I always wonder how this is legal in the U.S.A? Creating a fake bank in another country sounds like committing fraud in another country. At worst it can be they would be charged with money laundering themselves.
What is the line of what is acceptable at entrapment in the United States? What stops any agency from creating permanent fake banks for example?
I am glad drug lords get busted. I hate them, but I think if there is no line, then we do not need any kind of law. Just declare drug traffickers as not human and exterminate them. I do not think the outcome would be good.
It's legal because the law doesn't explicitly forbid it, I guess? Legality is a very flexible thing. Morality is another, but not necessarily the same.
Anyway, generally speaking, law enforcement is granted things that citizens do not, e.g. visibly wearing weapons, owning and transporting narcotics, etc. But those things are obvious.
Your last bit is very totalitarian, and I would have hoped we had intellectually grown beyond that.
Interestingly, the principal of legality in Brazil has two different meanings:
1. For regular people, it mean that they can do whatever the law doesn't forbid.
2. For public officials, it means they can only do what the law allows.
If the government setup their own Silk Road and busted a bunch of drug dealers it wouldn’t be any different than starting a bank. The first informant said I have drug traffickers asking for banking services. They setup what they were already seeking.
Most likely a few governments and courts in multiple countries were already OK with it by the end.
Yeah, just a heads up that darknet commerce goes much darker after every enforcement action.
More of it switches to Monero despite being less convenient, debilitating tracing capabilities.
It accelerated need for completion of Monero multisignature capabilities, allowing the custody of funds to remain with the buyer and seller, instead of requiring the exchange as an escrow provider which is where many of the funds are seized when the government finds a server and takes it down.
Buyers and sellers do their own encryption handshakes based on certain software protocols. Instead of all messages stored on the marketplace server. And they avoid certain apps like Wickr.
The effort to take down a marketplace increases while the yield decreases. Classic war of attrition.
Everyone already knows the best practices, they are just too lazy to implement them until there is evidence that it’s necessary and not just paranoia.
Of course, but these patterns are true of most businesses (and indeed much human behavior). Companies have policies planned exceeding implementation because the cost isn't justified (until it is).
... and "enforcing the law incentivizes criminals to spend more on not getting caught" isn't really an argument for not enforcing the law. Indeed, from the point of view of law enforcement, it's short-term win-win... Every resource spent on being harder to catch is a resource not spent on the actual harmful criminal activity.
> If the government setup their own Silk Road and busted a bunch of drug dealers it wouldn’t be any different than starting a bank.
Silk road was e-commerce. The laws & regulations of e-commerce and banking are very different, so yes they would different. Doubly so as it's in two nations. Thirdly so, because now international laws and regulations apply
Were the bank activities themselves illegal? It would only be entrapment if they were soliciting the illegal activity. It sounds like they were just soliciting banking services in a way that was attractive to illegal actors. Even if the banking services themselves were not legal, it would seem like entrapment if they used that to charge them with banking crimes.
If NYPD operated a Limousine service in hopes that criminals would discuss their crimes while being overheard by an undercover officer, it would not be entrapment.
“ It would only be entrapment if they were soliciting the illegal activity.”
I’d like to note that this isn’t how entrapment works in the US (or many other places). If I’m an investigator, it is not entrapment for me to go to government employees and say “Hey, I’ll give you $100 in exchange for state secrets. You in?”. Covertly soliciting illegal activity to try to catch criminals is not entrapment. It only rises to the level of entrapment when it is something that would cause a “normally law-abiding person” to break the law, or that the defendant would otherwise have had no criminal intent - for example, “Give me state secrets or I’ll kill your wife” would be entrapment.
But in this case they are setting up a bank that has the ability to facilitate certain banking practices that would be difficult to accomplish without a complicit bank. As such, no person, whether a criminal or not, would be able to commit these crimes without the help of the bank acting as law enforcement agent. The only way it would not be entrapment with regards to the illegal banking would be if they could show that there are other non-law-enforcement run banks that were available to make these facilities available to the defendant. If other banks have mechanisms in place to prevent these banking crimes in the first place, then you couldn't expect that the defendant could have committed them without the assistance of the government agent.
However if they learned information about other criminal activities through this, then those activities would not be subject to a defense of entrapment.
So go ahead and charge them on drug trafficking. But the laundering charges look like entrapment to me. Not a 100% shut and closed case, because it is a bit subjective, but I would expect any defense to have a good chance with it.
That’s not how the court decides if something is entrapment or not. To determine if something is entrapment there are two tests, and this fails both.
Objective test (Did LEOs use incentives that would cause a normally law-abiding person also do this?): Most normally law abiding people won’t launder money given the opportunity, as they have no incentive and the police didn’t provide any additional incentive here. Not entrapment on those grounds.
Subjective test (Was the defendant pressured into doing this?): It would be hard to argue that these people laundered money against their wills. Furthermore, they’ve all committed additional crimes which would predispose them to want to launder money. Not entrapment on those grounds either.
Yes, if the money was higher, then it is entrapment. E.g. 100k for a secret.
The question is “did the police agent catch a crime or cause a crime to happen” of course where it becomes entrapment is a grey area.
The bank activities were illegal and non compliant. The OCC was about to cut them out of the entire banking network for poor reporting, meaning no OCC-licensed banks could take or send wires to them or hold accounts in their name. It would have shut off all trade for this bank without knowing what they’re doing or alleging any crime, yet.
This is how the US enforces its will worldwide.
The Treasury has a similar way to do that, without the OFAC list. They did it in 2018
Back to the OCC, the outcome of the audit would have solidified criminal charges against the bank directors, but then they backed off with the “this is a government operation” excuse. Other reasons they would back off being any other kind of leverage, which small banks do not have.
What is the line of what is acceptable at entrapment in the United States? What stops any agency from creating permanent fake banks for example?
I am glad drug lords get busted. I hate them, but I think if there is no line, then we do not need any kind of law. Just declare drug traffickers as not human and exterminate them. I do not think the outcome would be good.