Questions about the "sovereign citizen" movement and "American state national" vs citizen.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. It's teh basis for various scams, some against the government, some against the gullible

One way sovereigns try to make the imaginary money real is by abusing legitimate I.R.S. forms. Law-abiding taxpayers use Form 1099-OID, for example, to report “original issue discount” income. But some sovereigns write in fake OID income, and fake withholding, in order to claim illegitimate refunds. If you file such a return, you risk at the very least a large fine. Yet from 2012 to 2014, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the I.R.S. received close to 7,000 sham OID filings.

Chronically underfunded and understaffed, I.R.S. investigators refer only about two dozen sovereign-scam cases, on average, for prosecution each year. The agency sometimes misses returns that should raise suspicion. For example, in 2016, the I.R.S. discovered a sizable redemption scheme — but only after processing 207 bogus returns and disbursing more than $43 million. That’s another reason these strange theories persist, and have begun to leach out of the sovereign network and into the general population: Sometimes, improbably, they work.
...
It was around this time that the Mortons turned to hawking the debt-erasing sovereign scheme known as the “bond process.” Over two years, they helped people around the country send nearly two dozen fake bonds to the I.R.S., Quicken Loans, PennyMac, Bank of America, Chase Bank and the treasurer’s office in Contra Costa County, California. Early in 2015, Barbara Lavender, the woman whose husband met Mr. Morton at a U.F.O. conference, gave him a call.
...
To wipe out her $70,000 balance, he suggested Ms. Lavender should send him $2,500, or less than 4 percent of what she owed. She and her husband believed Mr. Morton had discovered the sort of workaround rich people find. “You know,” she testified later. “You hear it all the time: ‘wealthy with tax loopholes,’ and that kind of thing.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/business/sovereign-citizens-financial-crime.html

It also has link to the "Posse Commitatus" movement, and include some seriously violent individuals, who have gone as far as killing police officers. Yes, worry about anyone falling for it. They're in danger of getting scammed, of being persuaded to try and defraud the government or others, or of getting mixed up in far right violence. If she actually believes this stuff, she'd no longer capable of looking after her own money without breaking the law. Maybe a relative could get someone appointed to run her affairs?