Regarding all the companies you’ve critized: isn’t that unfortunately the case for many if not most bigger companies?

Yes but not equally so. As an ethical consumer I choose the lesser of evils. Also, this isn’t about me. Consumers have a right to make their own choices. Most do not give a shit about ethics and the masses tend to choose the best financial deal. Some are lazy but ethical. That is, they heard a negative blurb about one supplier and they boycott that one supplier not knowing that it leads them to support a higher detriment.

Cash shipments are officially forbidden as per the FedEx ToS, no matter if the package is insured or not. If money is shipped anyhow it is not covered by the insurance.

Either way, it’s the sender’s choice whether to take the risk as they understand it. And they may not understand the risk. A wise sender would insure the package regardless of the contents. Even if the insurance would not pay out, the mere flag that a pkg has insurance has the effect of deterrance. Staff mostly only steal packages that are uninsured because those do not lead to investigation.

However, after a quick research many of the issues apply to FedEx as well.

I have been boycotting FedEx over a decade for those reasons (but note that I see nothing tying FedEx to the Better than Cash Alliance). But this isn’t about me. A republican would happily support FedEx.

Regarding acceptance of cryptocurrency or other forms of payments, I think that’s similar for sending cash in a box.

Cryptocurrency is as close as you can get in a digital mechanism that respects privacy like cash, but there is still a big difference. CC is a public ledger. Everyone sees every transaction and identities can be discovered and doxxed.

in Germany you’d be having a hard time to find a jeweler or other professional entity that accepts such a form of payment.

Luckily it’s the jeweler’s choice.

First, they won’t want to have discussions if packages are lost or valuables are partly stolen from the package.

Not sure what the point is here. Of course when a package is lost the parties involved both have a mutual interest in a claim being filed. A supplier who does not do their part in filing a claim does not get off the hook for the missing package. They still owe the recipient a package, so it is in their interest to file a claim.

Second, they don’t want to be associated with dubious businesses.

That is exactly the harm that perpetuates when you tie a tool to a stigma. It’s not okay to take away useful tools and options from non-criminals on the basis that criminals use them. We do not ban cars on the basis that they are a tool for drive-by shootings.

Furthermore, there’s a legal limit for cash payments of 10,000€ to avoid money laundering.

That’s shitty indeed because it oppresses non-criminals with a policy of forced banking.

I think to get back to the original topic, it’d be interesting to see some statistics on what percentage of the cases where police seized cash from packages were legal (although against FedEx ToS) and how many were related to criminal activities.

Not really. Marginalizing and oppressing non-criminals is not justified by a hunt for criminals. If your approach to hunting criminals harms non-criminals, you’re doing it wrong.

The case at hand is even more perverse, as the civil forfeiture practice actually hinders enforcement of law. They do the money grab for the money. When you seize cash, you send a clear signal to criminals that they are being investigated. It tips them off with intelligence that helps them adjust their operations. When you seize money from a tax evader a year before they evade tax by filing their fraudulent tax return, you actually sabotage the opportunity to catch them (it’s crime-prevention prevention). You can only catch them by recording the cash and letting it go, then auditing their tax using that information a year or two later.

Indeed. That was my paraphrasing (note the lack of quotes).

your bank has regulatory requirements

Are you talking about 31 C.F.R. § 103.121, which states:

“(i) Customer information required—(A) In general. The CIP must contain procedures for opening an account that specify the identifying information that will be obtained from each customer. Except as permitted by paragraphs (b)(2)(i)(B) and © of this section, the bank must obtain, at a minimum,the following information from the customer prior to opening an account:

1. Name;
2. Date of birth, for an individual;
3. Address, which shall be:
   (i) For an individual, a residential or business street address;
   (ii) For an individual who does not have a residential or business street address, an Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) box number, or the residential or business street address of next of kin or of another contact individual; or …
4. Identification number,…

?

I can somehow understand why it’s often a percentage.

But luckily under the capitalist paradigm every consumer can decide for themselves what prices are reasonable and decide whether a transaction is in their interest. I don’t care how they justify their price. If they are charging me 1% to move 5 figures, I’m not okay with paying upwards of $100 to move money. If there really is $100 worth of risk in moving money electronically, then I don’t want a piece of that action.

PayPal, Credit Card, Crypto Currency etc. should typically all process within seconds.

PayPal shares your personal info with over 600 corporations:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

Credit card: there are only 3 to choose from in most regions.

• visa: member of the Better than Cash Alliance; pays merchants $10k to reject cash, thus whenever you pay for something with Visa you help an entity who is trying to impose forced banking on us. Visa also blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy.
• mastercard: member of the Better than Cash Alliance. Blocked payments to Wikileaks, thus taking away our autonomy. Sells offline transaction data to Google (and Google does business with the Israeli military).
• american express: ALEC member, thus supports Trump and US republicans, opposes labor rights, fights women’s rights, fights environmental protection and supports climate denial propaganda, fights gun control, fights immigration, etc. Also blocked payments to Wikileaks.
• credit card does not work in the other direction. A jeweler cannot expect customers who sell their scrap gold to accept credit card. An individual is not going to setup a squareup or whatever it is just to do a one-off transaction.

