But the question is whether the imposition is proportional to the risk. Like if we were required to go through a body cavity search before we entered a bank, we would agree that's too big of an imposition for too small a gain. On the other hand, if the CTR limit were $100,000,000, I think we could all agree that it's reasonable to say there's near certainty that's tied to illegal activity.

Link? Iirc fincen and dhs go out of their way to say they do not feed info to the irs. Certainly there are people who don't believe it, but I am not aware of an evidence to support this audit claim.

I'm not talking about the direct causation of FinCEN handing the CTR yo the IRS. Any win big enough to trigger a CTR (or even multiple SARs) will be likewise noticed by the IRS.

If you prefer, I could give other examples that CTRs/SARs aren't harmless. Like SARs create a hostile business environment for cash intensive businesses - restaurants, strip clubs, etc - as a necessary condition of their intended purpose to prevent money laundering.

But on a meta level, I question why it can't be a given that currency controls fall between "totally harmless" and "****ting on the Constitution" and we spend more time debating what's a reasonable way to balance a need for oversight/security with harassing people who use cash regularly.

Like, several people seem to appreciate me pointing out the 10k limit isn't inflation adjusted. Has anyone besides me calculated what that number would be in 2018 dollars, as a starting point for some kind of a practical discussion? What would we, as both poker players and as human beings opposed to organized crime, consider to be a fair compromise?

wtf is a star note?

A Federal Reserve Note (or old silver certificate) with a "*" at the front of the serial number on the note or certificate.

A bill with an asterisk in its serial number, generally meaning that it is a replacement for a misprint. You can sell them for above face value on eBay.

^ Collectors buy , or steal if they have to , all kinds of nonsense! Likely, somebody , somewhere collects dog turds from special breeds. OPs hobby is not mainstream , but more understanable than many others. He was not banned because of his hobby outright , but because of all the hassel and suspicious activity he engaged in , I think!

+1

Back in 2012 (or whenever this series came out), I routinely scanned all my bills for special bills, and was pretty proactive in buying in for extra in 2006 series bills, and cashing them out to churn the bills. But I kept my churn to about 10% of my action. As a one-time burst, I also hit up my local bank and asked to change a non-SAR-worthy amount to new bills, and they were happy to oblige (the new bills were somewhat of a novelty at first).

I was able to change up more than a few buyins in the first few months (before cashiers started handing out the used / sticky / cocainey bills) into pristine bills with a reasonable number of specials.

This thread has definitely taken a turn for the worse.

Now me and my OCD tendencies are going to be looking for star notes.

Thanks Obama.