* authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation.*
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).
It will not be fixed. The lawyers have control of our legal system. They are the politicians and judges. The system is theirs; if we want to change the status quo, it will take nothing less than a bloody revolution.
> I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering.
I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.
And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.
> Meanwhile, authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation. She has refused, saying she is innocent.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
Don't they also hate to lose though? This seems an unlikely case for a prosecutor to win. If it were a civil case, sure, the standard is much lower there, but for a criminal case the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.
>> I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
>Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
I'd note that many (most?) state jurisdictions (the Federal judiciary has the Federal Defender's Service[0]) require a defendant to be "indigent"[1] before a lawyer is appointed, rather than requiring the defendant to hire a lawyer.
Also, in many jurisdictions, private lawyers are appointed by judges to take on the cases of "indigent" defendants. Often there's little in the way of vetting such lawyers, and the fees paid generally aren't very high -- resulting in subpar lawyers and representation.
Even in places (like NYC[2]) with a more robust public defender system, these lawyers are generally handling dozens of cases at once and don't have the resources of the prosecutor's office (investigators, budgets for forensic testing/analysis, etc.), leaving the defendants' side at a considerable disadvantage.
As such, it's not just saying "I can't afford a lawyer," and Perry Mason rushes to your rescue.
[1] Different jurisdictions have different standards for determining if a defendant is "indigent." But many of those won't appoint a lawyer unless you're flat broke. Own a home? Take out a second mortgage. Have a job? You're not indigent. Etc, etc, etc.
You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.
It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)
A corollary of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is that there’s just no way to compute such statistics. It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven without looking into the details of their case.
There’s a functional difference if you’re trying to compute “tough-on-innocence statistics”, because it means that the target for the only possible metric is much higher than zero. A healthy criminal justice system should routinely rule people innocent; if nearly everyone who’s prosecuted is found guilty, that doesn’t mean prosecutors are being really picky about filing charges, it means the system doesn’t treat innocence as an acceptable outcome.
I've never understood that. There's a claim you are guilty of robbery. You get charged and go to court. You plead not guilty. The da insists and you go to trial. During trial, you manage to provide cctv showing that you were 1000 miles away. The jury says "not guilty".
Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?
CCTV shows you were in the general area of the crime, but your shady friend says you were hanging out with him at the exact time the robbery happened, and the guy who says he saw you do the robbery is also kinda shady. I think it’d be reasonable for a juror to think you probably did it (because your friend is untrustworthy and has obvious incentives to lie) but didn’t do it beyond a reasonable doubt (because the witness just isn’t credible enough).
"Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?"
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
Unfortunately the court system is such that it would collapse under the load if everyone actually exercised their right to a trial which heavily incentivizes plea deals
That is a different problem. In this case it should be clear that the prosecutors have messed up and won't admit it, maybe to save their carriers. They are going after someone innocent because it is the easy target while the real criminal is at large.
Partially. The prosecutors and DAs are motivated by conviction rates. The delays in the court system are a bludgeon to encourage that end. Just like identity theft in itself, no-one is motivated to fix the system but the ones being fucked by it, who are the least able to do so.
We like convictions because there's a hell of a lot of actual crime that is never punished. Just my circle of friends has suffered car break-ins, burglaries (no suspects), grand theft auto (never recovered the car), and devastatingly, a rape on school property. Most of these crimes weren't investigated, despite real damages, and the couple that were never saw a conviction.
In theory, if crimes exceed prosecutions, then number of convictions being closest to the number of prosecutions should indicate an effective use of resources. The real problem is that thorough investigations are rare for most crimes and it's just and industrial-scale process to show the elements of an offense were met by a preponderance of the evidence.
Sure, but it feels like you're doing something helpful. It's like self-help books, or new years resolutions. The emotional fulfillment of feeling like you've done something is vastly more popular and marketable than doing the actual work.
In recent years we have also witnessed the outcomes from DAs who refuse to prosecute -- having someone more hard nosed in office seems vastly preferable to losing the local Walgreens and still not having my burglaries prosecuted.
So then is your need for "justice" satisfied by rounding up a bunch of unlucky people and convicting them? To me it seems like you're just describing the other side of the exact same coin where the justice system isn't doing its job, but in a way that absolves it for not doing its job.
I mean it's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right?
The way I see it, every time the public demands the justice system (prosecutors, police, etc) do their jobs better, the people in the system respond by doing anything but focusing on its job. Either raising the false positive rate ("hard on crime"), going on strike (raising false negative rate), or even rioting to create disorder from whole cloth (then blaming it on the protestors).
Check out Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate. The writing is poor and it’s one of the only sources that dares suggest that the Enron executives were victims but regardless, there are points relevant to exactly what you’re asking about.
Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
> This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...
Not only does the US not care about justice, they favor the government, always. In a federal conviction you used to have forever to file an appeal, but that was determined too expensive (because people could utilize it) so they made it 10 days. But that was too short. So they made the fair compromise between 'an appeal should always be allowed' and 10 days, and made it 14 days for defendants (but 30 days for government because you know, the government has more limited resources than someone sentenced and being moved across country in prison transports between detention centers to their assigned prison).
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like you should consult one. If you have the legal information of this person and they have possession of your activation locked phone, sounds like you could at least sue him civilly or in small claims court for the value of it, if the DA won't do anything
At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
"If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems."
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
We are all ears if you'd like to start that conversation. Make a page/blog post and submit it here, and accept ahead of time whatever fallout may arise from doing so. If the benefits outweigh the risks, or if you simply are at a point where the risks do not matter.
They give a shit about their conviction rate. And maintaining a comfortable relationship with their local police department(s). Very little else.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
The French are just exercising their second amendment rights as originally envisioned by the founding fathers. They're doing America better than Americans!
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Nobody did a correlational study between electability and judge or prosecutor competence either.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
It's hard to craft an exam that isn't mostly testing how good the examinee is at writing exams. Things like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, etc... are good predictors of near-future academic success but not very useful beyond that.
