Don't store your gold or priced possessions in safe deposit boxes even if they say they are "trusted"

• In January 2024 a story broke (highlighted the interesting parts):

The FBI overstepped its constitutional authority when agents searched hundreds of safe deposit boxes without warrants in 2021, a federal appeals court ruled. The court compared the FBI’s tactics to the kind of indiscriminate searches that led to the enactment of the Bill of Rights in the first place.

In March 2021, the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults, a safe deposit box company in Beverly Hills, California. The company marketed its services around client anonymity and privacy, which appealed to gambling rings and drug operations, but also customers who were unable to get a deposit box at their bank or simply mistrusted banks and preferred to store their valuables elsewhere.

The FBI seized millions of dollars in cash from the deposit boxes, plus a mix of jewelry, personal effects, and documents such as wills and prenuptial agreements.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision on Tuesday. The court ruled that the FBI exceeded the bounds of a warrant obtained prior to the raid, which explicitly did not authorize any “criminal search or seizure” of the boxes’ actual contents.

The FBI’s warrant application omitted key details of the raid plan, including that the special agent in charge had directed agents to open every box, preserve fingerprint evidence, inventory the contents, and have drug dogs sniff all cash.

• In March 2024 the story continued:

Two lawsuits will move forward against the federal government over the FBI’s warrantless search of hundreds of safe deposit boxes, a court ruled this week. Last year, in a related case, a federal appellate judge called the FBI’s raid “egregious” and “outrageous.”

Some of the former U.S. Private Vaults customers say their property was never returned, giving rise to some of the claims in the lawsuits.

In one suit, Jeni Pearsons and Michael Storc, a married couple, claim the FBI seized $2,000 in cash and $20,000 worth of silver during the raid, but the cash was never returned. In another suit, Donald Mellein, a retiree, alleges the FBI seized 110 gold coins but never returned 63 of them that, combined, were worth more than $100,000.

“The first case shows the government never should have opened the safe deposit boxes to begin with,” Gay [the plaintiffs’ attorney] said. “This case shows that, once they did, they had an obligation to keep the property safe.”