Coastal_Explorer

For the other way around:
Wedding cake looks great but usually tastes awful (compared to other cake). These cakes are usually drier, or are starting to get old by the time they get eaten.

The Avatar movie depicts what could happen in a scenario where we find intelligent life, but we’re the more advanced civilization.

Adding onto this, the reason they press charges against the money instead of you is that, in the US, you would be innocent until proven guilty. They get around this by “charging the money” instead in which case it can be considered “guilty” until proven innocent.

What happens next is that you would have to sue them to prove the money/property innocent in court to get it back. Additionally you can’t sue and recover legal fees. So, if they only confiscated a few thousand dollars, you would likely spend more money trying to win in court than you would get awarded in the end.

It’s also worth noting, there’s an incentive for the TSA to tip off DEA agents to sieze the cash because the DEA will then share some of the money back to the TSA. Likewise for local/state police, even if they can’t sieze it under local laws, they can sieze it for some federal law and then the cash will be split between the law enforcement agency that siezed it and some federal agency.

More information here from a group that’s been fighting this in court (and winning some cases with the Supreme Court) here: https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/