Frequent cash withdrawals land Springfield man in court | Hacker News Reader

Frequent cash withdrawals land Springfield man in court

news-leader.com

17 pointswarsaw14 comments

I'm not sure what kind of reporting news-leader.com generally does, but I feel like most of this story is missing.

Sure, he was structuring, which seems as ridiculous as 'precrime' to me. But why was the guy trying to flout reporting requirements? Why were they looking in to him? I'm positive that my bank transaction history would, at times, look odd- especially as I was ramping up to buy a house and move to a different state while starting a new company. Also, my credit union was always in Oregon, even when I wasn't- which lead to weird contortions like mailing myself a $5,000 check and a $2,500 check to then snap check them in to my business account with the same credit union because I hadn't taken the time to link them properly yet and the max you can snapcheck is $5K, and I didn't want to take the time to find a partner branch.

Maybe someone looked into it behind the scenes, maybe they didn't. Either way, my money never got frozen and I never got in trouble. Why? Because I wasn't up to no good. I'm not touting the "if you've got nothing to hide..." crap about being happy to give up my liberties, but in general, even when they're stomping all over our constitution you don't go to jail for no reason.

> Sure, he was structuring, which seems as ridiculous as 'precrime' to me. But why was the guy trying to flout reporting requirements? Why were they looking in to him?

Because federal law requires banks to monitor for and report this type of behavior.

The DOJ states that he admitted he was structuring to bank employees, whereas the article says he admitted it to his employees. Either way, he knew he was avoiding reporting requirements, so he would have been able to figure out that it was a crime. Admitting it to the bank employee was probably what started the legal investigation.

Additionally, there are newer reporting requirements that deal with a change in behavior of deposits/withdrawals, not just a fixed floor of $10k per transaction. I know this has been talked about since at least 9/11.

If I were you, I wouldn't admit on a public website to skirting a law, but I'm not sure that "snapcheck" is a law vs some company's risk-limiting policy.

I generally agree that this seems like a non-crime being prosecuted, but it's the law. Until people stop deferring all safety/security decisions to police and prosecutors (which is why we have such a ridiculously bloated criminal code), we will continue to have laws like this for the nanny state to save us from doing the "wrong" things by keeping us in a nice, safe prison cell for 10 years.

It's insane that 10 years in prison is the potential penalty. No wonder the US "leads" the world with it's prison population.

Yeah. American prisons are overflowing with guys who got caught pulling $220k out of the bank in a structured fashion. This is the real source of our prison overcrowding.

Your comment is sarcastic, uncharitable and unproductive.

Obviously the narrow specifics around this case are not the sole cause of prison overcrowding. It's been driven by a massive expansion of criminal codes and decades of ratcheting minimum sentence guidelines upwards and get tough on crime efforts such as "three strikes" laws. The result has been a flood of people imprisoned for money laundering, recreational drugs, petty theft and an even larger number who are simply awaiting trial. The specific case in this story is just one example.

Are you asserting that overzealous prosecution of money laundering is a significant source of prison overpopulation? I'd love to see some sort of supporting evidence for this claim.

As it stands now, it looks to me like you're just lumping nearly every crime together and insinuating that because some are overpenalized that all are.

Prisons should be home to people you're afraid of, not for people you're mad at. It seems that a lot of prosecutors forget that (for a multitude of reasons)

Prisons serve multiple purposes. They are not merely there to hold scary people. Indeed, most scary people are not in prison nor should they be. Being scary is not a crime.

Prison can be an entirely appropriate punishment for nonviolent crime. For certain classes of crime, it seems the most appropriate punishment because it can be difficult to punish effectively with fines. If you only fine for financial crime, you make lucrative financial crimes more appealing. Worst case they just take your ill gotten gains.

I understand that structuring may reveal a pattern for an illegal activity (money laundering, fraud, etc) and that law enforcement can used it as a hint to discover these activities.

But is structuring illegal by itself ? If so, it seems that presumption of innocence is ignored.

Am I missing something ?

If you know that structuring is illegal and you tell -y-o-u-r- -e-m-p-l-o-y-e-e-s- your bank[2] that you are doing it to evade reporting, you admitted a crime to a witness. It doesn't matter what you are doing with the money after it is withdrawn. If he was using the money for money laundering or other illicit business, that is a separate crime from the one described in the article.

Dennis Hastert, former Congressional House Speaker, was convicted of the same charge[1] when an investigation into his (alleged) extortion/hush money used the same tactic to avoid financial reporting. AFAIK, he wasn't actually convicted of child molestation or statutory rape, but was convicted of the money laundering-related crime (because that was easier to prove).

Whether avoiding financial reporting is a reasonable statute is beside the point, but perhaps what you were commenting on.

The way I look at it, it's like a seat-belt law. It's only reasonably enforceable after you've already been pulled over for some other moving violation.

It seems to be in-line with most of the federal code which is designed to give federal prosecutors outsized leverage in plea negotiations. The more charges and the more years of prison they can throw at a defendant, the better the odds they will come away with a conviction. Sadly, this also leads to a lot of largely innocent people taking plea deals to avoid getting railroaded by vindictive prosecutors and less-than-rational juries.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/dennis-hastert-s...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/springfield-business-ow...

>>> It seems to be in-line with most of the federal code which is designed to give federal prosecutors outsized leverage in plea negotiations

That's what I thought. It's only that I find it - in general terms - terribly unfair and abusive.

It's [2016], here is the original source:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/springfield-business-ow...

He admitted to structuring, why is it surprising he was convicted?

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