Santos allegedly masterminded 2017 ATM fraud | Hacker News Reader

Santos allegedly masterminded 2017 ATM fraud

politico.com

20 pointswpietri9 comments

Santos really strikes me as the living version of this: “I’m like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one, you know, I just do... things.”

Looks like he was doing fine as a small-time con artist and criminal. Stealing puppies and stiffing landlords and skimming cards and selling ponzi shares is a living, of a sort. Maybe he intended to run for Congress and lose? Then nobody would be asking about his finances, and he'd have a whole new set of suckers to exploit. But winning has been very inconvenient for him.

Sounds quite similar to a recent US president

The brilliant part is, if he came right out and said "I was the mastermind of a sophisticated ATM fraud operation in 2017", no one would believe him.

Have you ever seen the Eddie Murphy movie The Distinguished Gentleman? Santos sounds like a real life version of that.

I can't fathom what would drive criminals to seek public office and the scrutiny that comes with it

The existence of political parties that don’t police themselves.

One can think of narcissists as people who create and perform a false self that is more impressive, more compelling than their real one. But it's not like an actor who can turn a role on and off. They live the lie. I'm sure Santos doesn't think of himself as a criminal. He spins from circumstance to circumstance, trying out things to say and ways to say them until he finds something that works, at least for a while.

So I think Santos just gradually lied himself into it. A hill-climbing social algorithm.

To me the unfathomable part is not that somebody would try, it's that he would make it to be a major party's candidate for one of the most important elected positions in country. Politics has to be attractive to grifters and frauds of all sorts. I have to wonder how he made it that far without anybody noticing.

The modern US republican party is tailor made by grifters, for grifters.

actual title "George Santos masterminded 2017 ATM fraud, former roommate tells feds"

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