So, I think an exam is a bad idea unless it's a pass/fail exam (ie no grades, you either understand the law or you do not) and there should be no meaningful time constraint when completing the exam. That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
There are state and federal oversight mechanisms with the power to remove bad judges.
Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
Ok. So we just need enlightened legislatures to enact these processes into law and fund them. I actually agree with what you propose, but am having a hard time seeing how to get such a system in place.
Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
The highest level public offices should always be either directly elected, or appointed by an elected person for only the duration of their office. This way voters can get rid of them if necessary. Otherwise they become an unelected deep state.
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
It's not stated in the article, but quite often when you look into these extraordinary miscarriage of justice stories in the US you find out what race the victim is, and then it becomes clear what's happening.
Time for CashApp founders and C-levels to be held personally liable for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
Then you sue all the law enforcement officers and local officials who are attempting to lay the blame for this on someone they should know is likely innocent. Make all of the financial liability for this lazy investigation come directly from the pockets of the cops and prosecutors until they have nothing left to their names and then extract every thin dime that you can from the city that hired or elected these clods so that the whole city is bankrupted.
Money is obviously the only thing that talks in this society. Make all these assholes pay with everything that they have managed to accumulate in their lives and kick their asses to the curbs after pointing at a dumpster and telling them that they can likely find some cardboard suitable for beggar signage. They'll need to supply their own writing tools though.
Apathy is the main thing allowing this to be a fantasy result. Maybe if enough people are caught up in bullshit like this where their lives and reputations are tarnished due to fraud perpetrated by someone else then we can energize some societal changes that pin the reputational damage and financial penalties on the correct donkey.
Police never thought to subpoena the ISP for the IP address associated with the cashapp login? This seems like an egregious omission in the investigation. Even if it were a VPN, you could subpoena her email to find payment receipts to the provider, etc. Even that may not necessarily prove guilt if there are no logs. That's all an enormous leap of evidence to assume the account is genuinely hers, especially given how endemic identity theft is.
> According to 404 Media's review, the address on the account was one where neither Smith nor her husband had ever lived. The account had also been accessed through Verizon connections, while Smith says she uses AT&T and has never had a Verizon plan.
> There was also a discrepancy involving the phone used to create the account. Cash App's records showed an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system dating back to 2022. Smith, however, provided evidence that her iPhone 13 mini was running the much newer iOS 26.5.2.
That's even crazier. You have to question if they even understand what they're investigating. I expect this to be thrown out in court, although I also have declining faith in our court system.
I think you have to understand that they care more about whether or not they can get a conviction than whatever actually happened. Then the rest of it makes perfect sense.
So beyond the prosecutor, we have to start questioning judges and juries. If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction, then what's really wrong here: the prosecutor or the judge/jury part of the system? Prosecutors are famous for only bring cases to trial they feel they can win. That sense normally comes from their experience directly or reading of previous trials.
> If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction
Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.
Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.
The prosecutor is trying to scare this woman into accepting a plea deal. Couple thousand dollars and 6 months probation. Maybe they eventually drop the case, but she’s going to face much more than that in travel and legal costs. No matter what happens here, this woman is, on some level, fucked with no recourse. And the people responsible for it are the ones who should be protecting her from the effects of the identity theft in the first place.
Having had the opportunity to participate and observe the jury system, there is no way I'd ever take a jury trial for a criminal matter. The judge started off the trial by informing the jury pool that despite the state lacking any evidence, we'd need to attest we could find the defendant guilty. Jurors follow the instructions given to them by judges, that is all.
They don't care at all. For her it's potentially six years in prison, for the cops, and the prosecutor it's a small potatoes case on a random Thursday.
The plea deal offer kind of says it all, if this reaches the court it will either very quickly be thrown out or they may drop it because it's not worth the time.
Many other countries have proper multi-year colleges specifically for the field of policing, and rigorous physical and mental health tests required to get the job. In those countries the police is more educated and more competent than the vast majority of the population.
Most people don't have the power to strip me of my freedom and legally shoot me. If anything the police should be held to a higher standard than the average person.
So how exactly does Cash App verify users that signup for new accounts? If the process is so lax, shouldn't they be forced to temporary block it? To say nothing about money laundering charges, that would be raised against any bank in such situation.
This is more general issue in the USA. How do you prove who you are? Your driver license / identity card doesn't have a chip, so given enough information about someone else you can sign up as them.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
This happens to me frequently, I have an OG gmail account which a bunch of people have associated with their own accounts. The problem is the provider will verify a phone number, and once that's validated, will accept an email address, even if it's wrong. Two financial entities have accepted my email address tied to other people's account: Chime, and Venmo. There's no way to fix this since they all presume I am a customer of theirs, so the path to fix is to do it in their app. It is incredibly frustrating, more so when it's people who handles money do it. They should know better! The "We are not a bank (therefore not covered by banking regulations)" does so much work to cover their shoddy practices.
Want to hear a fun one? You can get realtors to spam any (US) phone number you want by entering it into Zillow for like a rental or something. They do no verification whatsoever.
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
If they don't do any verification, and I'm not sure how they would in countries like the US, then any fraud case or attempt to claw in money from random people should be thrown out of court by any reasonable judge.
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
SSN should just be considered public information at this point. It’s not secret so it cannot be treated as a password and it’s not even suitable as an identifier. It’s purpose is for tracking earnings, not identifying a person.
In Poland you can block your PESEL (SSN equivalent) to prevent this kind of fraud. One click in our government app or website. If PESEL is needed to confirm identify with a corporation you can unlock it temporarily.
I think it is slightly different in Poland. PESEL has status blocked or unblocked. Certain operations like taking loan or opening bank account requires PESEL to be unblocked at time of operation. But not everything requires unblocked PESEL. If it is not required to be unblocked by law, companies can still verify identity with PESEL even if status is blocked. Correct me if I am wrong. Anyway it is still big improvement.
