I Worked for a Criminal Organization
openmonstervision.github.io
openmonstervision.github.io
How wrong I was. It was their "creative bookkeeping" that worried them. When I offered to make that all possible ('zapping' as it is called now), they loved it. Based on their referrals I sold it many times over.
Come next customer / market: bookshops. Guess what the most important selling argument was, besides easy cataloging, inventory, searching, website publishing and reporting? Right: zapping.
Thought me an important rule: do not underestimate what your customer is NOT telling you.
Perhaps they thought they were saving the lives of innocents from collateral damage in wars of aggression?
It's odd how the people that think this are generally the same ones most likely to argue that “positive rights” that impose a cost on others are an incoherent concept, and positive entitlement can at most be a limited privilege granted by others based on available resources and expected utility of the grant. But they fail to recognize that the “right” to wall off goods from the commons and exclude others by force—i.e., property—is very much a positive right that has a cost for others.
Your error is starting from the assumption that land is owned in common by everyone, rather than unowned. If land were actually owned in common then you would need to obtain permission from every single person on the planet before using any of it. You would starve to death long before you obtained even a small fraction of the necessary consent. And no, the government cannot grant that consent on behalf of others who never deliberately and voluntarily agreed to permit the government to represent them. You would need the consent of each and every individual.
Don’t attack strawmen, it’s boring.
Merely wanting to be left in peace in the place where you were born without being compelled to pay for things you never asked for is not "freeloading".
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sfVbXjODdRQ/T9-dLQR5yUI/AAAAAAAAM...
Your parents, as guardians of a newborn, made your initial decision for you to bring you into the society.
You maintained your consent by retaining your citizenship when you reached an age of majority.
Taxes are the price you pay for retaining the benefits of your citizenship.
Not theft.
even after that, the IRS can come back and harass you at any time if they suspect you of tax fraud, and most foreign countries will cooperate with them.
pragmatically, I don't object to the idea of taxation. the government provides some useful services and it needs a way of funding them. I'm also not actually interested in renouncing my citizenship, as I personally find US citizenship to be worth the tax obligations.
what I do object to is the common "social contract" argument for why taxes are legitimate. in particular, I strongly object to the idea that I "consent" to taxation merely by having been born here. I haven't consented to anything; I submit because an overwhelmingly powerful entity compels me.
This is also the "I don't want to be told what to do" argument, which PERSONALLY I find immature. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not calling you a name, we're having a reasonable discussion, I'm just saying that no one likes being given orders, but it's a part of life. You DO have the option of leaving and going somewhere without taxes. You're submitting because you have to in order to be where you want to be.
There is no written contract when you sit down to eat in a restaurant, and yet you are obliged to pay after your meal.
It’s not difficult to find people who believe, rightly or wrongly, the tax system is unfair.
On the other hand, black and grey market activity are also I think quite an important counter-balance to the possibility of totalitarian government. It creates "gaps" let's say for more diverse human and economic outcomes. Which is also potentially good.
I think it's one of those indefensible things that we should tolerate a tiny amount of. Kind of like a vaccine in the body.
This is true, and in addition, it's a very unequal crime. To properly evade taxes and get away with it, you need professional help. Most standard W-2 employees can't afford it, i.e., for most, the cost to hire professional help evading taxes is larger than the taxes they could save.
However, if you're very wealthy, then the calculus changes: saving 20% taxes on $50M/yr income is a lot more attractive than saving 20% on $200k/yr income. Effectively, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to evade taxes, further exacerbating at least the perception (and quite likely the reality) of inequality.
.
>than saving 20% on $200k/yr income
Erm, that's not a standard W2 employee's income. Not even close. The median U.S. household income was $63,179 in 2017.
40k of 200k doesn't make a big difference, 3016 of 15,080 (federal minimum wage @ 40 hours a week for a year) makes a HUGE difference as does 12,635.90 of 63,179.
Why do you think waitstaff and the like prefer cash tips? because they feel that no one will know if they don't report some or all of that income. Go ask any waiter, waitress, bartender, etc if they want you to give them that tip on credit card where they get taxed or cash where they don't. The same goes for electricians, plumbers, handymen, etc as they'll happily take cash first because they can fudge their numbers some.
At $200K, the tax rate is 32%, so the tax is really $64K, 160% of your estimate. (all for single filers or married filing separately; married filing jointly has wider bands, and the rates are less overall at the given combined income levels)
When people find a way to pay fewer taxes, it means money is not only not going to wars, but also being able to be used for better things for everyone.
Consider:
Person A is evading Taxes.
Person B is not evading taxes.
Government says 'Well, we aren't getting enough money', So they raise taxes on those who can't realistically evade. By a second order effect, Person A is causing Person B to get 'stolen from' twice instead of once.
They charge tax way higher than any of the services they provide truly cost (even if we put any efficiency concerns aside).
