Why is the bond for a $500 fraud identical to that for a more than $20 000 fraud? This man who was much advertised on the internet (see the links) has 19 charges, the bond for each of them being set to $40 000. The question is why, as long as some charges are for frauds ranging from $100 to $500 while others for frauds above $20 000? The total bond would be $760 000. See the list of charges here: https://www.donaanacounty.org/inmates/viewprofile/1700009732
Bail schedules In the United States, bail bond amounts are commonly set in accordance with a local bail schedule. According to Moving Beyond Money: A Primer on Bail Reform, published in 2016 by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School: Jurisdictions throughout the country use bail schedules to determine the amount of money bail that will be applied to certain categories of offenses. Generally, a bail schedule will list particular offenses or offense types (e.g., various classes of misdemeanor or felony) and assign a specific dollar amount or dollar range. Jurisdictions may embrace bail schedules as a tool of efficiency or because they provide uniformity along certain dimensions (that is, defendants accused of the same offense will have the same bond amount applied to them) ... But by setting out a simple matrix of offenses and corresponding dollar amounts, bail schedules do not allow for meaningfully individualized considerations of a defendant’s circumstances ... Bail schedules may be mandatory or advisory and may be set at the state or local level. Once bail schedules are in place, however, they often become de facto law even if they are not formally mandatory. Rules in New Mexico The use of bail schedules, and the associated bail bonds industry, is peculiar to the United States and has been widely criticised. As the CJPP report notes, bail schedules "are fundamentally inconsistent with individualized decision-making." In the jurisdiction you have referred to (New Mexico), a constitutional amendment was passed in November 2016 to encourage a more flexible approach to setting bail. Section 13 of the Constitution of New Mexico now provides: A person who is not detainable on grounds of dangerousness nor a flight risk in the absence of bond and is otherwise eligible for bail shall not be detained solely because of financial inability to post a money or property bond. A defendant who is neither a danger nor a flight risk and who has a financial inability to post a money or property bond may file a motion with the court requesting relief from the requirement to post bond. The court shall rule on the motion in an expedited manner. On July 1, 2017, the New Mexico Supreme Court issued new rules to comply with the constitutional amendment which prohibit the use of "fixed money-bail schedules that do not take into account evidence of dangerousness or flight risk cannot be used": New Mexico Supreme Court, Key Facts and Law Regarding Pretrial Release and Detention. However, the rules do permit the "standardized release of low-risk arrestees," and the process of "standardization" presumably involves a bail schedule: In place of the various inconsistent fixed-money-bond schedules that had been used by many local jurisdictions despite their lack of consideration of individual risk and noncompliance with controlling law, the new rules (Rule 408) also provide tighter regulation of procedures for early release procedures by detention centers and court employees, allowing standardized release of low-risk arrestees prior to initial court appearances but ending the practice of releasing high-risk defendants on fixed money bond schedules before they appear before a judge for a detention or release hearing. Given that the defendant in the case you have referred to was arrested less than two weeks ago, was extradited to New Mexico, and remains in custody, it is unclear that the bond amounts on the county inmate register have any significance. The situation may change at the next court hearing.
It would be a violation of 18 USC 1001, which is the law against making false statements to the federal government. Paul Mozer, who was a Salomon Brothers trader, received a four month sentence for doing something along those lines in 1994. Bidding on something implies an intent to pay for the thing, which in this case is a falsehood: in so doing, one "falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact" (that you don't intend to pay for the thing).
If a person is wrongfully deprived of money (or something else of value) for a period, that is damage, even if the money is later repaid. The victim might have used the money in some profitable or advantageous way during the period when it was taken. But the victim need not prove exactly how s/he might have profited, it is enough to show that the victim was wrongfully deprived of something of value. Of course, there are other elements to fraud. There must have been a lie or deception, on which the victim reasonably relied. There must have been intent that the victim so relay. The deception must have been material and must have directly caused or led to the damage. (Or have gotten the Fraudster a benefit that would not have been provided had the victim known the truth.) But assuming that all the elements of fraud are proved, restitution, even full restitution with interest, does not excuse the fraud. However, as a practical matter, if offered full restitution on condition of a release or an agreement not to prosecute, many victims will choose to take it, preferring their money back, perhaps with interest, to a legal case, even a winning one.
