Is it a crime to have $1,500 in cash on your person?

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hso

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This is certainly a tin-foil-hat question, but have any of you heard of a recent fed law that makes it a crime to carry $1,500 or more in cash on your person? Since I know folks that carry more than this with them to shows it would make buying knives and guns interesting.

On a similar wavelength, is there a fed law that makes it a crime to carry $10,000 or more in cash on your person?
 
there is some federal law against carrying more than 10k in cash when crossing international borders. something to try to stop people from moving large amounts of cash in an undocumented manner.
 
You can't travel on an airliner with more than 10K unless you declare it. If you declare it the money might be arrested unless you can prove where it came from. Bank reciept etc...


A police officer can take money from you as evidence of a crime without arresting you, the lab WILL find cocaine on some of it and it will be confiscated.

I often carry large sums of money for gun shopping and vacationing but always in a bank money envelope with the bank receipt inside showing the amount withdrawn and the balance.
 
The $10k limit is for international travel. If you deposit/withdraw $10k or more, banks must report it. Neither is technically illegal. If you declare the cash, technically it's ok. Same with depositing $10,001.

If the feds come knocking, you better be able to prove you made it legally.

Now, is a wise idea to carry so much cash? I doubt it. I'm not as much worried about being mugged, as I am LEO folks getting suspicious. If you're legal, you probably won't get in any trouble. The worst case is that you lose the cash. In my opinion, it's not worth the hassle.

Just make two $5,000 deposits on two seperate bank accounts. ;)

Edit : Now that I think about it, if I had the cash, I'd make a bunch of $10k deposits. If anyone asks questions, have my paperwork handy. Then I'd do it over again, just to make 'em fill out more paperwork.
 
You can't travel on an airliner with more than 10K unless you declare it. If you declare it the money might be arrested unless you can prove where it came from. Bank reciept etc...


A police officer can take money from you as evidence of a crime without arresting you, the lab WILL find cocaine on some of it and it will be confiscated.
Click to expand...
America! Land of the Free!

Yeah...
Riiiiiiiiiiiight... :banghead:
 
REVDISK got it right. The rest is BS. There is no federal law against carrying more than $1500.00 in cash.
 
There are a few places with laws on the books that say you can be arrested for vagrancy if are not carrying at least $15 on your person.

I'm thinking this about 10 years ago in ether Corpus Christi or South Padre Island.
 
You have to declare more than 10k on international flights only. I have never heard of anyone getting arrested solely for carrying that kind of money. Where they were arrested there was a whole lot more going on, like drug dealing.
If you own a retail business and deposit more than a certain amount in $100 bills you have to declare that too. Friends of mine run a store selling "urban" clothing and a lot of their receipts come in $100 bills. They declare it on the deposit slip and they're done. Been doing it for years and never had an issue.
 
Five months after law enforcement officials took Hector Herrera's $4,000 at
Eppley Airfield - saying it smelled of illegal drugs - federal officials
have decided to give it back.


U.S. Attorney Tom Monaghan said Wednesday that his office reviewed the case
of the 30-year-old Mexican immigrant and has declined to pursue the
forfeiture in court.


"We looked at the law, the facts and decided not to proceed," he said. He
would not elaborate.


Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union in Nebraska, which had
contended that Herrera was unfairly targeted because of the color of his
skin, said they were pleased with the decision yet upset that Herrera's
money had been held up for so long.


"Clearly we're glad the right thing is being done," said Tim Butz, executive
director of the ACLU in Nebraska. "But it goes to show that unless the
government's power is held in check by aggressive vigilance on the part of
its citizens, we're going to keep losing these battles for civil liberty."


Lawyers in Monaghan's office would have had to defend the forfeiture in
court if the government were to keep the cash. Monaghan's decision not to
proceed means that the money must be returned.


The return of Herrera's money, however, does not necessarily end the ACLU's
challenge to searches and seizures at Eppley. The airport surveillance is
coordinated by the Nebraska State Patrol.


Butz said he believes that Herrera, a laborer and restaurant worker, was
stopped because of his ethnic background and the "perception that he was a
vulnerable target" who would not fight to regain his money.


Herrera was never charged with a crime nor did he have illegal drugs on him
when law officers took his money June 16 at Eppley.


Afterward, State Patrol officials who oversee the drug team defended the
action.


Herrera was stopped by drug agents after paying cash for a flight to
Arizona.


When an officer in plain clothes approached him and asked him to be
searched, Herrera agreed. A drug-sniffing dog indicated that Herrera's
money was tainted with drug residue. The money was confiscated; Herrera was
let go.


Studies have shown that most of the currency in circulation is tainted with
drug residue.
 
When I went on a cruise to Mexico, they said you had to declare more than $10K in cash when going through customs. So it's not just for airlines, it's any border crossing.

They also restrict how much alcohol you can bring in. :cuss: :fire: :banghead:
 
One of several cases....

Carrying large sums of money may not be illegal, but it may be expensive.

Legalized Theft

Willie Jones of Nashville was flying to Houston on February 27, 1991, to purchase plants for his landscaping business. Because Jones was black and paid cash for his plane ticket, the ticket clerk reported him to nearby Drug Enforcement Agency officers, who presumed Jones was a drug courier. DEA officers at the Nashville airport approached Jones, checked his identification, and asked permission to search him. Although Jones refused to grant permission, the officers searched him anyway and found $9,000 in cash. The DEA agents then announced that they were "detaining" the money. Jones observed: "They said I was going to buy drugs with it, that their dog sniffed it and said it had drugs on it." (A 1989 study found that 70 percent of all the currency in the United States had cocaine residue on it.) Jones never saw the dog. The officers didn't arrest Jones, but they kept the money. When Jones asked the officers for a receipt for his money, they handed him a receipt for an "undetermined amount of U.S. currency." Jones objected and asked the officers to count the money out, but the officers refused, claiming that such an action would violate DEA policy.