I'd even argue this impact is positive given that now money is freely circulating in society for other stuff. For me, society will eventually have other ways to finance infrastructure and social benefits that are not based on taxes, as it happens today – but this doesn't even mean something entirely new. Let's remember most fire companies, schools, hospitals, and other stuff we rely upon are either privately maintained (for-profit or not), the concept started like so, or both.
I don't really buy this: plenty of totalitarian regimes have illegal black markets, that governments often tolerate because they don't see a threat to their power.
A better way to counter a totalitarian government is via open communication and coordination of the government's subjects. Government's are far more afraid of this, which is why strict censorship and propaganda are the "go-to" tools for any totalitarian regime.
I would say it is often even opposite of it - black/grey markets help to stay in power. When everybody is breaking some law, buying something [almost] illegally, everybody wants to stay quiet.
And it helps [totalitarian] government a lot.
You think for example the North Korean government happily tolerates the black markets there? No way. If it would be easy for them to control them they would close them down. The black/grey markets happening in totalitarian countries are more like compromises - it would be too difficult to stop the activity without murdering half of the population or so.
They most certainly do. There are tons of articles based on satellite based cameras that track the rise and fall of small black markets in North Korea. Some markets lasted years, before being abruptly shut down for unknown reasons.
No. How about serial killers, real theft etc.
> You're stealing from everybody
No, tax evasion is not theft. It is primarily your earned income where you pay taxes from. Tax evasion is tax evasion, no reason to confuse it with other crimes.
Think about it this way: easiest way to avoid taxes is not to work at all. Are all those who are slacking off with government benefits, or living off from savings or inheritance stealing from us? No, they are just not working.
> You're creating a non-level playing field.
The playing field will always be non-level, you gotta deal with it. What about those who have a job at the government and are not doing any work? Are those also stealing?
Trust in society is a complicated issue. Often the industries where tax evasion happens are low-income jobs. I'm not saying it is right thing to do, but I don't think it is as serious crime as many others.
Income you were able to earn because infrastructure allows businesses to operate, police forces protect their property, physical safety and the shipment of goods, a court system allows peaceful resolution of conflicts, armed forces protect you from invasion, fire departments prevent entire cities from burning down by putting fires out early etc.
Taking the benefits without paying the democratically set price for a wide array of services is not that different from stealing.
Yes, but one of those benefits is privilege of excluding others from the use and enjoyment of goods—i.e., property—so if you reject it...
> Most companies protect their property by hiring security guards, not calling the police.
No, they hire security guards who call the police, not instead of calling the police.
That's not how democracy works. Many of these benefits only make sense if a whole area is covered (if your neighbor isn't serviced by to the fire brigade, that puts you at risk), so we instituted a voting system where people can elect representatives who set a tax rate and a budget detailing what that money is spent on.
If you feel like the selection of services is to your disadvantage you can also always go to another country. I hear Somalia has pretty cheap taxes, along with an accordingly small selection of services.
> That's not how democracy works.
That's exactly how democracy works. Unfortunately, a democratic society is not inherently a just society. It's just a bit more stable than autocratic societies due to integrating periodic small revolutions in lieu of less frequent but more severe transfers of power. The better versions have certain protections for minorities, which makes them less democratic but more just.
Moving to another country isn't a solution. That other country (yes, even Somalia) will already be infested with its own form of protection racket, and anything you could do to defend yourself against governments and wannabe governments in some other country you could do equally well right where you are. Moreover, why should you be forced to move away from the place where you were born just because someone else has drawn some arbitrary borders on a map and thinks it's too much work to create the system they have in mind without forcing everyone in that area to participate? How does their inability to exclude you from whatever benefit they think they're creating suddenly become your problem?
https://www.taxfairness.ca/en/news/j-k-rowling-paying-taxes-...
This reminds me of a joke I heard on Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljaP2etvDc4
Even a lot of the things that are legal these days are extremely unethical. The system is a mess. Capitalism is destroying society, rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior.
All the good companies/projects I worked on over the years (e.g. education) are struggling in this economy while all the evil ones (gambling, finance) are thriving.
Communism is looking better with each passing day. Especially with the level of automation we have today.
Every day, automation is getting better but people are getting worse. The systemic inefficiencies caused by fraud and other unethical behaviors under capitalism has outpaced the inefficiencies of a communist society whereby everyone gets paid the same and each person does as little work as possible.
Would the creators of VPN software need to consider ethics since it could break government censorship? Or if the government requested I create a backdoor for them, would that also be an ethical issue?
Selling a tool with a law-breaking feature, in full knowledge that its main selling point is that feature, that your customers are buying it specifically to break the law? That ought to raise some ethical concerns. You can say that it depends on the particular laws being broken - but here we're not talking about ethical minutiae of censorship or surveillance. We're talking the usual defrauding of the commons through tax evasion.
Creators of VPN software definitely need to consider ethics when deciding who to sell to, what uses to tolerate, what information to store, and how to navigate local laws. Such a business has to deal directly with conflicting needs of citizens, criminals and governments, and thus whatever it does, it's making an ethics choice one way or another.
