Aleyla

What is one thing about daily life in the prison system you feel should change?

It seems like you are making a huge jump from a bank filing a SAR to the underlying activity actually being illegal. SARs can be filed simply because the bank teller, or an automated system, thinks the activity is out of the ordinary for that specific customer.

Did you guys determine how many of those 2100 reports were actual illegal activities?

You are right to be skeptical. A SAR is just a report for "suspicious" behavior. It doesn't actually mean something illegal is going on.

For example, let's say you have a business that is primarily paid by check. One day a customer gives you $5k cash for a job instead so you deposit it. That transaction could kick off a SAR report.

Another example, let's say you want to buy a used car from a private seller. Most sellers today don't want checks or money orders so you bring cash. Because withdrawing a large amount of cash (let's say $8k) isn't normal for you there will likely be a SAR filed. When the seller deposits the cash there will likely be a SAR filed by their bank as well. That's 2 reports for essentially the same transaction.

If you've ever had a bank teller ask where the money came from (for a deposit) or what you were doing with it (withdrawal) then you've very likely had a SAR report filed with your name on it.

Knowing that, "12 million" SARs being filed means absolutely nothing. What matters is whether the federal government took action - because it's ultimately the government's responsibility to determine if laws were actually broken and to enforce them.

I supported and trained people on these machines in the mid 90s. We had a policy that any time the device got a positive result the test administrator had to call tech support and walk through the recalibration procedure. Once that was done correctly they would administer the test again.

If the second test was also positive then action was taken. There were a list of things we knew about that could cause a false positive. Almost all of them would clear up in the 15 minutes it would take to recalibrate the device.

Seems to me that if these organizations followed that procedure then there wouldn’t be a problem.

In your reporting you say Texeira's motive appeared to be just ... clout?

I’m unsurprised by this. We’ve been told this is the “Information Age” for a few decades now. Used to be that you showed off by driving a corvette. Now you show off by giving some tidbits of private information to a crowd that is hungry for anything new or interesting.