Federal judge Thomas Wiseman, in an April 1993 decision, concluded that "the officers' behavior at this point was casual and sarcastic... they believed that the seizure of the currency was all but a fait accompli ... they cared little for Mr. Jones's feelings of insecurity ." Judge Wiseman concluded that the DEA officials' testimony on the seizure was "misleading," "unconvincing," and "inconsistent" and ordered the money returned--after a two-year legal battle. Jones observed: "I didn't know it was against the law for a 42-year-old black man to have money in his pocket."

http://www.libertarianworld.com/Property-Seizure-Rights.html
Click to expand...
 
As far as bank transactions go, the banks are required to report transactions of 10K or more. I've made a lot of such transactions in the last 10 years or so and have never had the Men in Black visit me in the middle of the night to threaten me, nor do I have black helicoptors circling my neighborhood. :D

As for carrying around 10K in cash, I'd be really leary of doing so. There are very few legitimate reasons to do so when you can carry travellers checks and most places take credit cards. If the cash is lost or stolen, you have no way of recovering it- you are basicly screwed, with travellers checks, the bank can have send you a new set of them in a matter of hours, maybe even minutes these days. Ask me how I know.
 
I disagree. Large amounts of cash can come in handy in negotiations, such as buying a new car. Nothing makes the price go down like pulling out a wad of $100s and stating your final offer firmly. They salivate all over the place!

Furthermore, I maintain it is none of anyone's %^&*( business how much cash I have on me. If you think I commited a crime, get a warrant.
 
I remember reading about Actor/Comedian Red Skelton carrying $40,000 to $80,000 cash on him, all the time, back in the 40's or 50's. He grew up poor and didn't want to ever be broke again. Must have been $1000s!
 
Large amounts of cash can come in handy in negotiations, such as buying a new car. Nothing makes the price go down like pulling out a wad of $100s and stating your final offer firmly. They salivate all over the place!
Click to expand...

Yep. I've done it with $500 in twenties. It doesn't hurt to pretend to lose count somewhere around $420 and start over. The longer the car sales parasites look at cash, the hungrier they get.
 
The anecdote about Red Skelton reminds me of a man my step-father works with. He is an older gentleman who was raised by a depression era family. As a result, to this day, he always has ~$5000 in cash on him and another ~$5000 at his house. Each paycheck he takes so much in cash, transfers part of it to the roll at home, the remainder to the cash on him. He has done this for decades, slowly increasing the amount carried/stored as time passed.

As a side note, this same gentleman had an attempted robbery on his house after his maid discovered the large sum of cash and thought there was more in the house. Her boyfriend and another perp broke into the house and attempted to rob it, only to be met by the man and his revolver. Shot and killed the one fellow, hospitalized the other. When he called the cops, they took the one body to the morgue, the other to the hospital, and the homeowner was promptly arrested for murder. He spend about a month in jail on murder charges before being released for acting in self defense.
 
"Arrest the money" is not at all unknown in various jurisdictions. It's not just DEA, either.

Louisiana passed a state law saying that suspected drug money would be split up 50% to the state, 25% to the involved judge, and 25% to the police jurisdiction making the arrest. It is not necessary that the person owning the money be arrested on a drug charge. There was enough uproar over one incident involving a Florida woman that Florida's state government was very vocal about dissuading Floridians from attending Mardis Gras. I think that AAA got involved enough to warn people of the potential problem about carrying large sums of cash when in Louisiana.

In east Texas, several yeqrs back, a black guy from Louisiana who does cash deals for old cars for restoration was stopped as a suspected drug dealer. His $11,000 was taken away from him as an "arrest the money" deal. His legal costs to regain his own money were not trivial...

No, there is no law against possessing any amount of cash. It's just that the present day laws allow "the fuzz" to take it away from you and the burden of proof is on you that it's money that was honestly acquired.

Art
 
I disagree. Large amounts of cash can come in handy in negotiations, such as buying a new car. Nothing makes the price go down like pulling out a wad of $100s and stating your final offer firmly. They salivate all over the place!
Click to expand...

Pulling a checkbook out does the exact same thing. I don't think carrying $500 in cash is going to make or break a deal at a car dealership, when you can write a personal check for $25,000 it gets their attention.
 
Delayed Reaction said:
They also restrict how much alcohol you can bring in.
Click to expand...

There is no restriction on the amount of alcohol (Or anything else that is not restricted) you can bring in. There is a restriction on the amount you can bring in that is not subject to a duty. You can be charged a certain percent (which I forget) of the items claimed worth, but it is up to the individual inspector. I have brought back 24 1.5L bottles of Sang Thip from Thailand several times. Only once was I charged a duty ($20).
 
As a car sales parasite I love it when people come in with cash. But just to burst your bubbles you aren't going to get a better deal. I already know what's in the car and what I have to get out of it. If you don't have enough cash I'll always let you make it up with a check. :)

On deposits, I love walking in with 10k or more and dropping it into three accts. The tellers always laugh, saying that everyone does it just to spite the fed's paperwork. Of course there is another advantage to cash: I can always write the paperwork for less, save the buyer some sales tax and stick the balance in my pocket. Of course I would never actually do that but some dealers, hey, parasites, dontcha know. :D
 
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