Giving ‘The Government’ less money is seen by some as a moral duty.
Governments do a whole lot of giving other people other people’s money. I’m sure there’s people who would argue this can be problematic.
(I've also seen people argue that they pay for more than they're using, but somehow the concept of derisking and variance reduction doesn't escape these people when it comes to buying insurance.)
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[0] - Ranging from healthcare and schooling to laws, defense and ensuring a safe and stable environment in which everyone can conduct their business.
It'd be kinda dumb to pay up and refuse service on principle.
Note that it is still pretty much impossible to run a business without paying any taxes, in the end you have to pay some but you might be able to evade some. In the end it is just endless debate about what level of taxes is felt fair. Changes from individual to other. When people don't feel their taxes are fair, they start to evade those. They might be also just greedy bastards, but I don't think that's necessarily commonly the case.
(* Having a job doesn't necessarily mean doing beneficial work, just receiving the salary.)
No, normal people do not. Tax evasion is a serious crime. People don't start doing criminal acts when they just feel something "isn't fair".
Right, but when you add a feature that does that and has no other major use, you move beyond 'seen by some' on to 'seen by me'
Also, ethics include one own integrity, it is not about sacrificing everything to others - at least not all ethical inquiries will conclude that.
The GST/HST system in Canada sort of serves the same purpose. It is an overarching tax system that seems redundant in that every business then can claim back every bit of GST they've paid out. But to do so you have to have receipts for everything, from every source, and when they randomly do an audit they aren't checking you as much as they're building a profile of every other business you interacted with.
Tax avoidance is a problem in every country.
In those cases it's typically about preventing the employees from not ringing up the sale and just pocketing the cash. The receipt proves that the order was entered into the system. Same idea, just a difference of who's stealing from whom.
Hm, I suppose that scam is less of a problem in the era of credit cards.
and how did procurement for that contract go?
Where I live at least not reporting activity like that could result in a few years in jail.
> Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it.
That's not generally true. In the vast majority of cases, simply knowing about a crime and not reporting it is not a crime in itself. You only become liable when you aid-and-abet or join in a conspiracy to commit the crime.
However, it depends very much on the specific crime. Tax evasion may be entirely different than say selling drugs.
EDIT: Apparently, your illegal income is regularly taxable, and expenses related to (most) illegal activity are tax-deductible. Cool!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_....
"The U.S. Supreme Court in Tellier reiterated that the purpose of the tax code was to tax net income, not punish unlawful behavior."
I do appreciate this sentiment. Separation of concerns.
I’d assume tax fraud is much more common than money laundering. Maybe drug dealers and the like create enough of a market for “reverse zappers” to exist; not sure.
I was there for one instance, 2 guys had asked him for a meeting to get some advice on opening a pizza place or something and wanted the input of a non-competing experienced business owner in the area so he agreed to meet with them and I was there so I sat in just to see if I could learn anything from the exchange. Like we're in some cheesy movie, these guys make small talk before one sets a briefcase on the table and opens it to reveal gobs of what appeared to be 10s and 20s and proceeded to tell him they actually wanted to buy a percentage of the club cash and he shut them right down and asked them to leave. After they left he told me he was approached multiple times in the first couple years of business with such offers. People wanting to dump a bunch of cash in his lap that, presumably, he would then trickle into the coffers via fictional sales as a way for them to launder some money via their cash infusion and potentially get far more back if the club remained successful. At the time I legitimately thought they were friends of his and he was pranking me or something, it was so absurd. I came to realize though that those selling drugs definitely love clubs as we'd have kids in their early 20s coming in 1-2 times a week and buying bottle service at 300$+ a bottle to impress friends/girls week after week with no realistic way of having that much disposable income.
This guy was super shady in general, and his shadiness is why we ultimately parted ways, but even that was too much for him.
It would not surprise me in the least if there was a market for this for bars and clubs that had "creative" income streams on the side. He would regularly have the bartenders pour house shots (An "IV" of OJ/shot of soda water/cheapest well vodka) for free for a group of people to get them to stay (often it was bridal parties) to make the club appear busy and doing stuff like that would certainly be a way to legitimately burn through some cheap liquor that you could ring up as premium-priced cocktails. I could see restaraunts that do free refills on drinks also being able to do this by ringing up some extra drink/burger/fries sales and fudging the numbers several percent, if not ten percent, to similarly sneak illicit money in.
Isn't this super easy to discover if you use any sort of electronic payment? Salons and restaurants might be cash based, but who pays their mechanic in cash?
Lots of places will do it anyway on a cash job if they think they can get away with it, because it's relatively easy money. A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them.
> replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of
> time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me
> to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them.
The mechanic may have even made even more money by scrapping your catalytic converter.
In the UK, swapping the exhaust out for a straight pipe is a common (illegal) modification for greater performance and sound. To get the car through the MOT, you either need to find somebody willing to "look the other way" or re-weld the original exhaust in place.
