I wrote “ISIS Beer Funds” in a Venmo memo and the feds detained my $42

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/i-wrote-isis-beer-funds-in-a-venmo-memo-and-the-feds-detained-my-42/

by jseliger • 10 years ago

84 40 10 years ago

arstechnica.com

x5n1• 10 years ago

pathetic and a sign of things to come.

grimmdude• 10 years ago

"The moral of the story, I guess, is not to buy $42 worth of beer at a bar in the West Village."

Hmmm, not sure sure that's what I would take away from this.

paublyrne• 10 years ago

Let's hope that real ISIS supporters are thoughtless enough to include the word ISIS in their communications.

jpalomaki• 10 years ago

Probably this is at CYA ("Cover Your Ass") security [1] in action. Everybody knows these terms are not very useful on these lists, but also want to make sure they don't end up having to explain why all other names were listed, but the something as obvious as this was left out.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_...

nvahalik• 10 years ago

Your government can either provide you with freedom or it can provide you with security. Get ready to pay up America—freedom isn't free.

tallerholler• 10 years ago

this

Joof• 10 years ago

So this is security? I'm confused.

mindcrime2• 10 years ago

Your government can either provide you with freedom or it can provide you with security.

I see no reason to believe government can provide either. And in fact, I'd say government is always, by definition, an assault on the former of the two.

krapp• 10 years ago

And in fact, I'd say government is always, by definition, an assault on the former of the two.

Found the anarchist.

jaytaylor• 10 years ago

I wonder how effective this sort of (brain dead) regulation has been at hindering actual enemies of the state.

It's a shame there is no transparency in this system.

mindslight2• 10 years ago

We're all potential enemies of this "state", so somewhat effective.

I'm hoping for an entertaining populist civil disobedience campaign over this.

forgotpwtomain• 10 years ago

It maybe be possible to file a freedom of information act request with OFAC, for the number and amounts of seizures in the past several years?

Rmilb• 10 years ago

Would the funds still be held if he was sending the money to reimburse a fiend to one of the many businesses with "Isis", in its name?

http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-with-the-name-isis-...

abrowne• 10 years ago

Or people names Isis?

tetromino_• 10 years ago

No different from being detained and banned from boarding if you joke about a bomb at an airport.

There isn't much incentive for TSA or OFAC agents to apply common sense or attempt to detect irony. Because (1) that requires mental effort, (2) if you get it wrong and decide someone is serious when they were joking, it doesn't hurt you any other than needing to waste some time on paperwork, and (3) if you get it wrong and decide someone is joking when they were serious, then you've put people's lives in jeopardy, terminated your career, and perhaps opened yourself up for legal liability.

mindslight2• 10 years ago

There isn't much incentive for TSA or OFAC agents to apply common sense or attempt to detect irony

... because they avoid responsibility for the damages of their willfully negligent actions.

riprowan• 10 years ago

There isn't much incentive for TSA or OFAC agents to apply common sense or attempt to detect irony.

Right, because every incident that they have to report and log is additional work and justification for budgetary increase.

dwaltrip2• 10 years ago

He's not at the airport. This is a PRIVATE communication between two individuals. It's absurd that this power is available to a government.

FireBeyond• 10 years ago

Where private is defined as "financial transaction through an intermediary who is bound by several laws regarding the laundering or potential illegal use of money".

joesmo• 10 years ago

I can't imagine the incredible stupidity that led to this regulation. As if terrorists are actually going to use the acronym ISIS. They don't even use that acronym when talking about themselves. In fact, I don't think anyone outside the US uses that acronym. Even if they did, I doubt they would be that stupid to use it in an actual money transfer. They are not as stupid as the people making these regulations.

But I disagree with the author. Sounds like the moral of the story is to not send money online whenever possible and when not possible, to always use a benign description, even if it's a lie.

HillRat• 10 years ago

Well, OFAC seeks to regulate transactions with proscribed groups and individuals. Normal banking covers this in part with "know your customer" (KYC) rules and processes, but I guess Venmo decided it needs to cast a wider net. In this case, I wouldn't blame OFAC; they just got a suspicious activity report and now have to act on it.

whatnotests2• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure ISIS would not be so stupid as to actually list their purchases as being intended for "ISIS-" anything.

