Yes, but they are now aiming to use these funds to buy real estate and of course that is going to raise a bunch of flags. If the government would accept this without challenge criminals would suddenly be left all kinds of crazy inheritances. At a minimum you'd expect some documentation of how that money landed in their possession in the first place, for instance a will, a final balance of an estate and so on.

I've handled a couple of these for family members and the amount of paperwork around even a minor inheritance can be pretty impressive.

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mothballed 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'd expect a presumption of innocence, and at the very least I'd expect some documentation from the government showing probable cause of a specific crime the money was involved in before blocking the transaction. The presumptive innocent party shouldn't have to provide anything by default.

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jacquesm 4 days ago | parent [-]

You have a presumption of innocence up to a certain amount. After that there is a - minor - burden of proof. Not a single time that this happened to me did any of this appear to me to be unduly burdensome or invasive, and whoever did the investigation went out of their way to state that they did these checks as a formality, not because I was suspected to be in any way out of line. I don't recall it ever taking more than a few minutes (if that) either.

If I showed up with 50K in cash at the tellers window or a local notary to pay in part for a house tomorrow morning though I would expect the conversation would be an entirely different one.

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mothballed 4 days ago | parent [-]

50K cash is under the real value of the $10k CTR cutoff when congress passed the bank secrecy act (around 85k in current USD), so you can see how this slippery slope of the erosion of the 'up to a certain amount' has only gotten worse.

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jacquesm 4 days ago | parent [-]

The amount was just an example. Any kind of transaction using large amounts of cash is going to trigger flags all over the system and you can be expected to be quizzed on the origin of the funds. The only time I've seen someone that legitimately came by a suitcase full of cash it was when a waitress left her daughter said suitcase, which contained decades of tip money that she never spent. It was insanely heavy and it caused quite a few problems when she tried to do a deposit with her local bank.

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potato3732842 4 days ago | parent [-]

The fact that society has normalized a silly burden upon the law abiding doesn't make it right or good or justifiable.

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jacquesm 4 days ago | parent [-]

Well, if you are law abiding then you really should abide by the law and this particular thing has the force of law in many countries. Not doing it is by definition not being law abiding!

I've been in business for 42 years now. In all that time I have never seen more than 1000 Euros cash in any kind of business transaction, and I have never been offered to be paid in cash. It's always bank transfers on invoice. I've never bought a vehicle cash, I can't even begin to understand why or how someone would want to buy real estate cash. Besides the obvious risks of being robbed the whole idea of keeping that much money or more around in physical form feels strange to me.

Even in the 1980s when I would buy a vehicle it would be through a bank transfer. The only people that sometimes insist they want to do some transaction in cash are usually marketplace sellers that I suspect are professional sellers that are keeping their income out of sight of the taxman and restaurants where the POS machine 'just broke' that are doing the same. And when I say I do not have any cash and it's ok they can send me an invoice or give me their bank account number suddenly their machine starts working again. Ditto with cab drivers.

	▲	potato3732842 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The fact that you think some small timers dodging paltry amounts of taxes is somehow justification is laughable. You can trot out any kind of criminal you want and it will not change my answer. People deserve the right to be able to transact, for any size transaction, without being forced under threat of violence to leave a paper trail. Now, many times they will leave a paper trail out of connivence, but that does not change the fact that they ought to have the option not to without threat of violence.
	▲	ethanwillis 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Somehow you completely missed the point that it's not even about being law abiding. It's about the redefinition of what "law abiding" is without any consideration at all about whether that redefinition is "right, good, or justifiable." Just because there isn't more than 1000 Euros cash in people's hands is simply an indictment of the Euro as a currency and the culture around it.

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kelnos 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have this idea in my head that I would rather 100 criminals get away with "all kinds of crazy inheritances" than even 1 regular person get screwed over by these sorts of financial controls.