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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Oh I remember this. Good. I hope it costs him.

Honest question though:

> As part of his guilty plea, Choi admitted that while attempting to recruit potential employees, he made false and misleading statements about various topics, including his educational and professional history, and the amount of his wealth. Choi admitted in his plea that, in truth, he never attended any business school, that he was never employed in any capacity by any financial institution, and that he exaggerated his wealth.

Is "making misleading statements about various topics" a crime? If you tell your employees that you went to whatever business school, or your net worth is whatever etc etc... is that a crime?

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> Is "making misleading statements about various topics" a crime?

On its own, no. OTOH, making material false statements to people with the intent of getting them to give you something of value is the core of the offense of fraud, which is both a crime and a tort.

Exactly this, and he took money from some of his employees under fraudulent terms according to the referenced Medium story.

The lede is the juicer story, but I suspect (having not read the indictment), that the basis for the wire fraud charge is:

> He further admitted that in August 2016, while at WrkRiot’s office in Santa Clara, he emailed several of his employees fake wire transfer confirmation documents purporting to reflect their salary payments for the purpose of convincing his employees to continue working for his privately failing company.

The evidence of wire fraud is very obvious in the original blog post: https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-...

Misrepresenting yourself in a business transaction for your own benefit is called fraud.

Your own personal benefit or the company's benefit? Because if the latter, I have a queue of tech start-ups ready to be prosecuted.

Both. As for your tech start-ups, are they making grandiose claims for where they want to be in 5 years' time? Or misrepresenting what they currently have? If the latter then they absolutely could be prosecuted.

If you are broke but borrow a BMW from a friend to go to an important client meeting fraud?

You misrepresented yourself. Maybe shady. Not sure if it is illegal. Clearly there has to be more to it than that?

If you photoshop the name of the client onto the title of the BMW, tell the client you're giving them the BMW in exchange for working for you, but then don't give them the BMW.

Driving a BMW is not a representation of fact beyond maybe “I have permission to drive this BMW”, and would thus not be a misrepresentation of fact, material or otherwise.

In this case, it reflects fraud. On top of the wire fraud that he committed by emailing a false financial statement.

If they ever used misleading statements to bind a legal contract including employment, yes it is a crime.

Probably not. If it was, for example, that Yahoo CEO, pre-Mayer, who also faked his credentials would have been arrested.

Not every crime, even those that are known to prosecutors, is deemed worthy of prosecution.

Eh, I guess. Seems quite common even among high profile people though. I also remember a dean from the MIT being caught for the same thing, after something like 20 years. She too just resigned, and that was that.

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