The DA (District Attorney) is elected, so they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics. There are few incentives for them to not "win".

Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.

The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?

Unfortunately the court system is such that it would collapse under the load if everyone actually exercised their right to a trial which heavily incentivizes plea deals

American voters care about conviction rate above all else for their prosecutors.

Not only does the US not care about justice, they favor the government, always. In a federal conviction you used to have forever to file an appeal, but that was determined too expensive (because people could utilize it) so they made it 10 days. But that was too short. So they made the fair compromise between 'an appeal should always be allowed' and 10 days, and made it 14 days for defendants (but 30 days for government because you know, the government has more limited resources than someone sentenced and being moved across country in prison transports between detention centers to their assigned prison).

Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.

Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.

This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.

At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.

If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.

It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.

That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.

I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.

At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".

There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.

Poor incentives.

Yes. My brother is a retired Public Defender. There are crazier stories.

They give a shit about their conviction rate. And maintaining a comfortable relationship with their local police department(s). Very little else.

While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.

You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.

It's not stated in the article, but quite often when you look into these extraordinary miscarriage of justice stories in the US you find out what race the victim is, and then it becomes clear what's happening.

I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).

Prosecutors "protecting those careers" is 100% true

Source: I work with a top defense lawyer in Chicago

The job description of US criminal persecutors is wrong. People there should work into fixing it.

> I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering.

I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.

And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.

> According to 404 Media's review, the address on the account was one where neither Smith nor her husband had ever lived. The account had also been accessed through Verizon connections, while Smith says she uses AT&T and has never had a Verizon plan.

> There was also a discrepancy involving the phone used to create the account. Cash App's records showed an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system dating back to 2022. Smith, however, provided evidence that her iPhone 13 mini was running the much newer iOS 26.5.2.

Police are largely incompetent, what do you really expect?

Police don't issue subpoenas. The courts and prosecuting attorneys do. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/subpena_%28subpoena%29

funny you think cops are supposed to actually solve crimes.

I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.

I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.

Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.

If they don't do any verification, and I'm not sure how they would in countries like the US, then any fraud case or attempt to claw in money from random people should be thrown out of court by any reasonable judge.

Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.

I've signed up for a few bank accounts purely online. And if you give them your SSN and enough other information, they're able to pull all your credit reports, in real time, and then do verification based on them, that tends to be quite effective.

If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?

Well, now you get to the absolute travesty that is:

Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.

This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.

Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".

I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".

We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...

The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:

If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?

When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".

There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.

hilarious that the sort of comment you predicted was at the top of the page when i got here.

> the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth

This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.

A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person committed the crime.

It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.

Typically an investigation involving a digital crime lab that understands what they are doing. For example tying the digital traces to the actual suspect. If there are no ties to IP addresses or devices then it gets really tricky.

Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.

And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.

An accusation is typically not sufficient to arrest someone for a suspected crime.

Why would they need to arrest and extradite her for a crime like this?

But they sure are brave to continue living there.

It's just another fallen pillar: innocent until proven guilty.

In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.

Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.

You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.

Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.

With the exception of Louisiana, the US system of law is rooted in the common law as inherited directly from the UK in the late 18th century, so no.

The U.S. system of law is also based on common law, and is indeed derived from the English legal system. It's called "English common law".

Nah people routinely sue local governments and police and win hefty settlements when it's determined that those organizations negligently damaged them in this sort of way. There was a lady in New York a while back who was held on armed robbery charges for like 18 months and it ended up she was set up by her PI ex-boyfriend who was friends with the cops. She lost her business, her job and all that time with her daughter as well. She sued afterwards and won some mid-single-digit-millions sum that I would argue is low (because honestly while that's probably life changing for her, it's not punitive enough for the police department), but it's not nothing.

Ideally, her home state might have some laws (consumer protection, criminal neglect, whatever) which allowed her to sue Cash App for a very large sum.

IANAL - might any such care to comment?

A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future.

Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.

I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.

Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.

It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.

That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.

The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).

I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.

From what I can tell, the best she can possibly hope for is to be set free after a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. I see this as a consequence of increasingly out of control automation.

There's 330 million people here. You, being not from here, only find out about what's exceptional, not what's normal. This case made the news because of how bad it is. It this was common, it wouldn't have made the news.

"Land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy" -Zakk DeLaRoche

Let's not pretend this is an every day occurrence that happens to everyone. It's a one-off oddball situation. I'm not even sure we have all the details considering the sources.

Don't teach your kids that some one-off oddball case reported by non-standard news media is the norm. It's not.

> she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.

Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.

To get access to the account probably required using e-mail or phone number to match 2FA for a password reset.

> If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.

Did you read the quote you quoted? Your quote says the account was created with her social and date of birth.