I've seen in many scenarios "boy racers" dipping the clutch and coasting the car by the police. If your car is making a sound resembling a Spitfire you're sure to get pulled over, where they'll use a road side test kit and confiscate your car.
Some other popular cheap modifications include completely removing the air-filter (dangerous), stretching tires to create low-profile wheels (extremely dangerous if they let go [0]), putting the car on a diet (ripping out all interior, seats, etc), running contaminated fuel (either diesel/petrol mixes [1] or running farmer's diesel) - the list goes on.
There are also some processes for purposely causing the car to backfire regularly (especially on a down change, with quite large flames) and getting more "bang" from the fuel. At one point we were also experimenting with the idea of using the starter motor strategically to aid engine acceleration - but nothing ever came of it.
[0] We had a car crash on the motorway into the central barrier, which then caused all of the tires to instantly disintegrate - all at ~90 mph (~145 kph).
[1] We once had a vehicle literally explode when unburned fuel collected in the catalytic converter/exhaust and suddenly decide it wanted to be on fire. This in itself wouldn't have been an issue if a) somebody noticed and b) it didn't then ignite the fuel lines.
Oh, certainly. Not to mention that removing it would have been a larger & more difficult job, which I'd have to pay for... OR they can get less money but it's (very) easy money.
>completely removing the air-filter (dangerous)
Good god... Who the hell does that? What ricer would willingly risk killing their motor from eating some leaves (or a piece of gravel!) for a minuscule performance increase? The risk:reward scale there is just bananas.
Before scrapping it I decided to drive it around as a "risk free" car. The exhaust fell off (so not even a straight pipe), the battery was dead (had to push start it everywhere), the clutch was teetering on death, brakes were merely a suggestion to your speed (it had drums), the radiator leaked, the oil was probably as old as the car, tires were barely legal and it had no working headlight bulbs.
We ripped out all of seats, removed the air filter, filled the tank with contaminated petrol (had diesel in it - added a small amount of nitro-car fuel to balance it out) and drove it very hard.
I ended up using it for quick 20 minute journeys (that's about how long it took for all the coolant to leak out). We would leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition - I think it was more hassle to whoever tried to steal it. The car survived long enough to drive itself onto the back of a flat-bed lorry to be taken to the scrap dealers once the MOT and tax ran out.
This is not uncommon either, many people get "traders plates" just so that they can drive barely legal cars around before getting rid of them.
> willingly risk killing their motor from eating some leaves
> (or a piece of gravel!) for a minuscule performance
> increase? The risk:reward scale there is just bananas.
A lot of people do it. In the UK you've also got tonnes of rain regularly too, meaning all sorts of crap is sprayed into the engine bay area, both dry and wet.
The performance gain is surprisingly high given how simple the action is, the throttle becomes more responsive and you can audibly hear the engine taking gulps of air. Of course that comes with the associated risk. If you're a student with a £300 car and you want to pretend it's a race car, little tricks like this cost nothing for a little speed boost.
Also, Sheetz is a regional gas station (once) popular with street and track racers. I guess it still is, but their food quality has gone through the floor.
Wawa for life.
Statistically nobody but every mechanic remembers the story of "that one idiot".
This is how the hybrid car was born.
Yes :) We were quite amused to have had the idea a few years before it's popularization!
> just reduces performance by fucking up the O2 sensor
> readings unless you also dump a grand on a new ECU
You can also get a piggy-back ECU for the purpose of sending false sensor data - it's quite a bit cheaper.
I new a guy who was developing hacked firmware for POSes in the 90ies. One of the cool features he had is that at the end of the day the owner could unlock secret mode, enter amount of sales he wanted, and POS would create entire fake log spaced through the day and print it on tape, update electronic counters and then lock, and again behave like normal terminal ready for inspection.
You check other proxies relating to services rendered vs. money earned for an initial estimate.
Genuinely curious, if the US has managed to implement effective anti-tax avoidance solutions, could they be implemented here?
I read that as the OP saying they had specific experience/knowledge of it happing there, rather than intending to imply it happens there more than anywhere else.
People at ARIN also have 20+ years of experience identifying shell games.
From the criminal wire fraud case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15619660/united-states-...
The chocolate wasn't great, but it's more than any of our other providers have mailed us :).
Is having shell companies a crime ? I know a ton of bay area "startups" than engage in these sort of tricks to maximize the brand damage. Ask.com and other toolbar companies are great examples where they will just rebrand the same toolbar as X and sell it to 10 companies which were owned by same entity. Half the companies with "explosive" growth were using mass mailing techniques than involved spamming. Many used foreign companies to skirt US law related to spamming.
I think author is overthinking.
Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans.
A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market!
Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it. But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something.
Fuck all this.
I find especially baffling the rationalization over the type of crime. You don't need to physically harm someone to be committing a crime, and there's a lot of different crimes that happen in paper and/or bytes that don't (directly) physically harm people.
