Somebody's Watching You

ZeroHedge today reminded us of another reason to hold Bitcoins, with an article titled "Why 308,127,404 East Germans Americans Are Going To Get Hosed."

Highlights from the article:

"FinCEN is the executive agency tasked with ensuring that every US banker is an unpaid government spy through 'Suspicious Activity Reports'."

"Nearly 1.5 million Suspicious Activity Reports were filed across the US banking system in 2011, well over twice the number reported in 2004. On top of this, there were an additional -14.8 million- ‘currency transaction reports’ filed in 2011, a 6% jump over last year."

"A full 36 distinct federal law enforcement agencies requested information from FinCEN. And that doesn’t include state or local law enforcement."

"This is one reason why international diversification is so important – the likelihood of such collection and monitoring is greatly reduced when you bank overseas [TheBitcoinTrader: or move some of your savings into Bitcoin]."

"You don’t even need to be doing anything wrong (which is the case most of the time this happens) for one of these agencies to freeze your account ‘pending investigation’ with a simple phone call. Good luck getting it unfrozen."

"FinCEN also tracks the Report of Foreign Bank Account and Financial Accounts, commonly known as the FBAR. This form is required to be submitted by any US taxpayer with foreign financial accounts whose aggregate total exceeded $10,000 at any point during the year. In 2011, 618,134 US taxpayers filed an FBAR (which would have covered the calendar year 2010). This is more than a 100% increase over the filings just two years ago."

"It still leaves 308,127,404 Americans who have no backup plan, no insurance policy for their hard-earned savings. In other words, 99.8% of the population holds all of their money in an insolvent, corrupted, government-controlled, unsecured (though cleverly disguised) banking system."

Read the full article, here.

Posted in: banking,FinCEN,privacy