Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

>Still, regulated how? What you're talking about is criminal activity. Are regulations the antidote to that?

Yes, the creation of a regulation with a civil (cash) and personal (imprisonment) penalty is required in order to create enforcement actions. Then you load up a van full of Catalytic converters and drive to metal places and offer to sell them, if they accept, they arrest who ever accepted and seize assets of the owning entity.

View on HN

Isn't entrapment of this sort stupidly easy to avoid? If you don't know the person offloading goods to you, ask if it is legit. Let them make up a story about how they got them, or kick them out if they admit it is stolen.

Ask the people convicted of soliciting a prostitute?

Not a lawyer but had a brief introduction to the entrapment defense as a youngster. As explained to me, in the US, an entrapment defense requires the prevention of choice on the part of the criminal.

So if the LEO offers the converters and the guy says "Get out of here with those things!" then no arrest and no entrapment.

If the LEO says, "I work at a place that replaces catalytic converters and we need to convert these older non-working ones to cash." Then the person making the choice can reasonably say he believed that it was a legal transaction, so even if he is arrested the defense would be entrapment.

I will leave the other script (LEO is the buyer) as an exercise for the reader :-)

> Not a lawyer but had a brief introduction to the entrapment defense as a youngster. As explained to me, in the US, an entrapment defense requires the prevention of choice on the part of the criminal.

Not quite. It's more like that the LEO entices or coerces the alleged criminal into committing a criminal act they otherwise would not have done. A legit sting just offers the opportunity to commit an illegal act. Once law enforcement starts using persuasive or coercive tactics, then, you cross over into entrapment. That means that both of your scenarios are actually legit stings, absent any further interaction.

See https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/entrapment-basics-33...

If we can have laws that bring strict liability for financial institutions who don't know their customers (KYC) for anti-money laundering (AML) purposes, we can bring in laws requiring scrapyards to know their customers for anti-trafficking in stolen property purposes.

Catalytic converters, like many auto parts, have serial numbers on them. Tracking these should be standard practice for scrapyards. Furthermore, scrapyards should be subject to random surprise inspections to enforce this.

Furthermore, the palladium in catalytic converters should be doped with traceable radioactive isotopes and an enforcement scheme put in place to catch unscrupulous smelters who melt down the catalytic converters and attempt to sell the metal on the open market.

encouraging these sorts of sting operations could lead to all sorts of weird stuff down the line.

See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/stash-house-st...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com