A new device is allowing the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to clean out motorists’ bank accounts.
It’s long been known, that you need to carry lots of cash when you drive through Mexico, because every so often you’ll be expected to pay an unmarked toll.
Now, you might not have the cash, by the time you get to Mexico. Oklahoma State Police recently began using scanners, that can clean out your bank account long before the border:
“… the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
It’s called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.
Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.” (full story)
So if a cop pulls you over, and decides you look like a criminal, he can just pull out his handy scanner, swipe your ATM, and clean out your bank account. Ditto for any gift cards. You might want to tell your sister-in-law that you’d rather she just PayPal you some cash next Christmas, rather than give you another Amazon gift card.
Asset forfeiture has been misused across the country for a couple of decades now. (So much, that some States are putting restrictions on the practice.) If a person is suspected of a crime, and has a lot of money in the car, the police can hold it for safekeeping while you prove you aren’t a criminal. You have the presumption of innocence, but money is always assumed guilty.
It was originally intended to insure that crime doesn’t pay, but once law enforcement realized how much crime didn’t pay, they just couldn’t stop seizing assets. Quite often the assets weren’t as much as a lawyer would seize to get them returned, so the police got to keep them.
These scanners aren’t new. The Department of Homeland Security has been using them for a couple years now. According to Jack Williams, President of the ERAD Group, the technology was originally designed to combat terrorism, as terrorists have been using gift cards to move money around the world for quite some time.
What is new, is State Troopers using them. And you can expect to see the equipment nationwide very shortly, as ERAD Group has quite an incentive to get scanners in patrol cars across America: “…the state is paying ERAD Group Inc., $5,000 for the software and scanners, then 7.7 percent of all the cash the highway patrol seizes.”
This can’t be right- seems like there’d be a civil rights uproar-
Welp….guess it’s time to load everything onto Apple Pay and cut up the cards.
Gotta love a f’n crook.
I talked to the President of the ERAD Group. The magnetic stripe on bank, gift, hotel key, and credit cards is not subject to privacy protection under the 4th Amendment.
Well that’s just all kind of jacked up….
Nope. If you get pulled over, and suspected of a crime, they can go through your wallet, swipe all your cards, and zero all your balances.
However, your phone is. So they cannot access Apple Pay® without a warrant. So yes, Mike, you’re safer that way.
The problem is there are still a lot of places that don’t do Apple/Samsung Pay. Damn….do I have to go back to writing checks????
Just checked ERAD Group, inc website and can only find medical devices as products. Also, Oklahoma is not listed as a custmer. However the story does come from Oklahoma’s Own, a news station or so it seems.Wish you had blogged something funny.
Arggggh. This is getting intolerable very quickly.
I talked with Jack Williams, inventor of the technology. It’s real. There is also a DHS site linked in the article. Homeland Security has been using it for years.
The Blue Gang is into Highway robbery, extortion, human trafficking, kidnapping and murder all under protection from the state. Why should this be allowed to continue? Oh ya I forgot the politicians are on the take and they want their piece of the action. Remind me to never go to New Mexico.
P.S. I miss spoke this should be about Oklahoma, but almost all the states do this. Seizure of personal property and money is being practiced all over the USA. Without conviction the Blue Gang takes whatever they want and it can cost you $1,000 to fight. In New York if they take something and you want to fight it, you start with a $10,000 retainer fee to some slick lawyer and wait though years of litigation to get back your property or money and you cannot sue for damages even when or if you win.
Quite literally ‘highway robbery’ ― by cops! John Oliver brilliantly covered this topic back in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
Let’s stop this obscene ‘Policing for Profit’. Get involved: http://endforfeiture.com/
What ever happened to “due process”? C’mon! This is sounding more and more like one of these thirrd world communist countries we “all” so despise? America is better than this!
Government needs more money!
Fuckin’ okie PIGS! OINK, OINK! What a DICK move!