Newegg is being sued for engaging in massive fraud | Hacker News Reader

Newegg is being sued for engaging in massive fraud

gizmodo.com

This sounds similar to check "kiting" [link]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting , that was popular before electronic checking transactions made it nearly impossible. "Kiting" was the art of having multiple checking accounts and passing ever-increasing amounts of money, from one account to the other. In the old days, it took a couple of days to process checks, especially when the back accounts resided in distinct federal reserve regions (which means the checks would physically traverse the federal reserve banks... which took days for delivery).

It sounds to me like the Crazy Eddie scam from the late eighties. While securing financing from Wall Street, Crazy Eddie took the bankers on tours of its various warehouses in New York. And had workers populate the next warehouse to be visited with inventory from one of the already visited locations, making their inventory physically apppear to be 2-3x as large as it was in reality. Enough to make the valuation lies told by their books look true.

That was only a small fraction of Crazy Eddie's fraud schemes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eddie

can’t mention Crazy Eddie without linking whitecollarfraud: https://whitecollarfraud.com/crazy-eddie/

I lived in NYC when Crazy Eddie was big. Never realized he ran such a scam. Thanks for the post. LOL

Can someone point to what a "home theater personal computer" worth $8 looks like?

Amazon lists one of their things for $2369: https://www.amazon.com/Moneual-932BB-Home-Theater-PC/dp/B002..., close to the "fraudulent" invoice price. $2000 seems steep, but $8 seems preposterous.

I guess it depends when. The CPU (Intel Q9550) came out in 2008, presumably several hundreds bucks then but today nearly worthless.

That disparity is confusing to me, too. My interpretation is that the spread between the actual value of the "items as-delivered" and the "paper cost of the items as-described" was the method used by the defendant to collateralize the liens of credit?

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