The stacks and stacks of cash which are the cannabis industry\u2019s stock-in-trade, more so than seeds or sacks \u2014 and will be, as long as 96 percent of American financial institutions continue to refuse to do business with the marijuana industry\u2014 create opportunity for at least two distinct classes of criminals.<\/p>\n
There are the classic \u201crip-and-run\u201d gangs,\u00a0who by now are well aware that a cannabis dispensary on vendor day or on payday will have more cash on hand than a literal bank<\/a>. But there are also more entrepreneurial-minded wrongdoers, who capitalize on cannabis business-owners\u2019 exhaustion with running high-volume businesses in all cash and offer them \u201csolutions.\u201d<\/p>\n That is, scams \u2014 schemes that either still break the law and leave the risk with the cannabis business owner, or outright criminal enterprises that resemble old-school Mafia-style \u201cbusiness help.\u201d<\/p>\n As Los Angeles-based cannabis attorney Hilary Bricken noted at Above The Law this week<\/a>, would-be fraudsters pitch \u201cmarijuana banking solutions\u201d to the burgeoning industry with frequency, consistency and shamelessness\u00a0a Nigerian scammer<\/a>\u00a0would admire.<\/p>\n \u201cAt least twice a week, one of my firm\u2019s cannabis business lawyers will get contacted by an ancillary company trying to pitch us on referring our clients to them for \u2018marijuana banking services,\u2019 claiming they\u2019ve cracked the code on marijuana banking,\u201d Bricken wrote. \u201cWe routinely ignore these solicitations and all cannabis stakeholders should do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Such flimflam has a few specific calling cards, but the basics are universal. Though banks wield enormous power, and since participating in the scheme that triggered the Great Recession did not result in significant penalty, it\u2019s fair to assume that a few big banks could start accepting marijuana deposits without much trouble.<\/p>\n That said, no company you\u2019ve never heard of has that kind of power \u2014 and no company of any kind has yet to compel Congress to remove cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.<\/p>\n For this reason, if the \u201cbanking-solutions\u201d pitchman can\u2019t or won\u2019t identify the institution with which his would-be clients will store their money, it\u2019s a shell-scam. The solutions man will take the money and stash it in any old bank, its source unidentified, for a fee \u2014meaning the marijuana business would have been just as well off putting it in the local credit union, claiming it was lottery winnings or an inheritance from a previously unknown relative.<\/p>\n Large fees to a third-party are another signal of a scam. There is no reason, Bricken writes, for a third-party to require a payment to \u201cunlock\u201d a cannabis-friendly bank account. If the money is going overseas or even to another state, that\u2019s a further sign that the arrangement violates what laws are in place.<\/p>\n To the outside, all these arrangements sound like nothing so much as money laundering, which is an additional crime on top of federal drug law violations, and one for which no state law provides cover.<\/p>\n According to Bricken, the Bank Secrecy Act, a 1970 law aimed at organized crime, which compels banks to report activity that may be connected to money laundering or fraud to federal authorities, further restricts banks\u2019 ability to take marijuana money.<\/p>\n Whether because banks are risk-averse (and they\u2019re not, as Wells Fargo\u2019s actual fraud scams demonstrated) or just anti-cannabis, these Nixon-era rules apparently outweigh in bank officials minds\u2019 the Obama-era FinCEN guidelines, which laid out a framework with which banks could take marijuana deposits.<\/p>\n The FinCEN rules suggested that as long as a cannabis business had a state license and was willing to subject itself to state scrutiny \u2013 to ensure it was not a fount of money laundering \u2013 all would be well.<\/p>\n These guidelines are in place even in the era of Attorney General Jeff Sessions<\/a>, the erstwhile marijuana-industry bogeyman, yet banks don\u2019t care. And until they do, there will be ample room in the market for unscrupulous players willing to take advantage of guileless or cash-tired business owners.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, have you ever been scammed?<\/p>\n The post Beware of Marijuana Banking Scams<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The stacks and stacks of cash which are the cannabis industry\u2019s stock-in-trade, more so than seeds or sacks \u2014 and will be, as long as 96 percent of American financial institutions continue to refuse to do business with the marijuana industry\u2014 create opportunity for at least two distinct classes ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,459,170,96,978],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26476,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475\/revisions\/26476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Beware of Marijuana Banking Scams<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"