That actually sounds reasonable. Put in place procedural safeguards that limit the use of these scanners to this specific use case, make the argument in public, scrap the “public-private partnership” crap, and we’ll see what happens.
But the article makes it sound … shady.
Skimmers that steal CC numbers and buy gift cards in bulk are a much more common thing then OMG WAR ON DRUGS GIFT CARD CANCLE.
Recently we had CVS, Walgreen’s etc hit with people purchasing tons of gift cards with skimmed/cloned cards in person. It was a group from South Florida that roams around from CVS to CVS and turned skimmed credit cards into ‘born again’ gift cards.
But yeah…no matter what if you have a suitcase full of gift cards…that just MIGHT…set off some red lights for the police.
And I really…really doubt handing a gift card to a guy to buy a bag of pot is a realistic scenario.
“Hey…here’s this little bit of plastic that I TELL YOU is worth 100 dollars…now give me weed”.
the police need more stuff , and if they pass without much resistant , they will bring in card readers purchased with cooperation of the banks than can clean your checking / saving account and add some debt to you
Because if you have debt you can’t start an illegal trade !
[quote=“jerwin, post:16, topic:79470, full:true”]
Whose brilliant idea was this?
[/quote]I’m pretty sure this is just ERAD getting a contract as their credit card processor, with a higher rate than normal due to their “safeguards” against collecting from non-gift accounts. (Normal CC processors charge between 1.5% and 5%, based on various factors.)
[quote=“Bobo, post:17, topic:79470, full:true”]I can’t imagine that this could possibly disproportionately target any particular demographic… like say, the urban poor that can’t qualify for “real” credit cards, and who load their paycheck on a prepaid card[/quote]Does anyone really do this? I mean, all a gift card really is, is a debit card linked to a non-named account. I’d expect even “the urban poor” can get a bank account - and those all come with check cards nowadays.
They might prefer not to if they’re trying to hide their money from creditors.
Forfeiture laws should be scrapped, if possible. Failing that, they should only be applied after conviction, and then only under very specific circumstances.
The way things stand now, this is outright theft. Not only can the thugs beat you up, they can steal your lunch (or rent) money as well.
Who knew that being a schoolyard bully would actually count as career training?
Corporate Fuckin’ America.
Oklahoman cops are getting an early start on their Christmas stealing this year.
As I type this, the top article at oklahomawatch.org is, “Will Out-of-State Residents Avoid Okla. Because of Seizure of Prepaid Cards?”
I expect to see a lot of warnings in the future, issued to potential tourists to the U.S.
Every day the U.S. sounds more and more like a third-world country, with a laughably inept, corrupt government, police on the take (literally, taking whatever they can get), failed healthcare system, and an educational system with a very inconsistent level of quality from one region to the next, because some areas can’t afford quality while other areas choose to exercise their right to produce bigoted, stupid people.
And yet the political right keeps insisting that the rest of the world worships us and wants to be like us. They must be passing around some pretty good drugs.
Haha. Fuck Oklahoma. It was my first thought. I will never ever go there again.
Nice to know I am not alone.
I don’t think we ever weren’t.
Europe set themselves back in the 20th century and the two strongest economies at the beginning of the 20th were the US and Australia.
But certainly not in terms of military power. The US ran things for a while… but were not culturally stable as a nation. We have new nation problems. There’s a lack of identity and comraderie and a sense of belonging. Our culture is so homogenized and corporate. Inauthentic. It’s a bunch of hominids pulling shit out of the ground. The story of how the nation was developed is the story of a few wealthy powerful folks on a frontier exploiting and killing suckers they convinced to migrate west and ended up being suckers or slaves or worse… instead of getting paid simply being blown to smithereens at the bottom of a gully.
That’s America. The real America. It’s quite a terrifying place. And now they’re going to crown an orange king and give him the nuclear arsenal and a mandate to make us ‘great again’.
There is no planet B.
Unfortunately, “due process” is a pretty low bar.
I think you nailed it right there 
The trouble is that there is really no reason for this sort of roadside ‘account-drain-while-U-wait’ hardware except for circumventing procedural safeguards.
If somebody has a probable cause-worthy stack of dubious plastic; just get a warrant to that effect and then follow up from there(even if there isn’t an ID associated with the card, the payment processor or store that issued the card will have a record of it, since on-card stored value isn’t used for anything except very, very, cheap stuff like library copier value).
There just isn’t any circumstance where the ability to drain the account during a traffic stop makes sense as a legitimate application: if the card isn’t actually stolen or otherwise illicit, it’s plain highway robbery; and if it is, just confiscating the money rather than tracking it down, figuring out where the cards were purchased with a skimmed credit card, etc. merely leaves the police with the proceeds of the crime and eliminates any chance of reverting the fraudulent transactions.
Given the value of various flavors of mag stripe cards for fraud and theft, mag stripe readers and forensics equipment are perfectly logical things for police to have; but this isn’t really forensics equipment, it’s just a glorified point-of-sale terminal for applying charges to a card in the field. The only use case is just doing with payment cards what they already do with cash.
The one important thing to remember is how…unpleasant…the process of creating a spirit of national togetherness and shared identity can be.
National mythologies usually draw from some elements of historical truth, like any good historical fiction; but the process of eliding the unpleasant chapters and assimilating, expelling, or exterminating the various undesirables whose existence casts doubt on the truth of the narrative can be pretty messy.
It is true that people seem to like having a nice mythology; but it’s not clear that you want to do what it takes to make one.
Do you seriously think this is a common use case?
No they can’t. Since Sept 11th even proving you exist is nontrivial. Expensive.
I needed yet another birth certificate to get a driver’s license. The one I had since I was born was not official. I needed a printout from a state database.
A couple of bounced checks and you lose your checking privileges everywhere, as well. Banks have reports on individuals they share
So there are now options for people to select being paid in single use debit cards, as well as get tax returns and school loans and other things.
Not drug deals. Fucking idiots. Who deals drugs with a fucking debit card?!?!
Just to be clear, this isn’t only about prepaid debit cards. It’s your regular bank debit cards too. If you have money in your bank account, they can steal it.
“Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.”
That’s not the point. The point is people have prepaid and regular bank account debit cards.
The police made a fortune robbing at badgepoint from anyone driving past on the interstate with an out-of-state plate. All the police had to do is declare it suspicious - no evidence whatsoever needed - and they could take it.
People have wised up. They keep the money in their bank account or buy a debit card that they can hand over when they buy an old truck, iPhone or whatever. And so the police have adapted. It has nothing to do with drugs.
