One thing I’m concerned about is recording equipment leaving identifiable information without us knowing about it.
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Without some type of visual confirmation, it’s all noise.
On my way home from work, I grab $600 from the atm, $300 for my wife’s tattoo, $200 for me, and $100 for wife spending money.
After the appt the tattoos artists wife takes $200 and flys across country that night. I spend my $200 at the peelers, all those go to a dozen different girls and servers. My wife the next day goes shopping at an outlet mall and spends her $100 at 4 stores. The tattoo artist spends his $100 on beer.
We live on the same block and I pulled the money out across town. Who’s is the original takers purchases….?
It’s 95% noise, it’s useless unless you’re an investigator and have boots on the ground.
Again, it’s a fun story to share around the campfire though. Is it possible, yes, can it be done in actual practice, absolutely not. Not without some other information.
Yes that would destroy some data points but we are talking about a statistical approach here. How often do you give other people cash directly in comparison to spending it at stores. Given enough time and collected information local concentrations will show up. Its surveillance through data analysis with a new veneer.
I ONLY give other people cash, all my other purchases are debit/credit. Like MOST people and stores since Covid
The only time this works, is if it’s targeted, and that means an investigator is doing it. An automated system wouldn’t know what to do with any of the data. You’re severely overestimating how much people spend cash around them, that’s usually when it’s plastic. People use cash in “sketchier” places.
Again, zero basis on reality, it gets “destroyed” at every step without some manual intervention.
No manual intervention needed just track everything and retain the data for a long time. Then you can query the database for all serial numbers your target has ever taken out of an ATM and where they where returned. Circulation will diffuse these results somewhat but that follows a normal distribution. That means it is much more likely that a bill that was spent at a store by your target which is given out again as change, is more likely to be spent at another store near that original store. Aggregate this information over a couple of weeks or months and you will get a heatmap of locations to check out. You can run this operation automatically on all bank accounts if you want. Threshold the heatmap at some significant value and you get a list of stores visited by each person with X% probability.
Except most people use multiple cards, multiple banks etc. there will absolutely need to some visual verification to be able to ever establish a starting point. It just doesn’t work.
It’s a neat proof of concept, but in reality, that would never hold up in court.
Give your head a shake, I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you actually believe this is being used or can be used for what you claim.
If you always use card payments whenever it’s possible, it obviously isn’t necessary to analyze your cash transactions to learn where you are because you are already disclosing it :)
There are close to 2 billion unbanked people in the world. In the US, it’s less than 6% nationally, but over 10% in some states.
Many people who are not unbanked also often avoid electronic payments for privacy/security and other reasons.
The cash serial number tracking being described in this thread is useful for locating the neighborhoods frequented by someone who (a) avoids using electronic payments, and (b) maybe obtains cash from an ATM (or perhaps check-cashing service, in the case of an unbanked person) in places other than the neighborhoods they live in or frequent.
……
If they don’t use a bank, how are they pulling money out for it to be tracked?
See, none of it makes any sense lmfao.
Which is useful to who…? The only time that information is useful, would be for an investigator, so… again… someone, boots on the ground, and doing visual verification. And an investigator and plenty of other useful metrics with less noise.
It
Makes
Zero
Sense
In
Reality!
The person originally started talking about spending habits, and shifted to finding criminals. Those are two whole-fully different situations that need different information points, and are also gathered in significantly different methods.
One example I mentioned in my comment you’re replying to is check cashing services. Millions of people in the US receive money via things like check or money order and need to change it to cash despite not having a bank account to deposit it in; this usually involves identifying themselves.
See also payday loans, etc.
I assume you didn’t click (and translate) the link in the comment prior to mine which you replied to?
If you do, from there you can find some industry news about Serial Number Reading (SNR) technology.
I don’t know how widely deployed that technology is, but there is clear evidence that it does exist and is used for various purposes.
…
Those are done at a teller, not an ATM. An ATM requires a bank card, cashing a cheque at a teller does not. The post and everything that’s being discussed is about ATM tracking…
It doesn’t make sense when you actually understand how the system works… but of course people that don’t quite understand the system can be fooled by how it’s possible. But it isn’t, and not for the reasons you’ve suggested, as I’ve countered. It just doesn’t make sense because of all the NOISE.