What kind of morons are writing these scanning bots?

smh

teddyuk• 10 years ago

I worked on a project with uk banks, there is an international sanction list that is people and organisations and they name match them so this name is on the list hence why it was caught, it isn't very technical.

whatnotests2• 10 years ago

It's like rejecting emails as "spam" because they contain the word "spam".

Ridiculous.

jamessb• 10 years ago

This seems somewhat pointless - surely anyone trying to tranfer fudns to a terrorist organisation would not use its real name.

I'd also expect quite a lot of false positives if they're simply flagging all transactions containing the word "ISIS", and not just from jokes.

Isis is also the name of the river flowing through Oxford, and hence a part of the name of many legitimate entities with a connection to the surrounding area. Within the unviersity of Oxford, the technology transfer office is "ISIS innovations", and the men's reserve boat race crew is called Isis. There's an ISIS neutron source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. It also appears in the name of branches of larger organisations (eg. the "Rotary Club of Oxford Isis" and "Oxford Isis Toastmasters"), plus various private businesses (including Isis security and the Isis guest house).

secfirstmd• 10 years ago

The UK Ministry of Defence system for classifying supplier codes is also called ISIS.

https://www.isisweb.mod.uk/webisis/navigate.do

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

Even worse, there's the ISIS toolkit that's been used for Paxos-like, distributed stuff for a long time. One of the early innovators.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/Isis/

demarq• 10 years ago

and a model of toyota.

mkohlmyr• 10 years ago

It was also the name of a gentleman's (lol) establishment in Southampton. Apparently a black sign with Isis in white letters wasn't good for business.

grifter2000• 10 years ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

blackbagboys2• 10 years ago

Can someone explain the legal justification under which the government can direct a private entity to indefinitely seize a third party's assets with no due process?

cdumler• 10 years ago

It's called Civil Forfeiture. The money was arrested and charged with a crime. Since he's not a party the crime, unless he wants to admin being a party to it, he can't defend the cash. Since it can't defend itself, there is no need for the trial as it is going to lose by default; therefore, the cash can be taken. Makes one's blood boil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

Cool thing is police now out steal thieves in the U.S. for the group most likely to take your stuff:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

blackbagboys2• 10 years ago

I don't think that's what's occurring here; no crime is alleged to have occurred, he admitted being party to whatever was going on, and OFAC has directed Venmo to withhold his assets, they haven't directly appropriated them.

gozur88• 10 years ago

I don't have much sympathy - that's a pretty dumb thing to write.

Of course in 99.9999% of cases this is just some dumb joke. But look at it from the FBI's (or whoever's) perspective: if this just happens to be the one time it isn't the press will be all over them saying "My God, how could you not take this seriously?" And the first priority of any bureaucracy is the protection of the bureaucracy.

pjlegato• 10 years ago

I think Venmo is more at fault here than the government.

The government prohibits asset transfers between a certain public list of organizations. This list happens to include an organization called "ISIS". Implementing that prohibition is Venmo's problem.

Venmo then wrote a program to just scan all transactions against the list and auto-block all matches, as the least-effort path to compliance.

It's not Venmo's money, so they don't care. Most people whose legitimate transfers get blocked in this filter don't have a media platform to complain about it, so they aren't worried about negative publicity.

Finally, in terms of risk analysis, false positives are much cheaper than false negatives. If they allow a legally prohibited transfer through, then they're going to face a firestorm from the government. Expensive.

But if they block many legitimate transfers, they only annoy a few users and at most have to issue a few refunds. Cheap.

Actually having a human involved in the decision would cost them more, and expose them to more risk.

So, simple dumb keyword filters control our private finances now.

twelve40• 10 years ago

Venmo is probably just following what banks and other fintech companies are doing already. They don't even have to write anything themselves, there are commonly used third-party OFAC services like LexisNexis where you throw your transaction data over the wall, they come back with the verdict, you then just follow instructions and cross compliance off your list of things to worry about.

devishard• 10 years ago

Surely ISIS doesn't use the word ISIS when attempting to transfer funds.

shmageggy• 10 years ago

Who's going to be the first to prove how idiotic this system is by DDOSing OFAC with (im)properly labeled micropayments?

I wrote “ISIS Beer Funds” in a Venmo memo and the feds detained my $42

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