After SBF is accused of VPN use, court is asked to restrict his internet access [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

After SBF is accused of VPN use, court is asked to restrict his internet access [pdf]

storage.courtlistener.com

20 pointsjasonhansel24 comments

His “bumbling fool” persona doesn’t really match the cold-hearted calculation that’s necessary for the criminal moves he pulls off. But he has perfected this appearance to the point where even a significant portion of the otherwise so easily cynical HN crowd seems convinced that “someone this stupid can’t be all that evil”. It’s probably an incredible advantage for a conman to be underestimated to this extent.

Case in point: Media referring to him as a boy genius, him moving back in with his parents, and his apparent video game addiction all to the contrary, the guy turns 31 next month. If that surprises you at least a bit, and I have to admit it did surprise me, then his antics have exactly the effect he wants.

The real surprise to me is that he has access to the internet at all; from a prison cell he certainly wouldn't.

Surprises you in what way? Did you think he was younger or older?

I edited the post to clarify.

>“someone this stupid can’t be all that evil”

I see how you write about how he is cold-heartedly calculating stuff, but not where you explain what his calculations are and how they lead here.

It's not like "exit scams" are unprecedented in crypto. If he was planning to disappear to a non-extradition country with a secret wallet eventually, why didn't he do it when things blew up?

The simplest assumption is he believed FTX could go on forever, because people were throwing billions of dollars at him. And he couldn't just turn off the belief when it all collapsed. See: B.F. Skinner.

My understanding is he was illegally funneling investor money into unrelated business activities and then lying to his investors. His fabrications are not accidental and therefore are calculated.

Suppose that he were publicly cackling and saying "everything is proceeding as I have foreseen...".

Would you not call it BS, if he were asserting it as some sort of triumph? Because that seems to me isomorphic to what people are claiming when they say this was calculated. The only difference I see is the polarity, the positivity or negativity of how it's put.

Stupidity is not a binary.

It is entirely possible for him to have been fully aware of the criminality of his schemes, fully calculating in his execution of them, and also fully expecting to be able to get away with them, because he's a rich white guy, and may have(?) never faced any serious consequences in his life.

Perception is a hell of a drug.

>Stupidity is not a binary.

I do not even have the capacity to imagine stupidity as binary without someone else explaining their thought process. Words mean whatever you want them to mean.

But to my previous comment and what I was trying to communicate, stupidity is not even a relevant dimension sometimes.

If someone doesn't have a master plan for their whole life or decades at a time, not only is that not stupid or smart in some absolute or binary sense, it doesn't rate anywhere in between either.

It doesn't rate on any scale from smart to stupid, I think, because people can succeed without planning, and fail with planning. Or the converse (contrapositive?)

By the way, I can't help the word "binary" jumping out at me acontextually, because (I don't know if you've heard) there is or was a fairly large and scammy industry in "binary options" until it was banned in some jurisdictions. I haven't heard of SBF being connected, but some people at (or formerly at) Celsius reportedly were.

Meanwhile people across the US under indictment for small time crimes are being rearrested all the time for arbitrary violations of their bond conditions.

Well, they aren't making sizeable political donations nor are they able to convince the politicians they're donating to that they're going to get a big return investing in his company.

Sam Bankman-Fraud is still a free man because he did both.

Your comment seems to be similar to others flooding every online discussion area, so I guess it's a common opinion.

But you really think anyone has influence because of past donations?

There's a famous quote: "what have you done for me lately?".

Those on the receiving end of SBF's generosity wouldn't want to send a message to future benefactors that their money won't actually get them what they want when the chips are down.

I mean, yes, sure, they wouldn't want to send that message, but they still have to motivate the future benefactors and not the past ones with what limited resources are available.

I assume you have had plenty of experience in life where people praise you for one thing, but reward you for another.

If SBF goes free or gets a Martha Stuart style low grade punishment, then he will be able to give millions in the future.

Speculation is risky. A bird in the hand...

Slight tangent:

It seems like there have been a lot of mentions of SBF on HN.

Alex Mashinsky strikes me as an even less sympathetic character, who made some of the all time poorest aging comments prior to his downfall, like "either we're lying or the banks are lying", and yet I couldn't find a single thread with his name that had any comments on HN.

There were quite a few Celsius threads, but "Mashinsky" doesn't seem to have attracted interest.

I don't make up or subscribe to conspiracy theories, so I have no hypothesis to explain this, but it has long seemed inexplicable to me how some things get 700 comments here and others get zero without a difference that seems salient to me.

He, like a large minority of people, has gotten where he is by doing stuff until he is stopped.

Most people are more risk averse.

But rational risk assessment rules out some exploitable opportunities due to incomplete information.

Rational optimization has its limits and drawbacks, and it's not surprising people on HN would have a blind spot that shows up frequently.

"On February 13, 2023, it came to the Government’s attention, based on data obtained through the use of a pen register on the defendant’s Gmail account, that the defendant has used a VPN or “Virtual Private Network” on at least two occasions to access the internet."

I hadn't heard of a pen register before. Apparently it's monitoring:

- All email header information other than the subject line

- The email addresses of the people to whom an email was sent

- The email addresses of people whom received the email

- The time each email is sent or received

- The size of each email that is sent or received

As an aside, would headers give away the fact he was using a VPN when using Gmail?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register

My first thought was that it might be from the originating IP address. But if he used the Gmail website (online client), wouldn't that have been Gmail's SMTP server IP?

Edit: from this conversation on Stack Exchange[1]: "IIRC, Google never had client IP information in its web mail headers."

Maybe he asked a desktop client?

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/238483/is-the-i...

SBF is doing his best work in witness tampering, and federal courts are failing to stop him.

"On January 15, 2023, the defendant contacted a potential witness at trial, without the presence of either the defendant’s or the witness’s counsel. The defendant contacted the witness through the encrypted messaging application Signal, as well as by email, and wrote in relevant part that he would “really love ... for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”"

His use of Signal didn't hide much from the Government.

Expect to see a witness tampering charge added.

But is he that “technologically sophisticated “?

With his situation, he should know his internet activity and online accounts are being monitored.

VPN traffic is easily detectable. You don’t even need to track IPs, or subpoena Gmail.

> With his situation, he should know his internet activity and online accounts are being monitored.

The man does not have a good track record for making good long-term decisions.

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