[manyxcxi]

I'm not sure what kind of reporting news-leader.com generally does, but I feel like most of this story is missing.

Sure, he was structuring, which seems as ridiculous as 'precrime' to me. But why was the guy trying to flout reporting requirements? Why were they looking in to him? I'm positive that my bank transaction history would, at times, look odd- especially as I was ramping up to buy a house and move to a different state while starting a new company. Also, my credit union was always in Oregon, even when I wasn't- which lead to weird contortions like mailing myself a $5,000 check and a $2,500 check to then snap check them in to my business account with the same credit union because I hadn't taken the time to link them properly yet and the max you can snapcheck is $5K, and I didn't want to take the time to find a partner branch.

Maybe someone looked into it behind the scenes, maybe they didn't. Either way, my money never got frozen and I never got in trouble. Why? Because I wasn't up to no good. I'm not touting the "if you've got nothing to hide..." crap about being happy to give up my liberties, but in general, even when they're stomping all over our constitution you don't go to jail for no reason.

[thephyber]

The DOJ states that he admitted he was structuring to bank employees, whereas the article says he admitted it to his employees. Either way, he knew he was avoiding reporting requirements, so he would have been able to figure out that it was a crime. Admitting it to the bank employee was probably what started the legal investigation.

Additionally, there are newer reporting requirements that deal with a change in behavior of deposits/withdrawals, not just a fixed floor of $10k per transaction. I know this has been talked about since at least 9/11.

If I were you, I wouldn't admit on a public website to skirting a law, but I'm not sure that "snapcheck" is a law vs some company's risk-limiting policy.

I generally agree that this seems like a non-crime being prosecuted, but it's the law. Until people stop deferring all safety/security decisions to police and prosecutors (which is why we have such a ridiculously bloated criminal code), we will continue to have laws like this for the nanny state to save us from doing the "wrong" things by keeping us in a nice, safe prison cell for 10 years.

[dpark]

> Sure, he was structuring, which seems as ridiculous as 'precrime' to me. But why was the guy trying to flout reporting requirements? Why were they looking in to him?

Because federal law requires banks to monitor for and report this type of behavior.