Fraud charges against HashRocket executives dropped | Hacker News Reader

Fraud charges against HashRocket executives dropped

jacksonville.com

109 pointshenning16 comments

While clearly not a criminal act, the act of sending scammy fake invoices is classless and shows the morals of the individuals involved.

To be in any way affiliated with swindling $29m in this manner is rather low and humiliating.

Sadly this is a common direct-mail tactic. I get these a few times a year, usually from domain name registrars or for technical magazine subscriptions.

There's a lot in the direct-mail industry that just smells, like the fake handwritten addresses and signatures, or the letters that look like they were written Just For You!, and the general creepiness of the standard direct mail sales letter, with its GRATUITOUS BOLD TEXT scattered throughout, and the fun little 'YES' stickers. Publishers' Clearing House is an excellent compendium of annoying direct-mail tactics.

Why does everyone seem to assume/know that these guys actually did send fake invoices? I've not seen any evidence for that.

Because we saw pictures of their "advertisements", and they were quite obviously designed to trick people into thinking they were invoices, or at the very least make them think they wouldn't be listed in the real Yellow Pages without paying the fee - only the fine print indicated otherwise. The link posted in that original thread had a picture of one of them, and should be at http://avramc.posterous.com/united-directories-federal-court..., though Posterous appears to be out of commission at the moment so I can't check...

Edit: from a later post on this topic, a working link to the image: http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/disreputa...

This update deserves as much attention as the initial report:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482497 (114 points)

Looks like the $425 million figure was wrong (probably due to it being a sweep account as mentioned in the previous thread). How could such a basic mistake be made? According to this article, the business had $50 million in revenue the past 10 years, with $21 million in postage costs alone.

The prosecutor didn't know what a sweep account was according to reports from the initial bail hearing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482497.

You might be surprised at how totally incompetent prosecutions can be at times, especially those that aren't motivated by a real desire to get bad guys.

E.g. Reagan's NASA administrator (removed from his position before the Challenger disaster). This was WRT to the version of the DIVAD that actually worked, the problem was that the contract was a hybrid cost plus/fixed cost beast. The prosecution team had to admit they didn't have anyone on their team with experience in federal contracts (!!!).

For some strange reason the judge wouldn't let them move dismiss the case without prejudice (i.e. with prejudice means they can't give the case another try later, it's over for all time).

"They had been accused in the complaint, but the case had not gone to a grand jury nor had they been indicted"

Yow. How could the Feds even get this far without observing that minor detail required in beginning of the Fifth Amendment???

And giving up (hopefully this is a dismissal with prejudice), let alone so soon is ... very uncharacteristic of the Justice Department. Just what happened here?

great, they were legally scamming people :/

We can't rely on the legal system to protect us from everything. At best, the system can only react and keep us from making the same mistake twice,

To anticipate and respond to new threats and get the reaction right the first time, we need some sort of highly creative and autonomous decision engine that can quickly make decisions from the perspective of an individual.

That would be you.

I think the legal system should deal with fraud where someone makes it appear that they are someone else. Individuals can't exhaustively research every little thing they do, that would lead to the most inefficient society imaginable.

This isn't a computer system, so there are other options than anticipating and responding. For one, there can be a deterrent if the penalty is large enough to overcome the possible upside of getting away with it.

I'm really happy this happened. Hashrocket are a bunch of great people running a great company and they went through a lot in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, though all charges are dropped, some damage to the reputation is inevitable.

damage to their reputation (those sending the scam mailings) is deserved. The fact that it's legal to scam people doesn't change that.

They sent out scam mail that made it appear they would list people in the yellowpages, using a very similar logo and all. They were intentionally taking peoples money by giving them a false impression and then not delivering the value the people expected from the mailing. That's a scam, unfortunately it's not a crime.

Some damage to one's reputation is an occupational hazard of doing disreputable things.

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/disreputa...

Hashrocket are a bunch of great people running a great company and they went through a lot in the past few weeks.

No. The majority of the people at Hashrocket may be great, but the people at the top that were involved in this mess are just scam artists.

Scam artists that managed to stay just legal enough to keep themselves out of jail, fair enough. But that doesn't change the fact that they pulled some scummy moves to trick small business owners out of their money.

Some of that stink has rubbed off on Hashrocket, for sure. But that's not a shame - it's what happens when a company has top executives that display a complete and utter disregard for ethical business conduct.

I feel pretty bad about assuming there was truth to this, initially.

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