They are magnets for thieves, police, usually in urban area where a PI can easily follow you and even when acting fully within the law it could unintentionally look very bad if you are in the middle of some proceedings.
A hole in the ground is probably preferable 99 times out of 100.
Traditionally, the answer was "your bank", but does that apply anymore? Chase is discontinuing the service, I'm sure plenty of banks never offered it in the first place, plenty of people use "online-only" banks where there might be a branch for legal reasons, but it's nowhere they could easily stop in and retrieve documents, and entirely too many people are unbanked.
This seems like enough of a gap in the market that a third-party service that says "we've got a really secure building with armed guards and lots of cameras and stuff" could reasonably find an audience among the law-abiding.
I assume a service like the one raided doesn't advertise to the broad public "store dirty assets here" -- indeed, one would expect advertising the service to non-criminal customers would be an important part of their legal ass-coverage strategy.
Anonymous safe deposits threaten the paradigm that assets should by KYC'd and easily visible to creditors/the wife/child support/.gov/privacy-hating-tyrants without resorting to depending on the testimony of the defendant.
Saying "anonymous boxes are a problem" is viable if there's a prominent non-anonymous alternative. I don't think that exists-- see my concern about the bank option.
Hell, one would think this would be a great opportunity for law enforcement to get a direct line into "normal people's" business. Let them do a safe-deposit service: put my passport/birth certificate/old paper stock certificates in a vault at the police station. It's less likely to be burgled than my house, and if they want to gawk over a 30-year-old certificate for one share of MCD, they can feel free.
That is what is alleged, but has yet to be proven.
I doubt that the owners put up billboards or bought ads saying "Store your ill-gotten goods here, wink-wink". It is much more likely that the business was taken advantage of by criminals. Like how FedEx and UPS are used to ship drugs.
Judging by the lawsuit, there's at least 400 customers who used them for legitimate purposes. And some unknown number of customers who used them for nefarious purposes. At what percentage nefariousness does a business become a criminal enterprise, resulting in a large raid by the FBI? Sweeping up and inconveniencing the innocent customers in their dragnet?
This sounds like a fun thought exercise. No idea who we are protecting against but some factors might be:
- Moisture. The containers need to be completely sealed from moisture and have resistance to acid from the soil.
- Metal detector. Perhaps this could be mitigated using a skid-steer with an auger drill attachment? Some of the larger skid-steers can use an 80 inch bit. Excavators can use even larger bits and drill at angles to get under solid objects. Rock auger bits can get through some rocks. Layers of gravel might obscure detection from ground penetrating radar.
- Location should be obfuscated by trees to avoid satellite and aircraft imaging from Keyhole/Google/Others.
- Accessibility. If there is a few feed of rocks above the container and a rope passes through the rocks, then retrieval is less likely to damage the container and one would not need dig as deep for extraction.
- Drill numerous holes and find some other use for them whilst singing One of these things is not like the other
For anti-metal detection, ideal spot would be atop/near a buried junkyard. Once they've gone to the trouble of excavating a rusted Dodge Neon, interlopers are not inclined to dig there again.
Diamonds were worthless until De Beers paid a marketing agency to make the public think they are valuable.
In other words, salt the surrounding area with lightly buried worthless coins, nuts, bolts or metal scraps and anyone trying to find your loot will give up.
Ground-penetrating radar is a different beast, but also has its limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar#Limit...
The investigators tear apart the backyard and find nothing. The alleged terrorist then lets his wife know the backyard is prep'd for this year's potato planting.