I've signed up for a few bank accounts purely online. And if you give them your SSN and enough other information, they're able to pull all your credit reports, in real time, and then do verification based on them, that tends to be quite effective.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
The problem is, if you have a SSN and enough other information, you can pull a credit report and answer all the rest of the questions for opening an account.
Well, now you get to the absolute travesty that is:
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
I don't understand why ID cards with digital features aren't really a thing in the U.S. In many countries, such as Germany, there are ID cards that you can scan with an app to prove your identity. That makes it much harder for fraudsters to simply open bank accounts in other people's names.
Meanwhile, Cash App who facilitated the scam and actually cost the buyer actual money... walks away with no repercussions. There is something horribly broken when tech companies who are ruining people's lives have zero responsibility but are making money in the process.
Still waiting for industry fans to comment. But let's get the ball rolling:
"I would never defend <company/common practice>. But this article is such egregious ragebait that I must speak out. It's a very sad outcome. But it's also clearly <her fault/impossible to legislate a fix/evidence that the system is working>."
It's good this is seen as big news, but to anyone paying attention this is an everyday occurrence.
All you need to charge someone is to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the elements of the offense were committed. Account being in your name and used in the crime meets that criteria. The problem is that many times a "thorough investigation" was not performed. There's nothing in law requiring a thorough investigation, but it's usually included in department regulations. You can file a complaint, but they won't do anything about it. There is no accountability anywhere in the system. The judges who are supposed to be neutral are severely biased due to the structure of the system and lack of training.
Meanwhile in our inboxes: “We take the security and privacy of our users very seriously” and “We have no reason to believe that social security numbers in our user database were accessed.”
Would the EFF get involved in a case like this? Feels like it could set an important principle about how weak the link can be between “PII” and the actual person, given the preponderance of data leaks.
Playing devil's advocate here, how should this actually be handled? If the police show up (not saying they did all the due diligence they should have) to arrest you for a crime and the person says "Nope, wasn't me."...is that sufficient for police to drop everything and walk away?
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
> the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person (may have) committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
Typically an investigation involving a digital crime lab that understands what they are doing. For example tying the digital traces to the actual suspect. If there are no ties to IP addresses or devices then it gets really tricky.
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
It's not just an accusation. Her identifying information is basically found at a crime scene.
Every part of this would be fine if the companies allowing fraudulent parties to use their platforms were prosecuted for mail fraud, or interstate commerce fraud. Put the executive in jail. It's really this simple. The moment executives have repercussions they change their actions. Make cashapp prove they did their due diligence.
For starters in this case, extradition shouldn't really work like that. There is no reason a suspect cannot be jailed somewhere close to their home (ie near their family), with police from the distant jurisdiction doing the traveling to question her etc. Doubly so if she's able to post bail. It's the police's day job versus the suspect's life, right?
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really a way around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should always be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head while being threatened with years in prison.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. While this isn't a long time as far as the legal system goes (remember, day job), it's an eternity for someone on the receiving end of it. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for expenses, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (a daily rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still under attack).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.
In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.
Identify theft/identity fraud is a bullshit risk-shifting move by the banking class.
The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.
With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.
Sad that Block Inc get to profit from frictionless signups, and outsource any costs of failings to innocent people in the form of jailtime.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
This is so backwards that it doesn't even compute in my brain.
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
From what I can tell, the best she can possibly hope for is to be set free after a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. I see this as a consequence of increasingly out of control automation.
I'm disgusted. How would one go about ensuring that their social couldn't be used to create an account with this much liability? Would freezing a credit line be enough?
Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.
I'm just wondering where the EFF and the ACLU are at the moment. This seems like a perfect opportunity to point out the dangers in current cyber crime laws and do some genuine good in the world.
And with internet crimes like this the legal attack could come from anywhere. I trust that Arkansas does not have a competent digital crimes task force, as they are idiotic in almost everything else in the legal world.
Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.
It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.
That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
Only SSN is not public information. They are not published, but the records are public if you go to the right place in person and ask the right questions. (sometimes you have a "need to know" before they will tell you, but it isn't hard to find one)
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.
It actually depends on which credit bureau CashApp is contracted to use. If they use TransUnion, then you'd need a TransUnion account and freeze your credit report there.
How I would like this to go so wrong for Cash App and the Prosecution. 10's of millions in fines but we all know the system protects these Corporations and shitty prosecutors. In the end she will have lost years of her life, her savings, etc with no restitution.
Nah people routinely sue local governments and police and win hefty settlements when it's determined that those organizations negligently damaged them in this sort of way. There was a lady in New York a while back who was held on armed robbery charges for like 18 months and it ended up she was set up by her PI ex-boyfriend who was friends with the cops. She lost her business, her job and all that time with her daughter as well. She sued afterwards and won some mid-single-digit-millions sum that I would argue is low (because honestly while that's probably life changing for her, it's not punitive enough for the police department), but it's not nothing.
Some legislators - perhaps honest idealists, perhaps those being paid more by lawyers specializing in such lawsuits - do work at getting such laws passed.
1) No, and 2) Irrelevant. State laws are made by state legislators.
Considering the endless vistas of billboards advertising lawyers for personal injury lawsuits and such in my part of Michigan - I feel pretty sure that >50% of our legislators are enrolled in those lawyers' "gratitude programs".
There's 330 million people here. You, being not from here, only find out about what's exceptional, not what's normal. This case made the news because of how bad it is. It this was common, it wouldn't have made the news.
You're glossing over the part where this approach brought their message into mainstream culture. If they took the money and dropped the message, sure. The history doesn't really support the narrative, though.
Let's not pretend this is an every day occurrence that happens to everyone. It's a one-off oddball situation. I'm not even sure we have all the details considering the sources.
