Quote:
Originally Posted by snowman
so the Bernie Madoffs of the world should just go along unpunished?????
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.
Last edited by dinesh; 10-20-2018 at 10:32 AM.