I never get any attention using the banking app to do transactions but appearing in person is a trial. Every walk-in transaction at my credit union requires you to give them your ID. The amounts don’t matter. EVERY transaction. It’s rare that I walk into the credit union these days, in no small part due to snotty tellers asking me for ID like I was trying to pull a fast one when all i want to do is deposit this check, dammit. if you’re going to be suspicious and ugly over a pissant deposit obviously you don’t want my business. I would go somewhere else except these days it’s so difficult to open an account anywhere. I’m sure there’s multitudes of people keeping their assets under the mattress because it’s just too hard to do business.
You get upset over being asked for identification? I’ve always handed over my ID with my checks and deposit slips without being asked.
Do they catch a lot of criminals because they put “laundering drug money” on those forms?
What people forget is that one of the roles of government is establishing and maintaining the monetary system.
Do you suppose that that is actually the purpose of the question?
I wouldn’t mind it so much if they weren’t so ugly about it. Whatever happened to “friendly banking?” Or even mildly polite banking. Maybe they’d be nicer if I was in there every day but that’s no call to be rude to strangers. It’s not like I’m trying to rob 'em.
No. You have a legal obligation not to lie to law enforcement investigators–certainly not to federal investigators–but you don’t have to “answer their questions truthfully”. (Although, I don’t actually know what–if any–protections there are for persons who are not actually guilty of anything, but just think that the questions of the “law enforcement investigators” are an improper invasion of their privacy. However, if said law enforcement investigators are “asking you about your transactions”, you’re probably on pretty safe legal ground in invoking your Fifth Amendment rights–maybe you did something that you didn’t even know was illegal, and ignorance of the law is no excuse–or maybe the feds think you did something and, even though you didn’t do it, “anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law”.)
The Fifth Amendment applies to all criminal investigations. Is that all you’re interested in?
Banking is a regulated activity which means you have some affirmative obligations if you want to engage in it, such as not structuring your transactions to avoid regulatory scrutiny of you behavior.
It’s a requirement, they all have to do that, or at least have you scan your card and input your PIN.
They dont want other people making deposits into your acct, that is often a sign of money laundering.
I think it’s worth remembering that this thread didn’t start out asking about “structuring”, it started out with a guy asking about making a one-time (admittedly large-ish, for these days) cash withdrawal, and whether or not he is obligated to tell anyone what he’s planning to do with his own cash money. To which the GQ answer, as noted in this thread more than once, is that no, he is under no legal obligation to answer such a question. (And I know that thread topics drift, sometimes in response to things the OP himself said.)
But we’ve also seen some statements in this thread like “why shouldn’t it be suspicious if you see a guy carrying $20k in cash?” and “they’d ask you where all that money is going” and “if…law enforcement investigators come to ask you about your transactions, you are obligated to answer their questions truthfully”.
It is perhaps getting a little far afield but it should be noted that law enforcement, both state and federal, can confiscate your money if they stop you in your travels with a large amount of cash. There have been cases of people traveling with large amounts of cash for legitimate purposes (buying a motor vehicle, buying a house, buying a business, buying for business) and they have found it difficult to retrieve their money once it is removed from them. If they are foreign nationals or illegal aliens, they pretty much have zero chance of having their funds returned; they’re often asked to voluntarily give up such funds as part of the deportation process.
I do not doubt that there are people roaming the country today grifting like crazy and money laundering like bandits. I’m also pretty convinced that the really meaningful big money laundering happens not by somebody going to a bank or by traveling somewhere with a bag of cash but computers talking to one another across the world. That is the truly big crime; the rest is petty cash by comparison. But I guess it’s easier to stop someone in the street than it is to talk to, say, bank presidents and heads of industry and leaders of countries.
Well, no. See, very very few drug dealers take credit cards or checks. This means they take cash. So, they need to spend the cash, without attracting attention. This is quite difficult with out Money laundering laws.
