Quote from: BCB on February 08, 2014, 04:03:58 PM

I highly doubt it. Krebs is a pretty smart and connected guy.

Yes, I know, I read his site regularly. But even smart people get false information "leaked" through them now and then. For the record I am definitely not accusing Krebs of perpetrating a hoax. But I do suspect that somebody (law enforcement? fincen?) might be using him as an outlet.

The major red flag for me is that he mentions "court documents" three times in the article but doesn't link to them. He lives almost 1,000 miles from Miami and this went down less than 12 hours before he posted the article, so if they're not in electronic form I don't understand how he could have seen them.

He's also active in his articles' comments, including this one, but is strangely ignoring peoples questions about the "court documents".

Another intermediate possibility is that some mid-level law enforcement officer jumped the gun on this, running a sting and grabbing these guys without discussing it thoroughly with senior enough prosecutors. End result these guys get set loose with no charges in a few days and we never know the difference. Since this was a sting there were clearly "operations" people involved; maybe it was all operations people and no lawyers, and right now those operations people are sitting down with a bunch of state attorneys who are explaining to them that "yes, that law is on the books" but their time is not well spent (nor their careers advanced) by chasing kids for trading baseball cards. Even if baseball cards are "trendy" right now and all over the news.