Consider the story a PSA, for folks who still believe that Trust and Justice are somehow part of the American Way. Maybe use it as a teaching tool with your kids, too.
Admitting to guilt, even when innocent, is not normal behavior among a normal population. As evidence, the topic of this thread, and probably you and me, and not some unknown elements in a story by NPR.
> Aside from the paltry number of trials in the federal system, states including Pennsylvania, Texas and New York have trial rates of less than 3%. In Santa Cruz County, Ariz., there were no trials from 2010 to 2012, the report said.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
What a complete and total non sequitur. Go ahead, name drop a folk hero from last decade who HN happens to love, even though his case has nothing in common with the one described in TFA. This is absolutely peak HN.
Go read up on literally any subject outside your narrow bubble of tech culture.
Stuff like this feels like some kind of society-wide humiliation ritual
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/
These are felony charges, are there no grand juries in AZ. The defense needs to absolutely unseal the grand jury testimony, there could have been nothing but lies told in that room. Not a single shred of evidence the defendant was ever in Arizona.
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
>Smith later discovered why she had been arrested: a scammer had tricked someone into sending $1,000 to a Cash App account, one that was in her name but controlled by a criminal.
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
> she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
> If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Did you read the quote you quoted? Your quote says the account was created with her social and date of birth.
Did you read what I wrote? Did I say it wasn't created with her SSN? I'm saying "if it was created with her SSN, then the service should have given her access.
We use the "if X" in my parts to mean "since X was the case, then....". And it seems it's valid in US English too:
Even if the speaker has just read a report explicitly stating that X did Y, using "if" is perfectly possible. The important distinction is that "if" does not necessarily indicate doubt about whether the Y occurred. In this context, it can have two interpretations:
Conditional justification: "If X did Y, then so and so is justified" The speaker is explaining what makes some reaction justifiable, without necessarily questioning the report.
Uncertainty about the facts: "Assuming X really did Y, then so and so was justified." Here, the speaker is reserving judgment about whether the report is accurate.
Both interpretations are available to a native English speaker.
* authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation.*
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
Prosecutors "protecting those careers" is 100% true
Source: I work with a top defense lawyer in Chicago
I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).
The job description of US criminal persecutors is wrong. People there should work into fixing it.
It will not be fixed. The lawyers have control of our legal system. They are the politicians and judges. The system is theirs; if we want to change the status quo, it will take nothing less than a bloody revolution.
> I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering.
I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.
And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.
> Meanwhile, authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation. She has refused, saying she is innocent.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
The DA (District Attorney) is elected, so they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics. There are few incentives for them to not "win".
Don't they also hate to lose though? This seems an unlikely case for a prosecutor to win. If it were a civil case, sure, the standard is much lower there, but for a criminal case the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
> I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/right-assistance...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_counsel
Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.
I'm well aware of that. I was speculating that the prosecutor may think that they could prevail vs a court appointed lawyer.
They said "good lawyer".
>> I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
>Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
I'd note that many (most?) state jurisdictions (the Federal judiciary has the Federal Defender's Service[0]) require a defendant to be "indigent"[1] before a lawyer is appointed, rather than requiring the defendant to hire a lawyer.
Also, in many jurisdictions, private lawyers are appointed by judges to take on the cases of "indigent" defendants. Often there's little in the way of vetting such lawyers, and the fees paid generally aren't very high -- resulting in subpar lawyers and representation.
Even in places (like NYC[2]) with a more robust public defender system, these lawyers are generally handling dozens of cases at once and don't have the resources of the prosecutor's office (investigators, budgets for forensic testing/analysis, etc.), leaving the defendants' side at a considerable disadvantage.
As such, it's not just saying "I can't afford a lawyer," and Perry Mason rushes to your rescue.
[0] https://www.uscourts.gov/topics/defender-services
[1] Different jurisdictions have different standards for determining if a defendant is "indigent." But many of those won't appoint a lawyer unless you're flat broke. Own a home? Take out a second mortgage. Have a job? You're not indigent. Etc, etc, etc.
[2] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2024/04/08/how-public-defend...
Well, now that this story is coming to light, I'm guessing getting a decent lawyer will be pretty easy.
> they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics.
Where can we see their tough-on-innocence statistics?
https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/
You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.
It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)
A corollary of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is that there’s just no way to compute such statistics. It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven without looking into the details of their case.
"It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven"
Oh, you mean another innocent person? (Emphais mine)
They are innocent under the law, not necessarily innocent.
There's no functional difference in this context - the legal system determines legal issues.
There’s a functional difference if you’re trying to compute “tough-on-innocence statistics”, because it means that the target for the only possible metric is much higher than zero. A healthy criminal justice system should routinely rule people innocent; if nearly everyone who’s prosecuted is found guilty, that doesn’t mean prosecutors are being really picky about filing charges, it means the system doesn’t treat innocence as an acceptable outcome.
I've never understood that. There's a claim you are guilty of robbery. You get charged and go to court. You plead not guilty. The da insists and you go to trial. During trial, you manage to provide cctv showing that you were 1000 miles away. The jury says "not guilty".
Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?
The closest thing is probably a mistrial due to a hung jury. That allows a retrial.
CCTV shows you were in the general area of the crime, but your shady friend says you were hanging out with him at the exact time the robbery happened, and the guy who says he saw you do the robbery is also kinda shady. I think it’d be reasonable for a juror to think you probably did it (because your friend is untrustworthy and has obvious incentives to lie) but didn’t do it beyond a reasonable doubt (because the witness just isn’t credible enough).
This is "lock the innocent" tho. The DA is not tough om crime, the criminal went to his merry way.
"Tough on crime" is often a euphemism for "lock the innocent".
"Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?"
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
Unfortunately the court system is such that it would collapse under the load if everyone actually exercised their right to a trial which heavily incentivizes plea deals
That is a different problem. In this case it should be clear that the prosecutors have messed up and won't admit it, maybe to save their carriers. They are going after someone innocent because it is the easy target while the real criminal is at large.