That doesn't make them right or okay by any means.
Fraud and spam are crimes that ruin lives in their own ways.
Though it is very natural for people to think "how bad I am" or "how bad is that company compared to the other companies" and so on. Also in the end the justice system has to sentence these crimes and there has to be some kind of "badness" metric that should be seen as fair by the general public. I don't think this "they are all just crimes" approach works.
However what we do see that correlates to some "badness" metric is the punishment we mete out for crimes. Years of imprisonment is a simple, linear measure that can be used to measure crimes against one another.
You see it all the time. So and so killed a person and got X years in prison, but this other guy ran a Ponzi scheme and got Y years in prison. Whether X is greater than Y, and your viewpoint, will determine if you think that's fair or not. But my original point is I think it's a rather pointless determination to begin with because it isn't really telling you anything. It doesn't answer the question of whether one crime is worse than another because that's fundamentally a philosophical question that I don't think can be measured.
Similarly, people often conflate something morally good with something morally bad and ask/argue ”If I mix the two is it overall good or bad?". Which similarly doesn’t matter.
The good should never be conflated with the bad. Otherwise, the good will just be used for rationalizing the bad...
(That’s not to say morality is not somewhat ambiguous. I just often see people trying to justify immoral behavior by doing this)
I never denied that. I wanted to know what exactly is the fraud that the company is causing. Also, spamming is all about matter or perspective. All major consumer companies send billions of emails. I would love to know what this company was doing differently .
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[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.
Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET
What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.
I've heard opinions that something similar is happening in my country too (Poland), and it would explain some strategically placed buildings in Kraków that can never seem to finish being renovated, and that also happen to feature ridiculously large ads on the scaffolding.
> I remember reading about cases of scientific papers that were advertisements pretending to be research work. I'll update this point when I find some actual examples.
Not exactly the same but related: soda manufacturers have been stressing the correlation between inactivity and diabetes, and in the process sliding in the message that sugar intake is not that big of a factor. That messaging goes with ads of healthy people in movement enjoying life and drinking sugar water.
NYTimes Blog: Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets - https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc...
Endocrine Web: The Coke Controversy: The Marketing Message That Could Spell Trouble for People Dealing with Diabetes and Obesity - https://www.endocrineweb.com/news/diabetes/coke-controversy-...
Study: Coca-Cola – a model of transparency in research partnerships? A network analysis of Coca-Cola’s research funding (2008–2016) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5962884/
Union of Concerned Scientists blog post: How Coca-Cola Disguised Its Influence on Science about Sugar and Health - https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised-its...
That said, I think helping VPNs is a good thing ethically. If he'd been arrested for running a Tor node that was used to download child pornography (which has happened), I suspect most people here would defend him.
Helping spammers is bad, but, at least as described by OP, not illegal.
We could do so many good things with technology, instead we use it more and more for bullshit to maximize profits instead of maximizing social value. It really is depressing really.
I mean absolutely no disrespect to you and I understand your feelings are probably coming straight out your heart. However I would like to point out that when you say that the world does not meet your expectation and that somehow is a problem with the world and not your own self is very arrogant.
> But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys.
These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism. It reeks of Rudyard Kipling's disgusting poem "White man's burden". Without knowing you are claiming that you have the power to know what is good for world and you only need power to fix it. In this process you actually get depressed. You are describing the world as "Fuck all this."
Notice that this kind of argument could have been (and probably was) used against the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, universal suffrage, gay marriage or religious freedom. If you have a minority position against the status quo, you can always be accused of arrogance. "Who are you to think you know better?". However, sometimes the arrogant are right.
> These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism.
And capitalism, don't forget. The ideology of infinite growth is destroying our habitat.
Yes, I think we all know some. And it's true, skirting the law and abusing the commons gives one a competitive advantage. But that doesn't make it OK. The market isn't the arbiter of ethics. It only means that not enough is done to stop that behavior, that the border between legal and illegal is too low, or too misaligned with what's actually happening. That people still underestimate the extent to which money trumps ethics in everyday decision making.
Sadly, this is a bit naive, market have become the arbiters of ethics, namely: if it successful, it's good.
This isn't a traditional moral code from, e.g., Kant, Bentham, or Locke. Rather, it's an ethics based on capitalism.
Sure, wonky economics professors justify capitalism by saying it's the most efficient or provides the most utility, arguably grounded in traditional Bentham morality.
But capitalism has never simply been an economic policy, there has always been an ideological component to it (see for example, Ayn Rand). Maximizing returns on investment isn't just "efficient", it's "right".
None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell. The crime they were actually charged with was using these shell companies to get more IP addresses than they were "entitled" to get. See the indictment at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.scd.250342/...
"As Micfo amassed VPN clients using the illegitimately-obtained IP addresses, a lot of traffic — some being criminal — filed through its network without a trace, according to government subpoenas directed at Micfo and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Golestan and Micfo are not charged with being part of or even aware of illegal activity transmitted via VPNs across Micfo’s servers. The DOJ charged him and the company with “defrauding the internet registry to obtain the IP addresses over a period of several years.”
