- The article Snowden linked is public. Presumably people already know about it?
- I don’t know about the details of the case, but the host wasn’t found guilty. That seems relevant.
- Snowden joined the conference just to call this guy out? Seems like a strange thing to do. Why not just not join the conference?
Why did Snowden do this?
That’s not what I see:
> On June 7, 2017, Mr. Tulsiani pled guilty to unregistered trading and breaching an OSC cease trade order in connection with an investment scheme involving the Private Investment Club, which targeted Ontario investors. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/osc-investor-alert-sunil-tuls...
> Why did Snowden do this?
Did you watch the video? He explains exactly why.
I was going off the article Snowden put up saying the guy was “named”, so I assumed he wasn’t actually found guilty, just accused.
I don’t know why people are attending this conference, but could anyone actually be getting value out of it?
If so, then it just depends whether you find this conference ethically defensible, or not. Seems like people could differ on that.
The host was really pressuring people to pay to join, even when his prospective customers didn't have the money:
>Before Snowden joined, Tulsiani was trying to sell $47 tickets to a "VIP" session of the conference. While pitching the VIP session, Tulsiani repeatedly said, “If there was a gun to your head saying you have to find [the money]...you’ll find it,” included as a response to an audience member who said in the group chat that she couldn’t afford the entry fee.
That's not necessarily a scam, but it sure is a massively unethical business model.
He's a scammer. If you had actually watched the video and listened to the explanations by Snowden and looked up the court case that you're saying the scammer was not guilty in but WAS FOUND GUILTY then you would either delete your comments or edit them to say you're wrong.
Many times these things aren't black and white. This is one case where it is. Please don't defend obvious scams. Don't give any gap for them to somehow convince people that they're on the up and up because those victim will be hurt.
Snowden is using his name and appearance to out this guy and I'm very ok with that.
I would edit the comment, but it doesn't look like I can now.
Of course, the scammers running this are absolutely getting value out of it.
Think of it as the difference between a group of people with a formal contract and meetings for investment splitting in a conference room vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU
It's extremely obvious which category this article's meeting falls into once you know about those two categories. I've had a bunch of friends fall into the MLM world (which will keep telling you it's not a pyramid scheme), and every single presentation or meeting they've ever seen, talked about, or been to has either been mindnumbingly cringe and unprofessionally fraudulent slides with false income numbers (upline-held ones) or cult-like scam screaming and money worship (corporate ones).
Information being public doesn't mean the people in the call know about it
> Snowden joined the conference just to call this guy out? Seems like a strange thing to do. Why not just not join the conference?
Because some people have a strong aversion against scammers and use anything in their means to oust them, including using any fame they may have.
That seems to be the case in general, but I have to say in this case it doesn’t really require that to decide to take the opportunity to slam dunk on someone when you discover you’ve been scammed into agreeing to be a speaker for their scam. A fairly normal degree of personal desire for retaliation would suffice.
Maybe I’m more impressed by his hands-on approach to calling someone out.
Either way, color me impressed.
Seems like hollywood has for ages turned a blind eye to a lot of these issues.
I think it takes more than a fairly average predisposition to honesty, to go out out there, and yell fraud when you see fraud.
Take this event as an example. If it was so easy to call people out, then you would hear it far more often. Here is a single case, and made it to the top of HN.
I think the people recruiting Hollywood figures into these tr things are probably just better at identifying people that don’t really care if its the thing that it says on the tin as long as they get a paycheck; which is why they tend to target past-their-prime figures with money (at least relative to lifestyle) issues.
Compare his claim (https://youtu.be/h1-Y3IzVqdw) to the program actually described in his documents (https://theweek.com/articles/463395/nsa-prism-leak-much-less...). In that video, he also makes the pants on fire claim that he, as a Sharepoint admin, had the authority to wiretap anybody in America without a court order.
To be fair to Snowden, I have no doubt that he actually believed it. He read some documents on the Sharepoint server he administered that he didn't understand and jumped to wild nightmarish conclusions; however, he has stopped making any claims about PRISM (and only ever brings up phone metadata now), so he appears to know that what he claimed was wrong, but I have yet to see him issue a mea culpa.