Partially. The prosecutors and DAs are motivated by conviction rates. The delays in the court system are a bludgeon to encourage that end. Just like identity theft in itself, no-one is motivated to fix the system but the ones being fucked by it, who are the least able to do so.
American voters care about conviction rate above all else for their prosecutors.
We like convictions because there's a hell of a lot of actual crime that is never punished. Just my circle of friends has suffered car break-ins, burglaries (no suspects), grand theft auto (never recovered the car), and devastatingly, a rape on school property. Most of these crimes weren't investigated, despite real damages, and the couple that were never saw a conviction.
By encouraging prosecutors to punish the innocent, you are ensuring that the actual criminals who committed those crimes go free.
Sure, but does voting for DAs with a high conviction rate get you any closer to solving these problems?
My guess is that it does not.
In theory, if crimes exceed prosecutions, then number of convictions being closest to the number of prosecutions should indicate an effective use of resources. The real problem is that thorough investigations are rare for most crimes and it's just and industrial-scale process to show the elements of an offense were met by a preponderance of the evidence.
Sure, but it feels like you're doing something helpful. It's like self-help books, or new years resolutions. The emotional fulfillment of feeling like you've done something is vastly more popular and marketable than doing the actual work.
In recent years we have also witnessed the outcomes from DAs who refuse to prosecute -- having someone more hard nosed in office seems vastly preferable to losing the local Walgreens and still not having my burglaries prosecuted.
So then is your need for "justice" satisfied by rounding up a bunch of unlucky people and convicting them? To me it seems like you're just describing the other side of the exact same coin where the justice system isn't doing its job, but in a way that absolves it for not doing its job.
I mean it's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right?
The way I see it, every time the public demands the justice system (prosecutors, police, etc) do their jobs better, the people in the system respond by doing anything but focusing on its job. Either raising the false positive rate ("hard on crime"), going on strike (raising false negative rate), or even rioting to create disorder from whole cloth (then blaming it on the protestors).
All countries not only America
Check out Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate. The writing is poor and it’s one of the only sources that dares suggest that the Enron executives were victims but regardless, there are points relevant to exactly what you’re asking about.
im gonna have a real hard time believing enron executives were innocent
Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
> This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...
Not only does the US not care about justice, they favor the government, always. In a federal conviction you used to have forever to file an appeal, but that was determined too expensive (because people could utilize it) so they made it 10 days. But that was too short. So they made the fair compromise between 'an appeal should always be allowed' and 10 days, and made it 14 days for defendants (but 30 days for government because you know, the government has more limited resources than someone sentenced and being moved across country in prison transports between detention centers to their assigned prison).
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
I guess facing decades in prison or a $100 fine--accepting the fine wouldn't be considered coercion, right?--legally speaking I mean.
Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
> Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like you should consult one. If you have the legal information of this person and they have possession of your activation locked phone, sounds like you could at least sue him civilly or in small claims court for the value of it, if the DA won't do anything
prosecutors measure success by conviction rates. they cant have a dismissed case bringing down their averages
At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
"If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems."
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
IL here.
Blue state systems are not better run.
WA here.
Most definitely are.
Oregon here. If you mean better in the sense that they dont convict guilty people much less innocent people, then yes much better run.
Source?
I think we would need to quantify "better", but there aren't any states that are good.
We are all ears if you'd like to start that conversation. Make a page/blog post and submit it here, and accept ahead of time whatever fallout may arise from doing so. If the benefits outweigh the risks, or if you simply are at a point where the risks do not matter.
It'll be flagged and your HN account banned or restricted. HN hates political posts unless they confidently assert nothing is wrong with the system.
We will just have to deal with it I suppose. That's why it is best if the source is outside of HN to begin with.
Poor incentives.
They give a shit about their conviction rate. And maintaining a comfortable relationship with their local police department(s). Very little else.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.
having judges and prosecutor elected sure is an american experiment that i'm too european to understand
The UK tried the experiment and gave up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_and_crime_commissioner
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
It's democratic. You don't have much democracy if the population is only allowed to elect some of the powers. Americans elect their sheriffs as well.
Yes, it's democratic. But there's a reason we're not electing doctors and engineers.
Is that like how european's don't understand not to burn down cities over school employee pensions?
The French are just exercising their second amendment rights as originally envisioned by the founding fathers. They're doing America better than Americans!
The right to loot and burn buildings and threaten shopkeepers with rape
America was founded on vandalism and violence, and Americans used to be proud of that. What happened?
> or even win re-election
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
First you should find some correlation between law school grades and competence of the lawyer.
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Nobody did a correlational study between electability and judge or prosecutor competence either.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
It's hard to craft an exam that isn't mostly testing how good the examinee is at writing exams. Things like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, etc... are good predictors of near-future academic success but not very useful beyond that.
So, I think an exam is a bad idea unless it's a pass/fail exam (ie no grades, you either understand the law or you do not) and there should be no meaningful time constraint when completing the exam. That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
There are state and federal oversight mechanisms with the power to remove bad judges.
Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
> Who does the selection?
Of what?
> Who approves the applications?
What's to "approve"?
> Who ensures the process is open?
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_entrance_examina...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
That's fine but a different argument from "it can't be done".
Ok. So we just need enlightened legislatures to enact these processes into law and fund them. I actually agree with what you propose, but am having a hard time seeing how to get such a system in place.
Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
Make them fight to the death? Seriously, it would solve sooo many problems.
The highest level public offices should always be either directly elected, or appointed by an elected person for only the duration of their office. This way voters can get rid of them if necessary. Otherwise they become an unelected deep state.
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
Yes. My brother is a retired Public Defender. There are crazier stories.
It's not stated in the article, but quite often when you look into these extraordinary miscarriage of justice stories in the US you find out what race the victim is, and then it becomes clear what's happening.
It will never stop until prosecutors/police become liable for gross negligence.