Cryptocurrency requires both people to use, which kills it as an option in most cases.

All of those options, including cryptocurrency, expose more data than cash and bring in risks with that exposure.

my intuitive feeling was, whoever is willing to take that risk, has a lot of money to transfer and is willing to lose some in favor to stay invisible.

Most people don’t have the insight that my fellow jewelers do. Most people think the risk of an uninsured pkg getting lost is the same as an insured pkg. They decide to save money and take the risk without understanding the heightened risk.

My reason for bringing up insurance was that insurance provides a way to secure valuables like cash. The best security is a good insurance policy. It gives a good option for the legit shipping of cash. The jeweler in the article most likely insured the $47k+ value. But if they didn’t, then it was most likely a young jeweler who has not learned that lesson. Either way, insurance does not likely protect victims from government actions, which is likely why the victims had to directly sue the state.

If you use a courier service that’s specialized on valuables which offers also insurance etc.

Something like that might exist in major cities but probably over 95% of the US is rural where some people are lucky if FedEx is within reasonable reach, much less anything special purpose. DHL abandoned the US, IIRC because they could not spread enough with enough reach to be sustainable. FedEx and UPS have a near duopoly.

It’s really annoying that @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org just took this on the chin. For me even a dispute over $100 would be worth the courtroom battle just to satisfy my curiousity of what happened. A landlord cannot evict without a court procedure, so the tenant would not have to spend a dime on court costs and bring the paper trail to the court. From there, since the banks (all 3 involved) did a shitty job of investigating, they could have been named as 2nd party defendants (sue them all, let the judge sort it out). The investigation should have revealed the bank where the money landed and the actual bank account from there. They could then use the court to subpoena the agency that has “no record of the case”, but who the bank says has the money. If there is no case, then they can return the money (a judge would say).

OFAC obviously benefitted from someone’s court phobia even though the tenant had nothing to worry about.

That’s not how contracts work. Unless the contact specified using that avenue, the only thing that matters is payment received.

You apparently believe OFAC took the money from the sender, not the recipient despite targeting the recipient. A court is not going to say that a payer owes money they already paid and must pay again in duplicate despite a government action to take money from the recipient. I have my money on the tenant prevailing in this case. Since OFAC targeted the recipient, the money likely would have left the sender’s bank and landed in the bank of the recipient. At that moment, the money is on the other side of the wall and outside of the sender’s control. The sender did not hire the recipient’s bank. The money grab would have happened after the money landed in the recipient’s bank. A sender cannot be responsible for a recipient’s bank paying their client.

If OFAC were some ransomware/cyber criminal gang running out of Nigeria, I would agree (as it’s not a government confiscating money from a recipient).

If I say in my contract: pay me by stashing cash under a rock at location X, and the payer complies, and then a bypasser takes the money, that’s a problem for the (foolish) person who drafted the contract that way. The drafter of a contract has a higher responsibility to flaws in the text of the agreement than the party who merely agrees to the contract.

For example, the US specifically has a law that states the benefit of ambiguity in contracts goes to the party who did /not/ draft the contract. This rightfully encourages contract writers to be diligent.

Otherwise you are left with penalizing people for faulty contract terms that they did not draft.

yeah, I was slow to realize that. Like a day slow.

So, if you want to transfer a large amount in cash, most people would probably use a dedicated cash transfer service.

“most people”. Luckily we know that it’s an injustice to marginalize minority groups.

Problems with xfer services:
① fees
② privacy

It’s really absurd, but money transfer services often charge a percentage of the amount transferred (esp.if forex is involved), as if sending more money somehow costs them more electricity to transmit. I feel like I’m being ripped off when charged a percentage of money that moves and even if the price is reasonable I will reject that option on general principle.

You potentially pay more to the transfer company than a courrier and give up privacy on top of it.

③ shipping is faster than electronic payment (no joke!)

I shit you not. I tried a payment service once to send a few hundred to someone for a laptop. Two days later I got a fraud alert demanding that I call a number. I was interrogated:

• how do you know the recipient? What is your relationship to them?
• what are you buying?
• why are you buying it?

WTF? When I send money in the mail, the postal worker does not pull this shit and snoop on me. After the interrogation, it took another day or two for the money to reach the recipient. The post would have been faster and hassle free.

④ we now live in a frenzy of AML extremists coupled with the masses being pushover consumers who will go along with being cattled herded. Non-criminals are being harrassed, inconvenienced, forced to overshare information, and generally oppressed in this fishing for criminals which is being carried out with total disregard for colatteral damage to law-abiding people. Why? Lazy law enforcement. They want /their/ job to be convenient. They want evidence of crime to fall in their lap, rather than to do clever good investigative work.

⑤ a sender may have to ship something AND pay money. I know jewelers. It’s common for someone who is buying new jewelry to pay partially in scrap gold. They give the jeweler their unwanted jewelry which has a melt value. The jeweler reduces the price of the new jewelry by the value of the scrap gold. If you are shipping scrap gold, why make a separate trip to a money transfer service and pay more fees? It’s cheaper and easier to put cash in the pkg if you trust the jeweler. Or a customer might want the very same gold or stones their great grandmother wore to be made into something else.

