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Prison and Cash App

It’s a huge ethical and legal problem

Morena
3 min readMar 17, 2023
cash app logo

“Cash App” is a hugely popular online money transferring system. The app can be setup as a direct deposit, keep track of stocks, do cryptocurrency, as well as doing other things to help you manage your money. However, there’s a very dark underbelly to it. It involves the jail and prison systems.

Due to the nature of jail and prisons, moving forward I will be using aliases to protect the identities of those involved.

My ex-boyfriend’s sibling was in jail. The sibling, let’s call them M, was constantly calling the house, asking for a member of the family to transfer money over Cash App. On a weekly basis, it was “transfer $65 to ABC” or “Transfer $100 to XYZ”. M claimed it was for transactions within the prison (“I want a tattoo so transfer this amount of money to this person on the outside”). When you do a little bit of digging, you see this is extremely common. This is how prison inmates do exchanges on the inside of the walls. Family and friends will exchange Cash App accounts and transfer money back and forth as a means to do something on the inside of the prison (give point and stick tattoos to each other, go to the salon within the prison, exchange contraband within the prison, etc.).

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Morena
Morena

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