Time for CashApp founders and C-levels to be held personally liable for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
Then you sue all the law enforcement officers and local officials who are attempting to lay the blame for this on someone they should know is likely innocent. Make all of the financial liability for this lazy investigation come directly from the pockets of the cops and prosecutors until they have nothing left to their names and then extract every thin dime that you can from the city that hired or elected these clods so that the whole city is bankrupted.
Money is obviously the only thing that talks in this society. Make all these assholes pay with everything that they have managed to accumulate in their lives and kick their asses to the curbs after pointing at a dumpster and telling them that they can likely find some cardboard suitable for beggar signage. They'll need to supply their own writing tools though.
Nice revenge fantasy bro
Apathy is the main thing allowing this to be a fantasy result. Maybe if enough people are caught up in bullshit like this where their lives and reputations are tarnished due to fraud perpetrated by someone else then we can energize some societal changes that pin the reputational damage and financial penalties on the correct donkey.
This is the original reporting: https://www.404media.co/amanda-smith-opened-a-cashapp-in-her...
Police never thought to subpoena the ISP for the IP address associated with the cashapp login? This seems like an egregious omission in the investigation. Even if it were a VPN, you could subpoena her email to find payment receipts to the provider, etc. Even that may not necessarily prove guilt if there are no logs. That's all an enormous leap of evidence to assume the account is genuinely hers, especially given how endemic identity theft is.
> According to 404 Media's review, the address on the account was one where neither Smith nor her husband had ever lived. The account had also been accessed through Verizon connections, while Smith says she uses AT&T and has never had a Verizon plan.
> There was also a discrepancy involving the phone used to create the account. Cash App's records showed an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system dating back to 2022. Smith, however, provided evidence that her iPhone 13 mini was running the much newer iOS 26.5.2.
That's even crazier. You have to question if they even understand what they're investigating. I expect this to be thrown out in court, although I also have declining faith in our court system.
I think you have to understand that they care more about whether or not they can get a conviction than whatever actually happened. Then the rest of it makes perfect sense.
So beyond the prosecutor, we have to start questioning judges and juries. If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction, then what's really wrong here: the prosecutor or the judge/jury part of the system? Prosecutors are famous for only bring cases to trial they feel they can win. That sense normally comes from their experience directly or reading of previous trials.
> If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction
Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.
Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.
>then what's really wrong here: the prosecutor or the judge/jury part of the system?
Arkansas is one of the least educated states in the US and one of the poorest. So, yea, there are a lot of systemic issues there.
The prosecutor is trying to scare this woman into accepting a plea deal. Couple thousand dollars and 6 months probation. Maybe they eventually drop the case, but she’s going to face much more than that in travel and legal costs. No matter what happens here, this woman is, on some level, fucked with no recourse. And the people responsible for it are the ones who should be protecting her from the effects of the identity theft in the first place.
Having had the opportunity to participate and observe the jury system, there is no way I'd ever take a jury trial for a criminal matter. The judge started off the trial by informing the jury pool that despite the state lacking any evidence, we'd need to attest we could find the defendant guilty. Jurors follow the instructions given to them by judges, that is all.
They don't care at all. For her it's potentially six years in prison, for the cops, and the prosecutor it's a small potatoes case on a random Thursday.
The plea deal offer kind of says it all, if this reaches the court it will either very quickly be thrown out or they may drop it because it's not worth the time.
Key insight: the police and prosecutors are not measured by crimes solved but by number of convictions.
Is there a way to know if she is being represented by a public defender?
Police are largely incompetent, what do you really expect?
In USA*
Many other countries have proper multi-year colleges specifically for the field of policing, and rigorous physical and mental health tests required to get the job. In those countries the police is more educated and more competent than the vast majority of the population.
*People
Most people don't have the power to strip me of my freedom and legally shoot me. If anything the police should be held to a higher standard than the average person.
People are likely on average a lot more competent than american police.
Police don't issue subpoenas. The courts and prosecuting attorneys do. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/subpena_%28subpoena%29
funny you think cops are supposed to actually solve crimes.
So how exactly does Cash App verify users that signup for new accounts? If the process is so lax, shouldn't they be forced to temporary block it? To say nothing about money laundering charges, that would be raised against any bank in such situation.
This is more general issue in the USA. How do you prove who you are? Your driver license / identity card doesn't have a chip, so given enough information about someone else you can sign up as them.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
This happens to me frequently, I have an OG gmail account which a bunch of people have associated with their own accounts. The problem is the provider will verify a phone number, and once that's validated, will accept an email address, even if it's wrong. Two financial entities have accepted my email address tied to other people's account: Chime, and Venmo. There's no way to fix this since they all presume I am a customer of theirs, so the path to fix is to do it in their app. It is incredibly frustrating, more so when it's people who handles money do it. They should know better! The "We are not a bank (therefore not covered by banking regulations)" does so much work to cover their shoddy practices.
Want to hear a fun one? You can get realtors to spam any (US) phone number you want by entering it into Zillow for like a rental or something. They do no verification whatsoever.
THIS! THIS! THIS!
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
Make sure to report the emails as spam. They might actually wake up once their marketing slop stops being delivered to gmail inboxes.
If they don't do any verification, and I'm not sure how they would in countries like the US, then any fraud case or attempt to claw in money from random people should be thrown out of court by any reasonable judge.
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
SSN should just be considered public information at this point. It’s not secret so it cannot be treated as a password and it’s not even suitable as an identifier. It’s purpose is for tracking earnings, not identifying a person.
In Poland you can block your PESEL (SSN equivalent) to prevent this kind of fraud. One click in our government app or website. If PESEL is needed to confirm identify with a corporation you can unlock it temporarily.
I think it is slightly different in Poland. PESEL has status blocked or unblocked. Certain operations like taking loan or opening bank account requires PESEL to be unblocked at time of operation. But not everything requires unblocked PESEL. If it is not required to be unblocked by law, companies can still verify identity with PESEL even if status is blocked. Correct me if I am wrong. Anyway it is still big improvement.