A jeweler told me uninsured packages have a very high rate of loss. Couriers apparently know when jewelry is being shipped, at least when the sender is “Bob’s diamond shop”. Insurance works as a great deterrant. A courrier knows there will be an internal investigation when an insured pkg does not reach the recipient. They can only steal so many of them before a pattern emerges. Insurance is so reliable for jewelers shipping gold and precious stones, they would just as well trust it for cash.

That’s not going to work for long. Best you’re going to get is a stay until you pay.

Hold on. Who are you saying OFAC took the money from, the tenant or the landlord? You can’t have it both ways. The tenant complied with the terms of the contract to send the money as directed. OFAC targeted the landlord. A court would not have impose a higher expectation than following contractual obligations.

I could see if a check got lost in the mail, where the result is that the defentant retains possession and constructive use of the money, then a court would have enough descretion to rule fairly. But the OFAC case is not that case.

IIRC, New Mexico banned civil forfeiture. But the cops kept doing it anyway. So a law change is not enough… enforcement is also needed. Yes, against the police, sadly enough.

I’ve been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Not for this reason but for the other reasons I mention in this thread.

It’s quite hard because many sellers do not disclose who they use for shipping. I can sometimes add a comment to my order saying “Do not use FedEx. If that’s the only option then cancel my order.” This makes online shopping tedious, so I’ve been driven to just shop locally.

I could not reach that enshitified article but judging from the title, FedEx’s contemp for Black Lives Matter is consistent with their extreme right politics:

• FedEx is an ALEC member (thus opposes labor rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, gun control, taxation, consumer protection, financial regulation, public education, welfare…)
• FedEx used to give a discount to NRA members
• FedEx ships sharkfins, hunting trophies, and slave dolphins
• FedEx was founded by an ex military serviceman (a mostly right wing demographic)

Being on the extreme right would be consistent with BLM contempt. And indeed, fighting unions is FedEx’s core reason for being an ALEC member. Photos of DVDs were leaked and circulated on social media with FedEx on the label and some title like “how to mitigate unions”.

Edit: Nvm the dogs don’t get to keep the money.

I’m sure they get plenty of doggie treats, likely procured with civil forfeitures. Which motivates the dogs to find more. I’m not the least bit worried that the dogs are unfairly exploited from the dog’s standpoint.

As it is openly stated that it will not be carried by FedEx, it’s no stretch that the police will consider it contraband.

It is a stretch. Enforcing contractual agreements is not the job of the police. And it’s also a stretch to say the police are looking to protect the contractual interests of FedEx.

It’s also strangely inconsistent with FedEx’s anything goes practices, whereby FedEx is known for shipping morally dubious payloads:

• #sharkFins (illegal in countries that have a shred of respect animal welfare and the environment)
• hunting trophies
• slave dolphins

Normally, FedEx could normally claim that they are simply maximizing the bottom line in their duty to their greedy shareholders. But the cash ban is not consistent with that. Unless FedEx believes that anyone who loses an insured pkg would claim the pkg included cash as a way to max out the insurance payout. But in that case, it is not in FedEx’s business interest to enforce the policy – just to be able to point to the policy when an insurance claimant say cash was lost.

(update) In fact, police are preventing crime prevention by grabbing the cash. This inspired me to propose a new rule.

Since it’s a small amount of money, the legal process would be with small claims court. You don’t need a lawyer for that. Small claims is cheap and easy going. It’s typically under $100 to file (which you get back if you win) and in some states a registered letter is sufficient to serve the other party.

You would not want to sue OFAC though. In this case you would ideally keep a paper trail of your payment attempt and carry on. Give your landlord the proof of payment (attempt) and wait for the landlord to act against you. That’s the easiest… you wait for the court date and show up with proof of your attempt to pay and a copy of your landlord’s payment procedure (which you followed). OFAC apparently did a money grab on the landlord, not you, so you would come away clean so long as you paid as per your landlord’s instructions.

But wouldn’t a particular dog with particular training who then becomes very interested in your unopened USPS package be a real reason to open the pkg?

Really? I thought pigs were 2-cycle animals (eat their own output on the first iteration, like rabbits), no? I mean, sure, some minority of dogs eat their excrement – the same dogs that end up in the homes of Blue Collar Comedy comedians. Tough contest I guess. I had a dog that rolled in every rotten dead fish it encountered by the lake. Not sure why… maybe it serves as a good cologne to attract the females.

(edit) dogs might have a better memory than cops.

I’ve never heard of cops being called dogs. Pigs, sure. Anyway, money confiscated in this way usually finances police station frills like high-end coffee machines.

They probably weigh the birthday cards to see if anything seems worth opening.

Indeed I’ve seen basic checking accounts with no interest. Then the more feature-rich accounts which offer a number of perks at either a higher fee or higher requirements to offset the fee also include interest. That’s really backwards because an anti-feature is being bundled in. By giving up interest the client should get more features, not less.