Prosecutors said Golestan’s alleged scheme was valued at $14 million, which was based on the government’s estimated value of between $13 and $19 for each address in the secondary market, according to the court complaint.
Born in Iran, Golestan, 36, started Micfo in 1999 in the bedroom of his childhood home in Dubai before emigrating to the U.S." https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2020/secure-smart-cities-c...
The fake “Channel Partners” addressed in the article are paragraph 4 of the indictment. The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment, the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. It seems preposterous to view those as unrelated.
No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity.
>the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose.
Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in responding to subpoenas, or any illegal use of the IP addresses by spammers, etc.
The article lists a bunch of things and either implies or explicitly says they are crimes, when none are. This includes having multiple shell companies, which is perfectly legal. Submitting false documentation for those shell companies is illegal, but is not mentioned by OP, presumably because they would not have been in a position to observe any of that documentation.
It says that when a parent company agent was in possession of a warrant addressed to the parent company at the location of one of the fraudulent “Channel Partners” they were ordered to interact with law enforcement as if they were exclusively an agent of the “Channel Partner”.
Now, I suppose that could be argued to not be primarily intended to evade compliance with the warrant but instead to maintain the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners”, but either way it's a deliberate act in furtherance of a crime that could be separately prosecuted.
You still don't get it. The fraud was submitting false documentation to ARIN. Operating multiple shell companies is perfectly legal, as long as you don't submit false sworn affidavits and otherwise lie in the course of your activities.
Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying. It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on it, and he says he wasn't permitted to reach out to LEO to clarify.
Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.
Sure, what's not is:
Having the registered principals of those shell companies be fictitious (as in this case).
Having agents of your company who have received a warrant addressed to your company pretend that your company has not received it, whether the purpose is to evade the warrant or to avoid drawing attention to your fraudulent front companiest (as, again, in this case.)
> Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying.
A subpoena or warrant is a command. Receiving it and not obeying the command fully is a crime.
> It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on
No, it says a warrant was addressed to Micfo but received by Micfo employees at the “Channel Partner”. It does not say it has both companies info on it. Even if it did, directing employees to pretend your firm has not received a court order naming your firm when in fact your firm has received it is not legal.
> Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.
If the intent was to preserve the illusion of the distinct identity of the channel partners tonorent discovery of the fraud, it absolutely was an act in furtherance of the crime, and a knowing participant (that is, knowing of the purpose, not just the act itself) in it would, even if they had no other connection to the concealed crime, be an accessory after the fact.
It never says they pretended not to receive it, or that they didn't obey the "command" fully. If they had not obeyed any subpoenas, I assume they would have been charged with doing so.
> It does not say it has both companies info on it. Even if it did, directing employees to pretend your firm has not received a court order naming your firm when in fact your firm has received it is not legal.
It says it was sent to the Channel Partner - it's not clear how but I assume it came through an email to the Channel Partner.
"Even if it did, directing employees to pretend your firm has not received a court order naming your firm when in fact your firm has received it is not legal."
I don't understand your theory where responding to a subpoena and signing it as one entity is "pretending" you haven't received a court order.
We'll have to agree to disagree on whether the set of facts in OP represents a crime. But even if so, it remains the case that everything described in OP, if it happened at a company that hadn't committed fraud but was using shell companies legitimately, would have been perfectly legal.
Where did that happen? It certainly isn't alleged by OP.
IP “ownership” is not a real thing.
It appears the law in this case feels differently.
The owners claimed under legal penalty that they had certain assets (paying customers, needs for IP addressing, etc). These statements appear to have been completely false. Thus, the trial.
And yes, lying to ARIN (or any RIR) about your customer base (need for IPv4 addressing) is just plain crappy. IPv4 addressing is a common resource - a 32-bit fixed address space - similar in concept to physical frequency allocation by the FCC.
There are 4.2B IPv4 addresses (minus some for RFC1918 and MCAST, etc). To lay illegitimate claim to them is really wrong, and more importantly, legally risky now.
The trial is about different alleged wrongdoings than OP is going on about.
Both a fraudulent system of shell companies and knowingly profiting by enabling spam are alleged on the article, and both have been the subject of criminal charges against the firm and it's CEO. [0]
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/a-tough-week-for-ip-addr...
Your source doesn't say that. I read the indictment and it doesn't charge them for "knowingly profiting by enabling spam".
You have responded to multiple comments with baseless FUD-like claims.
To which I contend.....
I smell Astro-turf!!!
And I was somewhat taken aback at how much pushback I got based on people completely misreading the article. It's one thing to disagree with me over what exactly is legal, it's another to start asserting that the company itself was running spamming services in the absence of any evidence. That surprised me. The government hasn't asserted it, the OP doesn't assert it, I can't find that claim anywhere but this thread.
Don’t defend fraud artists dude.