I've signed up for a few bank accounts purely online. And if you give them your SSN and enough other information, they're able to pull all your credit reports, in real time, and then do verification based on them, that tends to be quite effective.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
The problem is, if you have a SSN and enough other information, you can pull a credit report and answer all the rest of the questions for opening an account.
Well, now you get to the absolute travesty that is:
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
I don't understand why ID cards with digital features aren't really a thing in the U.S. In many countries, such as Germany, there are ID cards that you can scan with an app to prove your identity. That makes it much harder for fraudsters to simply open bank accounts in other people's names.
Meanwhile, Cash App who facilitated the scam and actually cost the buyer actual money... walks away with no repercussions. There is something horribly broken when tech companies who are ruining people's lives have zero responsibility but are making money in the process.
Still waiting for industry fans to comment. But let's get the ball rolling:
"I would never defend <company/common practice>. But this article is such egregious ragebait that I must speak out. It's a very sad outcome. But it's also clearly <her fault/impossible to legislate a fix/evidence that the system is working>."
Irony notice. This comment contains irony.
hilarious that the sort of comment you predicted was at the top of the page when i got here.
It's good this is seen as big news, but to anyone paying attention this is an everyday occurrence.
All you need to charge someone is to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the elements of the offense were committed. Account being in your name and used in the crime meets that criteria. The problem is that many times a "thorough investigation" was not performed. There's nothing in law requiring a thorough investigation, but it's usually included in department regulations. You can file a complaint, but they won't do anything about it. There is no accountability anywhere in the system. The judges who are supposed to be neutral are severely biased due to the structure of the system and lack of training.
Isn't it Cashapp that allowed a criminal to open an account with someone else's social security number? Does she have a case against Cashapp?
I believe this is the case record and the arrest warrant:
https://caseinfo.arcourts.gov/opad/case/46CR-26-292
https://caseinfo.arcourts.gov/opad/case/46AW-26-272
Meanwhile in our inboxes: “We take the security and privacy of our users very seriously” and “We have no reason to believe that social security numbers in our user database were accessed.”
Would the EFF get involved in a case like this? Feels like it could set an important principle about how weak the link can be between “PII” and the actual person, given the preponderance of data leaks.
Playing devil's advocate here, how should this actually be handled? If the police show up (not saying they did all the due diligence they should have) to arrest you for a crime and the person says "Nope, wasn't me."...is that sufficient for police to drop everything and walk away?
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
> the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person (may have) committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
I wonder how much nonsense gets misattributed to Joe Smith [0].
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/xnJUmJArCeaDmKem9
Typically an investigation involving a digital crime lab that understands what they are doing. For example tying the digital traces to the actual suspect. If there are no ties to IP addresses or devices then it gets really tricky.
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
An accusation is typically not sufficient to arrest someone for a suspected crime.
It's not just an accusation. Her identifying information is basically found at a crime scene.
Every part of this would be fine if the companies allowing fraudulent parties to use their platforms were prosecuted for mail fraud, or interstate commerce fraud. Put the executive in jail. It's really this simple. The moment executives have repercussions they change their actions. Make cashapp prove they did their due diligence.
Why would they need to arrest and extradite her for a crime like this?
For starters in this case, extradition shouldn't really work like that. There is no reason a suspect cannot be jailed somewhere close to their home (ie near their family), with police from the distant jurisdiction doing the traveling to question her etc. Doubly so if she's able to post bail. It's the police's day job versus the suspect's life, right?
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really a way around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should always be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head while being threatened with years in prison.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. While this isn't a long time as far as the legal system goes (remember, day job), it's an eternity for someone on the receiving end of it. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for expenses, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (a daily rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still under attack).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
Land of the free...
But they sure are brave to continue living there.
"land of the brave home of the free"
It's just another fallen pillar: innocent until proven guilty.
I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.
In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.
For those of us who are outside of the US, can someone explain why we see things like a judge ordering a 7 year old without legal representation to file legal paperwork? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/us/lawyers-unaccompanied-...
I'm not a lawyer, but I always associated (perhaps wrongly) common law with common sense. I don't see much of the latter here.
“Immigration judges” are not judges in the normal sense, they’re employees of the Department of Justice.
Unless you're in Louisiana, which has some really weird processes.
Specifically in Louisiana you need to ask for a lawyer when arrested, not a 'lawyer dog'
The U.S. system of law is also based on common law, and is indeed derived from the English legal system. It's called "English common law".
With the exception of Louisiana, the US system of law is rooted in the common law as inherited directly from the UK in the late 18th century, so no.
Identify theft/identity fraud is a bullshit risk-shifting move by the banking class.
The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.
With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.
Sad that Block Inc get to profit from frictionless signups, and outsource any costs of failings to innocent people in the form of jailtime.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
This is so backwards that it doesn't even compute in my brain.
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
From what I can tell, the best she can possibly hope for is to be set free after a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. I see this as a consequence of increasingly out of control automation.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181794
She should say her chatbox went rogue on her. It seems to be a efficient line of defence.
I'm disgusted. How would one go about ensuring that their social couldn't be used to create an account with this much liability? Would freezing a credit line be enough?
Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.
Even if she’s not convicted, paying lawyers, time off work, mental health, etc., can still be plenty life-destroying.
I'm just wondering where the EFF and the ACLU are at the moment. This seems like a perfect opportunity to point out the dangers in current cyber crime laws and do some genuine good in the world.
And with internet crimes like this the legal attack could come from anywhere. I trust that Arkansas does not have a competent digital crimes task force, as they are idiotic in almost everything else in the legal world.
Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.
It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
How did you know the PayPal account had been created?
I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.
That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
It would be a significant improvement if full names with middle name and maiden name/name changes (if any), date of birth, and SSN were published:
Because then nobody could keep using them like they're a password, and would have to find actually secure ways of identifying people.