They can charge you with anything they think you did. And yes, the circumstances play a large part in the decision to arrest, charge and prosecute. However, circumstances include you: Reputation is everything. If you are a 17 year old male troublemaker with a long juvie rap sheet, including 3 past instances of stealing golf carts, then expect to be charged with the theft. Honestly you would probably be charged with the theft if you had simply stayed away and called the cops to report it abandoned. If you came upon it in your vehicle and it's obviously blocking the road and your apparent motive is to figure out how to move it so you can get by, then you're probably in the clear. If you're a 44 year old owner of a golf cart business, PAL supporter, city councilwoman and know half the cops including one in the car that stopped you, then, they're going to pretty much listen to you as far as what's the deal with the cart. Probably ask you for help moving it safely, might even ask you to get your cart-hauler to take it to impound. You won't hear from the D.A. obviously; nobody will say "Sue Councilwoman stole a golf cart" because it would sound absurd and make the speaker appear to be a politically motivated liar. That's the power of reputation; no one would speak it even if you did steal it. (Of course if you got caught doing it on a Ring camera, well, the hero takes a fall!) Anything in between, they'll deal with it in proportion to both the facts about you and the fact about the situation. You do not have a right to get the same credibility as the councilwoman; that is earned. That's the power of reputation.
In the UK this is just called &quot;an appeal for the suspect to come forward.&quot; The UK police are not allowed to lie or mislead as suggested in the OP, and any reduction in punishment is in the hands of the courts when passing sentence (unlike some other jurisdictions, I believe).
The reason this section exists is pretty well stated in an English case: Holmes v. Governor of Brixton Prison and Another. In paragraph 12, they discuss the law of theft in England, and note that under the law there as it stood in 2004 (and reaching back to principles of common law, which are often but not always shared with the US), deception required causing someone to believe something. A machine has no mind, cannot think, and can't be made to believe anything -- it sees an input and mechanically performs some response in response to that input. For instance, suppose you were to discover someone's bank account number and printed a check of your own that had that number on it. You then make that check up to look like it's a check from the someone else to you, and deposit it to an ATM; you then withdraw however much is available immediately. In all likelihood, no human will see that check until the victim looks into why they're significantly poorer than they remembered, so no human was deceived. The only things that were possibly deceived were the computers involved in the check-clearing process. But they don't have a mind: as far as they're concerned, they see pixels, pass them through an algorithm, and then send a message to another computer at the bank with certain information (which a human recognizes as an image of a check and an amount of money, but an ATM doesn't know what it means for something to be an image of a check). The machine then mechanically pushes bills out a slot. They don't think the check's real, don't think it's fake, and don't think it's a check: they're just piles of semiconductors and wires acting in accordance with the laws of physics. If you gave a check like this to a check-cashing place, it's clearly theft by deception: you make the human there (falsely) think you have a legitimate check, and they then pay you money based on it. But these days, a lot of this stuff is automated. Alaska's legislature didn't want you to get out of theft by deception charged because something was automated. So, they said that a machine could be deceived. This isn't a crime by itself; you can't be charged with deceiving a machine. You are charged with an offense under the chapter that involves deception. What 11.46.985 does is say you can't argue "this wasn't deception because only the machine was deceived."
It has been investigated, it simply has not been prosecuted. The investigation started when someone reported suspicious activity in Hastert's accounts. The investigation proceeded from a belief that he was being blackmailed. After listening to a wire of a conversation between Hastert and the alleged blackmailer, the officers investigating decided it was not a simple case of him being blackmailed--they or the prosecutors' office used their discretion to go after Hastert for illegally structuring his payments to avoid anti-money-laundering reporting laws, and to my knowledge have not yet pursued any blackmail charge. Police and Prosecutors have very wide discretion regarding what charges they bring. In addition, it is very common to have a civil lawsuit brought that implicates criminal laws, but not have the criminal violations be charged. For example, if you steal a purse you go to jail, but if you steal a building you are rarely charged with a criminal offense. It is rarely to a civil litigant's advantage to bring up criminal matters and there are ethical rules limiting the interaction between the two.
A creative prosecutor could probably come up with a raft of charges. But you could start with the federal wiretapping statute, 18 USC 2511, and the anti-hacking statute, 18 USC 1030. Here is an indictment brought in 2012 under the anti-hacking statute against someone who distributed and used this kind of software. Depending on the facts and the jurisdiction, this may also constitute the tort of intrusion on privacy or seclusion, a tort recognized by the Restatement (Second) and actionable in many jurisdictions. The most common test is whether the invasion would be "offensive to a reasonable person." And no, contrary to the commenter's view, a "click to accept" license is not a get out of (literal) jail free card here. Courts interpret adhesion contracts liberally to favor the signer, and outrageous terms hidden in small print are not guaranteed to be enforceable, especially if the software is clearly designed to trick people into installing it. The license terms might even hurt you, by providing evidence of your intent to use the software for perving rather than its ostensible use. This is not an exhaustive list, and there may be additional state-level statutes that apply. Bottom line: yes, this is clearly illegal, and the courts will be reluctant to let you trick people into getting away with it.