Although here I'm mainly trying to clarify the law. People taking OP at face value will come away with a very incorrect impression of what's legal and not.
Also, OP didn't "put together a model" exposing hidden relationships. Every company they named was already in the indictment from last May.
You're the one defending someone who's wrong.
Also, I'm not defending the fraud, but the (legality) of the parts of this that aren't fraudulent. I understand that you believe it's ok to smear anyone as long as they've done something else you dislike. I disagree.
Ok chief. I'll wait to see the outcome of the legal case. That has 10000x more weight than a random internet commenter that appears to be continually injecting FUD.
Also, just incase you missed my prior comment: Don't defend fraud artists.
Just in case you missed all my previous comments: lying is bad regardless of the target.
You didn’t miss it. Everything after that first question were excuses for why it’s ok to break the law.
A lot of companies would also willingly break the law depending on the risk tolerance they have, many of those laws result into civil penalties and not jail time for CEO so that also matters.
I was genuinely hoping OP worked from some underground enterprise that provided hitmans to rich people or something. La John Wick style. But thats just the romantic in me.
Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police.
You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver.
That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.
This standard would work for about 5 minutes before a criminal complicated things enough that their crime was no longer obviously wrong.
I think the very best liars and fraudsters are the ones who they themselves don't know what's true. And what better way to not know than complexity!
Complexity seems indeed very good at enabling bullshit - bullshitters caught spreading lies can just plead ignorance and point towards complexity.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con...
From the description in the article, obstruction of justice, at a minimum, possibly also with the intent of furthering other crimes and civil wrongs by the firm or it's customers.
> Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as stalling LEOs and Warrants in whatever way they can.
Many companies will do anything within the law to do this, which is, of course, not a crime. But “whatever way they can” is a crime.
> A lot of this is not really "crime" as in kidnapping people or shooting people dead in some alley.
Yes, obstruction of justice is a different crime than murder or kidnapping. It's just as real of a crime.
> Is having shell companies a crime ?
No, but using them fraudulently can be a crime and/or a civil wrong, and which has been involved in both civil liability already established against the firm and CEO in question and which is seems to be a key part of the mechanism of the fraud involved in the 20-count federal criminal indictment against them. [0]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-sh...
The strangest one was they flew in for an interview the night before, got settled in at 11pm and decided not to sleep because they had to check out at 9am.
Nothing wrong with this ...
>PTR records, Enabling Spam
Doesn't say why that's illegal. At best it says they had customers that broke the law.
>Often both the CEO and Vice President would talk openly about how one of our clients was violating the TOS of several companies.
Not criminal even for the client, at least assuming the HiQ v Linkedin case is upheld. And not illegal for the company. Maybe civil liability under tortious interference? Pretty high bar there, though. And that's all assuming there's an actual ToS - the one example given is of Google search results. Manipulating your own website in the hopes Google treats it favorably can't be seen as violating any agreed ToS.
The stuff Micfo was accused of in court, and the stuff OP is claiming are criminal acts, are disjoint.
Did you see the part at the top where the CEO admitted to being all of those "customers"? They were playing a shell game, and while this guy didn't do the criminal activities he definitely was working for the "legitimate front end" of a larger criminal organization.
They have questionable character and moral standards by their own admission. That's before even considering the effects of their mental illness.
I would never hire this "perpetually unemployed" person. Everything they say points to something being off.
I've seen a similar scenario play out before with another spammer and the kind of people he hired.
This was later proved to be true when the CEO(Amir), admitted in the ARIN(American Registry for Internet Numbers) trial, he was really behind these entities."
But your claim was that this was unrelated to the trial. The response was that, no, it actually corroborated the core allegation in the Micfo case.
It's true that it alleges other stuff. That doesn't make the IP fraud point somehow not corroboration.
>But your claim was that this was unrelated to the trial. The response was that, no, it actually corroborated the core allegation in the Micfo case.
Now you're misreading both OP and the response to my comment. ghostbrainalpha claimed that the OP says the CEO was the same as the customers that were allegedly committing crimes like spamming. The OP does not say this.
>That doesn't make the IP fraud point somehow not corroboration.
OP never mentions this as one of the crimes he's listing. He lists:
1. Mishandling of warrants
2. Child endangerment
3. Enabling spamming
4. Enabling ToS violations
None of the things OP says are crimes are actually illegal, and none of them were at issue during the trial. That's what I pointed out.
And yet you're all like "I can't believe anyone thinks this is related!" based on the fact that some other stuff alleged (which seems reasonably credible to me, and also plausibly illegal if you infer some context) wasn't part of the trial. But... so what?
(Also: I don't understand why you're saying Child Endangerment isn't "actually illegal", it's literally a term of art in the field used in statutes all across the US! Obviously that's not proof of a crime here, but... no, you're wrong, "child endangerment" is an actual crime.)
What? He says it was done for customers. Not for shell companies.