Only SSN is not public information. They are not published, but the records are public if you go to the right place in person and ask the right questions. (sometimes you have a "need to know" before they will tell you, but it isn't hard to find one)
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
One of the more irritating forms of "ID" now is asking people to upload a driver licence photo, passport photo, or take a selfie of themselves.
I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.
https://www.chexsystems.com/security-freeze/place-freeze
I don't know enough about it to say if it would prevent the opening of a CashApp account.
It actually depends on which credit bureau CashApp is contracted to use. If they use TransUnion, then you'd need a TransUnion account and freeze your credit report there.
How I would like this to go so wrong for Cash App and the Prosecution. 10's of millions in fines but we all know the system protects these Corporations and shitty prosecutors. In the end she will have lost years of her life, her savings, etc with no restitution.
Nah people routinely sue local governments and police and win hefty settlements when it's determined that those organizations negligently damaged them in this sort of way. There was a lady in New York a while back who was held on armed robbery charges for like 18 months and it ended up she was set up by her PI ex-boyfriend who was friends with the cops. She lost her business, her job and all that time with her daughter as well. She sued afterwards and won some mid-single-digit-millions sum that I would argue is low (because honestly while that's probably life changing for her, it's not punitive enough for the police department), but it's not nothing.
Ideally, her home state might have some laws (consumer protection, criminal neglect, whatever) which allowed her to sue Cash App for a very large sum.
IANAL - might any such care to comment?
A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future.
> A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future
Who is going to sponsor such a law? The same representatives that are paid by the lobbyists of the corporations the laws are targeting?
Some legislators - perhaps honest idealists, perhaps those being paid more by lawyers specializing in such lawsuits - do work at getting such laws passed.
You're telling me you think there are >50% of congress critters and senators that are not on the take?
1) No, and 2) Irrelevant. State laws are made by state legislators.
Considering the endless vistas of billboards advertising lawyers for personal injury lawsuits and such in my part of Michigan - I feel pretty sure that >50% of our legislators are enrolled in those lawyers' "gratitude programs".
This is absurd. Would she be able to sue Block/CashApp? She should. For millions and millions of dollars.
Let me guess. USA?
For the land of the free and home of the brave ... it's incredible what you let happen.
There's 330 million people here. You, being not from here, only find out about what's exceptional, not what's normal. This case made the news because of how bad it is. It this was common, it wouldn't have made the news.
Lots of people are from many different places where this kind of shit never happens. Yet it keeps happening in America.
You think instances of bad policing and prosecuting only happens in the US? For real?
Again, you're being presented with this article because it is an exceptional occurrence. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be discussing it.
"Land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy" -Zakk DeLaRoche
"Rage Against the Machine? Let's do 9 figures of highly profitable revenue for a large multinational, that'll show them!" - Zakk DeLaRoche, probably
You're glossing over the part where this approach brought their message into mainstream culture. If they took the money and dropped the message, sure. The history doesn't really support the narrative, though.
Let's not pretend this is an every day occurrence that happens to everyone. It's a one-off oddball situation. I'm not even sure we have all the details considering the sources.
Consider the story a PSA, for folks who still believe that Trust and Justice are somehow part of the American Way. Maybe use it as a teaching tool with your kids, too.
Don't teach your kids that some one-off oddball case reported by non-standard news media is the norm. It's not.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
Accepting plea bargains, even when innocent, to avoid the huge expense of defending yourself is the norm.
Admitting to guilt, even when innocent, is not normal behavior among a normal population. As evidence, the topic of this thread, and probably you and me, and not some unknown elements in a story by NPR.
> Aside from the paltry number of trials in the federal system, states including Pennsylvania, Texas and New York have trial rates of less than 3%. In Santa Cruz County, Ariz., there were no trials from 2010 to 2012, the report said.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
I saw this advertised on the dark web somewhere as a way to make money, along with a list of other services that support easy identity theft.
Wow, that's crazy.
If you don't know who Aaron Swartz is, you may want to read up on how he was bullied by very much the same justice system.
What a complete and total non sequitur. Go ahead, name drop a folk hero from last decade who HN happens to love, even though his case has nothing in common with the one described in TFA. This is absolutely peak HN.
Go read up on literally any subject outside your narrow bubble of tech culture.
Stuff like this feels like some kind of society-wide humiliation ritual
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/
These are felony charges, are there no grand juries in AZ. The defense needs to absolutely unseal the grand jury testimony, there could have been nothing but lies told in that room. Not a single shred of evidence the defendant was ever in Arizona.
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
>Smith later discovered why she had been arrested: a scammer had tricked someone into sending $1,000 to a Cash App account, one that was in her name but controlled by a criminal.
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
> she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
>Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery
The case, as per TFA, was the opposite: she wanted to get access and couldn't, and she finally managed through discovery.
You describe what she "should have preferred" (in order to have the trail), I was talking about the actual case.
To get access to the account probably required using e-mail or phone number to match 2FA for a password reset.
> If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Did you read the quote you quoted? Your quote says the account was created with her social and date of birth.
>Did you read the quote you quoted?
Did you read what I wrote? Did I say it wasn't created with her SSN? I'm saying "if it was created with her SSN, then the service should have given her access.
We use the "if X" in my parts to mean "since X was the case, then....". And it seems it's valid in US English too:
Even if the speaker has just read a report explicitly stating that X did Y, using "if" is perfectly possible. The important distinction is that "if" does not necessarily indicate doubt about whether the Y occurred. In this context, it can have two interpretations:
Conditional justification: "If X did Y, then so and so is justified" The speaker is explaining what makes some reaction justifiable, without necessarily questioning the report.
Uncertainty about the facts: "Assuming X really did Y, then so and so was justified." Here, the speaker is reserving judgment about whether the report is accurate.
Both interpretations are available to a native English speaker.