At this point, Iām beginning to wonder what the difference, if any, is between cops and a āFriendly Neighborhood Businessmen Group Fire Insuranceā racket.
But if the person has proof that it belongs to him for legitimate reasons, thereās nothing going to happen. We wonāt seize it.
So much for the presumption of innocence. Whereās your proof?
No person shallā¦ be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Civil forfeiture is crime perpetrated by the state.
Enough is enough.
No bucks for you, enforcersā¦
P.S. I suggest we eliminate forfeiture laws because they are unjust bureaucracies at best, criminal enterprises at worstā¦
And I am lawā¦
Make it so.
The Friendly Neighborhood Businessmen Group Fire insurance are less predatoryā¦
You can trust the Businessmen not to shoot you outrightā¦
And theyāve been known to wh sack staff who get out of hand.
This is even more sickening than stop-light camera companies getting a cut of the fines collected. Itās absolutely unconstitutional.
Presumably this āadvanceā is to deal with people who use prepaid cards as a less-visible way of transporting cash without getting a financial institution too deeply involved in the matter(obviously VISA and Amex are involved, since they are the payment processor; but thereās way less scrutiny than a bank account-linked card).
That said, seizing money that is lodged with a financial institution is architecturally even easier: you just send them a request on the appropriate legal letterhead and they twiddle a few bits in the database.
It makes me wonder whether the scheme is prepaid-cards-only for the moment just because itās easier to keep that off the record(unlike a bank, which isnāt going to stick its neck too far out for you; but probably does keep records); or whether itās just good policy to confine the bulk of the ācivil forfeitureā to flavors of value transfer preferred by poor people nobody cares too much aboutā¦
Logged into the thread to say the exact same thing.
What do you expect from a state that thinks āOklahoma is OKā is a good tourist slogan?
Waitā¦ now I understand; theyāre trying to make it to āOKā. Wishful thinking!
āOklahoma is OKā because, as the joke told by a Texan went, āOkies are too dumb to spell mediocre.ā Apparently, ācontractā is out of reach as well.
Iām wondering- Could you erase or corrupt the data on the strip with a strong magnet? Could you make a ākiller cardā that would damage the deviceās read head?
Maybe coat the stripe with whatever matchheads are made of.
āYo Cletus, you try this, I canāt get it to read.ā
āCome on, you donāt know how to read a card? Just give it a good hard fast swipe.ā
Let the card soak in water whenever you get where youāre going.
Whose brilliant idea was this?
Wow. I canāt imagine that this could possibly disproportionately target any particular demographicā¦ like say, the urban poor that canāt qualify for ārealā credit cards, and who load their paycheck on a prepaid card for the exact same reasons you would if say you werenāt comfortable carrying large quantities of cash in certain parts of town.
Erasing or mangling mag-stripe cards isnāt too hard: ISO 7811 defines magnetic stripes with coercivities from 300(LoCo) to 4000(HiCo) Oersteds; with 2750 being another common value. The low coercivity ones are usually the cheap seats: printed paper bus passes or copier stored value cards with mag stripes, most credit cards are high coercivity; but modern rare earth magnets are pretty punchy; and a bulk tape eraser or other degaussing tool is really punchy.
The problem is that, if you destroy the stripe, the card will be similarly useless when you try to buy something with it. If you are lucky, the clerk will be willing to enter the embossed digits manually(though the cops can do the same thing); and vendors of prepaid payment cards tend not to be very helpful when youāve given them money and now canāt get it back, so getting a replacement issued is unlikely.
As for destroying the reader, Iām not sure: commercial-grade mag stripe readers are pretty durable mechanically, since they are expected to endure about ten zillion swipes from grimy cards held by hurried and incompetent users without throwing too many errors; but they do need to have relatively sensitive magnetic read heads; and exactly what overvoltage those read heads and the accompanying ADC circuitry can survive would depend on the manufacturer. I suspect that close contact with a proper degaussing wand would likely be warranty voiding; but Iād be much less certain that you could get something into the size and shape of a payment card that would do the job.
Their maybe a bit of a deeper bit of information.
Iāve had a credit card āskimmedā. The thing they do is buy prepaid debit cards before you can cancel: phone cards,gift cards and game cards. One of the charges was for a 200 dollar phone card and another PS game card.
From the looks at the haul in the pictureā¦Iām thinking itās probably skimmers buying cards and not drug dealers exchanging gift cards.
Just another way to square the circle of people who want a tax-free police state: the vendor presumably offered them a slightly better price upfront, so the impact of these on the documented-and-discoverable budget is reduced; with the meat of the deal coming in as their cut of some years of murky and opaque seizures.
Evil; but not stupid-evil.
