Are you involved in any of the following businesses?

Ammunition Sales
Cable Box De-scramblers
Coin Dealers
Credit Card Schemes
Credit Repair Services
Dating Services
Debt Consolidation Scams
Drug Paraphernalia
Escort Services
Firearms Sales
Fireworks Sales
Get Rich Products
Government Grants
Home-Based Charities
Life-Time Guarantees
Life-Time Memberships
Lottery Sales
Mailing Lists/Personal Info
Money Transfer Networks
On-line Gambling
PayDay Loans
Pharmaceutical Sales
Ponzi Schemes
Pornography
Pyramid-Type Sales
Racist Materials
Surveillance Equipment
Telemarketing
Tobacco Sales
Travel Clubs

Had any trouble with your accounts of late? Well, if so, the DOJ may be trying to shut you down by making it uncomfortable for banks to handle your accounts, as Teagen Presley found out

Teagan Presley, a former porn star, [found] out she was suddenly no longer a Chase customer. When Presley went to the bank in person to ask why, she was told it’s because she’s considered “high risk.”

“And then they told me that they canceled my husband’s account too, because our social security numbers are linked,” Presley told VICE News. “They told him that it was because I’m a notorious adult star. Which is funny, because I’m kind of a goody-goody in the business, and I’m not even doing porn anymore.”

US Department of Justice’s “Operation Choke Point” asks banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like. Banks are then told they must “choke off” those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts. The secretive operation began in 2013.

At Techdirt yesterday, Timothy Geigner, after noting that many porn stars have had their accounts arbitrarily closed because of “high risk,” made a number of extremely salient points:

Let’s not mince words: a program that was built upon the goals of stopping financial fraud has devolved into a massive government overreach into private businesses that are operating within the law. … The intention of the government, it would seem, is to make the banks unwilling to deal with the government harassment and simply cut anyone in those industries off from the financial institutions. Nobody is happy about this.

As Newsbusters notes:

First, DOJ doesn’t have the constitutional authority to go after businesses whose illegality has not been established by threatening their bank and financial services providers with legal sanctions and regulatory harassment if they don’t participate in the persecution. There are these things called laws which must be passed to declare certain financial practices and contracts illegal. That hasn’t happened. Short of that, there at least need to be court rulings having the same effect. There is apparently no evidence that DOJ has involved the courts at all.

The second is that although the bankers’ montage concentrated on payday lenders, many more business endeavors besides payday lending are involved. At least some of them, as odious as nanny-state officials and other might believe they are, operate legally.

You can read more from Newsbusters here.

While one might point to such things as payday lending or get rich quick schemes as perhaps being on the margins and maybe even illegally operating in some instances, most of the businesses on the list have no inherent illegality, particularly those I bolded. They are only ‘questionable’ because they are not liked by the Obama regime.

This should frighten any business owner and anyone who frequents a business. In other words, all of us.

What happens if the Obama regime declares you or your business ‘high risk’ tomorrow?