Category: Fail

This week Bank of America had some kind of outage that resulted in an unknown number of their customers having their bank accounts zeroed out.

“My personal and business Bank of America accounts were wiped to $0.00 in this alleged cyber attack,” Elijah Schaffer, a journalist with Gateway Pundit

Elijah Schaffer is a fairly well known conservative reporter and the host of the “Slightly Offensive with Elijah Schaffer” podcast.

Thus far I’ve not seen any numbers of how many BofA customers experienced this problem.

The number was apparently large enough that their customer service phone lines were overwhelmed and would answer, say they couldn’t talk, then hang up.

This points to the fragility of a cashless society, in general. It also points to something potentially more sinister.

In recent years there has been a push from some quarters to have specialized categorizations added to VISA, MasterCard, American Express, & other cards.

For the time being these categorizations appear to be limited specifically to firearms.

So while Federal and State governments say they’re not in favor of a nationwide firearms database.

These categorizations allow Federal and State governments to have a backdoor into being able to identify someone who either has guns, (registered or not, because grandaddies rifle or six shooter is probably not registered, and doesn’t NEED to be,) who may have purchased  bullets, accessories, or even hats displaying firearms logos… or who may just have an interest in guns.

Categorizations are way better than a firearms database. With a firearms database, someone has to have purchased a firearm, or specifically chosen to register a weapon.

Ever changing laws regarding which firearms need to be registered, what doesn’t, what is legal in this state or that state and what isn’t, and that a gun or a magazine purchased last year was legal then but now isn’t legal, have gone a long way toward criminalizing average citizens.

It’s really all about creating enough legislation such that anyone, at anytime, at the convenience of whatever government or state official, can be charged for illegally possessing something that some other asshole who’s never seen or fired a gun in real life decided was too dangerous to exist.

All of which brings me to my point. 

Select, apparently random Bank of America customers have suddenly, inexplicably, had their bank accounts zeroed out. Since many banking customers have their credit cards through the same bank their checking & savings accounts are with, categorizations could literally be used to punish individuals that government entities find offensive.

Think about it. You expect your direct deposit paycheck to be accessible. You expect your debit card to work. You expect your credit card to work. What happens when you offend a government official and they order your accounts frozen?

The IRS, for years has used this power to screw citizens. The IRS was granted the power to freeze accounts in an effort to curtail drug and human trafficking. But they, more often than not, use it to make sure a mom & pop business owner and their family goes hungry.

Obama used the IRS to punish organizations which opposed him. Folks in these organizations  spent years and thousands of dollars defending themselves against Obama’s IRS. Some of them are only recently cleared of wrongdoing. But the IRS is under no obligation to pay these people back for their legal expenses.

How much easier would it have been for Obama DOJ to punish everyone who donated to organizations he didn’t like with a conference call to VISA, MasterCard, & American Express?

Creating categorizations allows for very specific targeting of large groups who have one or two charges in common. 

For example, everyone who’s ever purchased a firearm or bullet. How about anyone who’s purchased a ticket to a Trump rally?

We know that Biden’s DOJ used charge records to identify January 6th attendees. Some of those people were later classified as January 6th rioters and arrested. Many of whom are still incarcerated awaiting trial almost 4 years later.

Over time, computers could narrow it down to categorizations of individual products. Don’t like cigarettes? Cancel people’s accounts who buy them. Don’t like a particular corporation, destroy them through their clients. No one will buy a corporation’s products if doing so results in being unable to buy food.

It’s far more efficient than the IRS having to target individuals or organizations. Subpoenas and all the constitutional protections that the IRS has to step over, through, or around, become a thing of the past.

Simply looking at commonalities between members of a group would allow correlation and targeting. Eventually, I could see the focus narrowed to individual SKU numbers. I’d bet it could be done today with the right databases and a bit of creativity.

I know this sounds like a dystopian fantasy, but believe me when I say it’s possible. This is what people mean when they talk about social credit scores, if you believe this kind of control can’t or won’t be implemented here in the United States you’ve got a shock coming. There are a number of congressional folks from both parties who approve of elements of this but don’t see the bigger picture.

Which leads me to wonder, was the Bank of America “Glitch” really a cyber attack, or was it a proof of concept demonstration?