The United States Postal Service is Now a Crime Fighting Squad?

Submitted by TP

GIS technology is now being used by the United States Postal Service (USPS) Bank Service (BSA) Compliance Office to detect suspicious activity, using sophisticated analysis and mapping to monitor millions of money order transactions across the United States. How do they do this? Using GIS maps, they can monitor where suspicious activities may be occurring and link transactional data to show potential criminal patterns. The reason why they’re doing this is because the Postal Service is an issuer of money orders and a number of federal anti-money-laundering laws and regulations directly affect the Postal Service because of this.

The BSA Compliance Office can identify post offices that may be suspected as being used in criminal activity by tracking if any of the offices have an unusually high number of suspicious money orders over a certain period of time. They can also view money orders that look suspicious or see where unusual money order transactions have occurred. The office can also determine whether a number of money orders have been purchased from numerous locations and have been cashed at a single location which can be used to investigate suspicious activity and apprehend suspects and also to prosecute criminals.

The USPS BSA Compliance Office’s use of this technology is somewhat controversial. It raises issues of privacy, accuracy, as well as power. Issues of finance are a private matter that should be dealt with discretely. By making this transaction information available to the USPS BSA Compliance Office, it is possible for certain individuals to take advantage of this and use this information for their own benefit. In addition, this could also lead to numerous cases of wrongful accusations. This is a serious undertaking for the Compliance Office, yet, how effective will it actually be in fighting crime?

One Response to “The United States Postal Service is Now a Crime Fighting Squad?”

  1. Hinta says:

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