A good lawyer can bring this up; that there is no chain of custody .. but you need to afford a lawyer. If someone in a low paid job is incentivised to find this evidence, they could occasionally just plant it, get their few extra $$ a few times a year, and some other low paid worker could get screwed over because they can't afford anything other than a public defender.

They then get a sex offense charge, can't get a job, are looked down upon by all their friends/family no matter how much they claim innocence and get even poorer.

I realize a Geek Squad member isn't quite as low income as you can go, but it's still low income people incentivied to hurt other low income people. .. Mortys killing mortys.

Or better yet. You get a bag of clothes in, "Hey, I know this guy, he's an a$$hole, I'm going to plant something in his clothes and report him, ha!"

That can always happen, it's just that now one would also get a compensation.

I don't think it is just that. In the dry cleaning example, the evidence would be extremely slight, it would turn into a he-said/she-said case, and either no one would get convicted or there would be enough evidence to convict the dry cleaner. And the dry cleaner can do this at most once before the police became suspicious. The cops will probably be suspicious right away: either the drugs are valuable and no one would actually leave them behind, or it is something like weed and the consequences will not be severe enough for the cops to bother.

In the case of the images, the evidence might be just as slight, but the police have essentially communicated to the employees that they won't be looking too deeply at the evidence and juries are ignorant when it come to technology and punitive when it comes to 'illegal images'.

The argument here as the defending attorney is ridiculously obvious: the employee has both motive and incentive; but I'd still give high odds of conviction (or worse, a plea bargain) and even if acquitted the accused will be marked for as long as people remember.

As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. Of course, digital images cost nothing, so there isn't a right price to set. I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

Or, you know, you could have law enforcement maybe not turn the rest of society in to paid snitches. Not everyone wishes to live in a reimplementation of East Germany.

I realize that for many people 'pedophile' is the root password to the Constitution (not my line), but the existence of horrible people should not be an excuse to elevate authoritarians.

> I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

You're still missing an important implication of this, now a real child pornographer's lawyer can get him off by creating enough doubt in Jury's mind that Geek Squad's employees planted the evidence, especially since they are getting paid for it.

In other words, not only there is a risk of innocent people getting arrested and possibly going to jail, there is a risk of guilty people going free.

> As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none.

A dime bag by definition retails for $10. $500 < $10. (The cost is reduced by buying in bulk, if you wanted to scale up this scheme.)