>And yet you're all like "I can't believe anyone thinks this is related!" based on the fact that some other stuff alleged (which seems reasonably credible to me, and also plausibly illegal if you infer some context) wasn't part of the trial. But... so what?
My main point is that nothing alleged in OP is actually illegal. OP implying otherwise is just ignorant of the law. Unethical, perhaps, although I'd defend at least some of the stuff described. The fact that it mentions the trial and mentions the (legal) practice of having multiple shell companies doesn't change anything. They weren't charged with having shell companies, but with using those companies to commit fraud. OP mentions none of that fraud.
>I don't understand why you're saying Child Endangerment isn't "actually illegal", it's literally a term of art in the field used in statutes all across the US! Obviously that's not proof of a crime here, but... no, you're wrong, "child endangerment" is an actual crime.
I'm saying the actions alleged in OP are not illegal, including the actions described in the child endangerment section.
The "customers" that just happen to be the very same shell companies described at trial, engaged in the very same shenannigans with "their" IP addresses? Those customers?
I mean, come on. I think at this point you're just retreating into pedantry, arguing that the linked article doesn't meet appropriate evidentiary standards when presented in a blog post and therefore we need to assume that Micfo is innocent in the sense of this one article not meeting a sufficient burden of proof. So... OK.
But anyone with a brain can see that this is a personal story about exactly what was going on, and thus that it's clearly describing related activities. Some of which, again, were clearly illegal.
Where are you getting this from? I admittedly have not watched the trial or read through trial transcripts. Are you asserting that the trial produced evidence that the shell companies mentioned were involved in spamming (as opposed to renting out the IP addresses to customers who ultimately used them for spamming?) I haven't seen this allegation in any of the articles I've read about the case. The blog post doesn't identify any customers.
>But anyone with a brain can see that this is a personal story about exactly what was going on, and thus that it's clearly describing related activities. Some of which, again, were clearly illegal.
No need for personal attacks. It's far from clear that anything described in the blog post is illegal. I already went point by point in my initial comment on this. You're making allegations the blog post never made that Micfo was itself involved in spamming. I doubt this, being as it wasn't charged and nobody but commenters in this thread have alleged it.
OP appears to be saying that the "channel partners" were the shell companies. Hence why Micfo was responding as the channel partners and why subpoenas went to them.
He also says:
>Our largest customer would submit PTR deletions, additions, and changes to our channel partners, I would log into the channel partner portal, and recieve them then act on them.
It's clear he's not saying that this customer was a channel partner/shell company. I don't know how you could possibly read the post and come off with that impression.
> Nothing wrong with this ...
Depending on where they're located, failure to report certain types of crime to law enforcement may itself be a crime.
Just like how you would get fired if you sent out a legal demand letter to another company without legal being in the loop. Law enforcement is no different: they are not your friend.
Law enforcement doesn't even have that aligned incentive. You might say you are aligned in that you want the law to be followed, but their incentive is more along the lines of making sure they bring in and prosecute cases. If the only way to make the case work is to throw the company that reported it (and by extension, its employees) into the grinder because that's all they think they can successfully do, then that's likely what they'll do.
For blatant issues (i.e. there's a dead body) you'd still be expected to act on your own, but on any greyer area you'd be covered.
How common are setups like this, anyone know?
While this statement is often true (big companies make these cost-benefit decisions), I don't think it really captures what is happening to Facebook. Doing a cost-benefit analysis like this requires having data on potential costs and benefits. In most cases, Facebook didn't have this data.
When an individual, company, or institution is faced with a decision, but lacks data to properly evaluate it, they fallback on other decision making tools, including instinct and principles.
Facebook almost certainly didn't know the consequences of the many decisions they made, they didn't know the potential costs or benefits. But they did have some underlying principles, namely: maximizing platform engagement, convincing people to share more personal data on their platform, and exploiting user data for better advertising.
With these foundational principles, you can end up making some really bad decisions even without a proper cost-benefit analysis.
- lets you sign a waiver that you are willing to receive spam
- ensures that you sign with your real name, not a shell
- are not a helpless child that can be endangered
This together guarantees that neither a crime is committed nor enabled.
Indeed; when I clicked the story I expected it to be about working for a FAANG.
I’d rather not work for either, but if you’re not in a hot tech area, then your choices are limited.
There is an old protocol still creeping around smartphones known as WAP Payment (yes that WAP) which was/is used to buy stuff on the mobile web and the purchase shows up on your phone bill.
They buy all type of mobile ads (banner, text, popup, modal, etc.) and when you open the ad you get billed 4€, 5€, 6€ per week or month, without any confirmation whatsoever. Some phone carriers ask for user input (mostly the user has to click a button "I agree") but that's where click-jacking, CSRF and other kind of exploit comes in, very few ask for a confirmation code.
The sad thing is that they know, the carriers know but they don't care, until enough people complain about it then they shutdown the service to that website for a few days (in some cases they shut it down permanently) but they always come back online.
P.S. this is a throwaway account