When I was younger some teens would water balloon my family's house a few times a week. We called the police when we thought we figured out who it was. They showed up within an hour, had a chat about it then went to the kids' houses who promptly confessed. It was all handled outside the legal system. Later I told a police officer about this story and asked why they were able to give it so much attention so promptly. He said something along the lines of, "it's easier to deter them now while they're still afraid of their parents' wrath."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
The main benefit there is that banks are iirc. legislated to provide this to everyone, and because merchants have no risk this way they don't ever have to filter potential customers based on perceived creditworthiness and similar factors.
In the case of eBay seller fraud, eBay absorbs the loss. Report the fraud to them and you'll get your money back.
They don't even bother suggesting that you report it to the police.
Insurance companies might insist on you telling them a crime-report number (I imagine this is quite effective in reducing fraudulent claims of fraud), but eBay don't.
I was incredulous, as of course was he, and I asked to look at his paperwork because, frankly, I didn't believe him.
Often, I have learned, when you hear of things like this in the system, once you look at the paperwork you find out "oh, on top of stealing the bicycle you also pulled a gun on someone" or something of the like that explains things.
Not this time...the guy was a drug addict in his 40's who had a lifetime of petty crap, and I guess the judge was in a shit mood the day of sentencing. Since a porch is attached to a house..an "occupied dwelling" in Florida parlance, this was considered a rather serious crime, thus the 15-year bam!
I guess I'm trying to say...it depends upon several factors how things like this are going to be treated. To be honest, I have a few "friends" in Vegas now that are telling me they are really cracking down on fraud and handing out real time behind relatively minor offenses.
Just carrying a fake ID in Vegas with priors will get you a 2-5 year state-sponsored vacation.
Petty crimes like this ruin otherwise helpful ideas. In my city I've come across a number of Bird scooters that have been vandalized, had the GPS ripped off to presumably steal them for personal use.
If nobody does anything about that, an otherwise great idea that could seriously help people get around more easily and reduce traffic and pollution will simply not work, because we allow some people to get away with being assholes.
At some point I figured the guy who took mine needed it more than the effort I didn't take to lock it up.
I find cars tremendously annoying and dangerous, does that mean I can start smashing them up?
Also, they are not being only vandalized, but stolen, which would imply that the perpetrators do believe the scooters are quite useful, but simply don't want to pay for them.
You're also ignoring that many of the scooters are being stolen not vandalized, or the vandalism is part of the theft (ripping off the GPS unit so the scooter can't be tracked).
Besides nuisance/boon is not a binary switch. Even if the vandals were a handful of angry cranks who were annoyed by the scooters, that doesn't imply that the scooters aren't overall beneficial to the city.
Reasonable, morally normal people don't want anybody sent to prison for stealing a bike. That's a reductive straw man. The issue at hand is that this person had stolen before, had been caught stealing multiple times before, and, despite being told that doing it again would result in a long sentence, still couldn't stop himself from stealing a bike.
This is a pattern of bad behavior, even in response to the threat of dire consequences. That's not normal. And it's not just "stealing a bike." It's the totality of the behavior that's being punished. "Three strikes" laws require three strikes. It's silly to look at any one of those strikes in isolation. The point is that society is saying, "enough is enough."
She called the police and showed all this to them and they basically said that she wasn't a victim of the crime, since she had been made whole by the credit card company and the amount was too small for them to follow up on. So, nothing happened and presumably this person is still out there ripping off other people.
Yet another example of how many crimes depend upon a degree or more of separation to escape prosecution and conviction. We are most definitely victims when the recovery cost is borne through the revenue from the interest rate charges.
We should be wondering why doesn't every payment system run 0.1-0.5% overall end-to-end between both user, merchant, and payment system that simultaneously acts as a bank, or perhaps even lower for more decentralized systems. There's very little transparency at all the costs imposed by middlemen within the system.
Local cops serve the local community. They're responsible primarily for deterring/investigating crime that most directly affects the local community. So if they have to choose between chasing some bank's $500 and the perp who broke into a someone's garage, they're going to serve the locally registered voter every time. And that's how we want it.
Banks are very good at managing fraud, on the whole. They tend to view it at the level of detection and prevention, not punishment (which is far more expensive). And their techniques work. Total fraud in the credit card industry is actually very low.
The women would have been out $500 if she had not noticed it and because she did, she had to report it to get the money back. Both of those are problems that she had/would of had to suffer through.
Petty theft, especially of bicycles, gets almost no investigation either.
I live in a country with bad policing and these type of crimes are taken seriously. Like if you use the card for 50-100$ purchases, your next will probably jail time.
Another point: Did the card owner complain? Usually, when a complaint happen multiple parties are involved. The shipper gets a charge back on his account, so he'll actually care to pursue. MasterCard/Visa also pursue these issues as well as the banks involved in these transactions.
tl;dr: probably BS in the US. And from what I read the only countries where you can get away with are Russia, Nigeria, etc...
There was an investigative news story on TV about a couple who would order hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise over the Internet using stolen credit card numbers and brazenly have it delivered to their own home. The TV crew showed their house brimming top to bottom with boxes and boxes of fraudulently obtained goods that they would resell on eBay. They said no police ever visited them.
In every one of the frauds the couple committed, the merchant would know that he shipped to (for example) 1234 Main St, Minneapolis. The credit card issuer, bank, and defrauded card holder would have the address also. Probably hundreds of police reports were made, or am I assuming too much? If a single policeman actually followed up on one of these "too small" thefts of $100 to $1000 they could have prevented hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional theft.
I imagine that the system breaks down because no one reports the fraud or pushes to get something done, or because the police don't follow up, or both.