Thursday, March 22, 2018

There Really Need to be Repercussions

Per CoinDesk, "Digital payment processor Payza has been charged by the U.S. government with running an unlicensed money services business. ... The court filing lists several charges: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to launder money, and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business in the District of Columbia."

Except that Payza isn't in the District of Columbia. It's in Canada.

The authoritahs abducted one of the firm's founders while he was in Detroit (which is also not in the District of Columbia). The other remains "at large," which presumably means "at home, in Canada." The indictment actually dates from 2016, but seems to have been publicly released in conjunction with the abduction.

Not the first time the feds have pulled this kind of shit. Several times they've abducted executives of online casinos that operated from foreign countries, when those executives would happen to travel through the US, and charged them with breaking US law because some of their customers happened to be Americans.

They've also prosecuted Swiss banks for doing business in Switzerland, because some of those banks' customers may not have told the IRS everything it wanted to know about their business dealings.

Since the Canadian and Swiss regimes seem disinclined to react to this Barbary pirate style bullshit in the same way that the US reacted to, um, the Barbary Pirates, it seems to me that foreign-owned-and-operated businesses need to set up some kind of insurance pool,  under which professionals are retained for high-speed reactions to this kind of thing.

When DoJ abducts an insured business owner, US Department of Justice employees start disappearing.

When the DoJ releases the abductee, the insurer releases the DoJ employees.

Perhaps a timeliness clause, in keeping with the "tough on crime" posturings of the US regime, under which for every month the thing drags on, the head of a US Attorney shows up at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in a flat rate Priority Mail box or something like that.

I hate to recommend the latter even for terror kingpins like US Attorneys, but if businesses don't start getting tough with these DoJ thugs, the nonsense won't ever stop.

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