Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as "legal fraud". Fraud is always illegal.

In theory yes - in practice no.

Legal/illegal is only a binary variable in theory. In practice it's things that are clearly white, clearly black and lots of grey in between. There are many concrete examples regarding accounting rules mentioned in the interview.

The question is where does a court draw the line, and as parent rightly points out, sometimes code/case law changes after the fact.

I think the parent is making a point about definitions - that the word fraud can only refer to illegal actions by definition. I think this is an overly literal interpretation of language' though.

Since the term was quoted in Pyramus' comment, this goes from being overly literal to being perversely pedantic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com