This is for the EU, showing the the problem is world-wide.
https://people.exeter.ac.uk/watupman/undergrad/ron/methods%20and%20stages.htm
Your outgo is someone else’s income. You’re sending that cash somewhere, and there’s a fair chance the recipient may owe some kind of tax on it. Maybe you just hate checks and credit cards, and like living a cash-based life; the IRS isn’t going to worry much if you’re buying ordinary amounts of beer and groceries from ordinary stores. But $2000 a day? In cash? That’s certainly not just for beer and groceries, unless your neighbors back up your claim that you’re also buying for them. Are you paying off a bet? OK, they’re going to want to go talk to (or quietly investigate) the recipient of all that cash and verify that he’s declaring that cash income on his 1040. Are you putting on lavish nightly fireworks shows in your backyard? That’s fine, but it’s a little weird that the guy selling you all those fireworks only transacts in cash; they’re gonna want to talk to that guy about his business activities.
As is also being discussed in this thread, it’s also entirely possible that you are the victim in some kind of scam, and the authorities may actually be able to help you.
Bottom line, $2000 in cash, withdrawn every single day, is highly unusual and may merit a few questions from people we hire to enforce laws against organized crime and income tax evasion. It’s not all that different from a group of four guys dressed in dark clothing wandering around quiet suburban neighborhood streets at 3AM: this is likewise highly unusual, and although they may be totally innocent in action and intent, the situation merits a few questions from any police officer who happens to come across them.
I agree that it’s not quite correct to say that you are obligated to answer questions truthfully. It’s more correct to say that you are obligated not to lie.
There may be some times when you are in fact obligated to answer questions, like if you are subpoenaed. And other times where you might not be obligated to answer the questions, but if you don’t answer the questions you won’t get the services. Just like you are not obligated to let a security guard look through your backpack, but if you refuse to let the security guard search your backpack they can refuse to allow you through the door, ticket or no ticket.
It seems to me it is perfectly legal to refuse to fill out the form at the bank detailing where that cash is going. And then the bank will just fill out the form for you saying that you refused to give that information, and submit that form to the Feds along with the giant pile of all the other forms. And this single “refused to answer” response will form one datapoint in an algorithm that looks for money laundering patterns. And that one datapoint about you will return the answer: not suspicious.
It would trigger an investigation if you did it multiple times in some pattern that isn’t well known to the public because the Feds don’t want to give money launderers an open source version of their algorithm to design their money laundering schemes against. But it’s fair to say that withdrawing “large amounts of cash” and refusing to give an answer one time isn’t going to result in a human being looking over your banking history to see if they can find any financial crimes.
They bank doesnt submit that form to the Feds. They just submit a CTR. The info on “why?” is for the banks own use.
However, such a outright and maybe angry refusal may have made the bank file a SAR.
SARs all get looked at by a FBI & IRS agent. So, yes a human agent will look into it. How deep? Maybe only for a few minutes. But maybe more. They may be interested why a LEO is being obstructive.
No “algorithm” there.
Are you arguing both sides? They make you use cash, but want you to not use cash?
I’d assume this is due to the tellers see a much higher proportion of pain in the butt customers and/or transactions. The advent of online banking, mobile deposits, and ATMs mean that the average teller doesn’t get as many routine deposits and withdrawals, they’re spending most of the day dealing with the customers who come in with a 3rd party check from the Bank of Mongolia and want to cash it immediately.
Even we Americans know not to make smart ass remarks to our own CBP officers when returning home. They don’t treat us any better than they do you.
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The bankers and government both generally want to incentivize “cashless”; BUT since the cannabis business is seen as “undesirable” the bankers make it a PITA for them to join in.
The cannabis business isn’t “undesirable” - it’s illegal. Yes, several states have decriminalized or legalized it, but distribution is still a federal crime. Banks that facilitate transactions for cannabis dealers are committing a federal offense. It is admittedly a bit of a legal gray area, with the Obama administration more or less turning a blind eye, but the Trump administration, and in particular AG Jeff Sessions, have been very clear and explicit that they still consider distributing cannabis, even where it has been fully legalized at the state level, to be a prosecutable criminal offense, and therefore it is also a clearly and explicitly prosecutable criminal offense for a bank to facilitate those transactions.
If “legal” (by state law) cannabis businesses are having difficulty using the banking system, it’s not some weird Catch-22 - it’s the system working exactly as intended.
In effect the Regulators have made it impossible for normal banks to bank the cannabis business.