Will another Forbes 30 under 30 member be arrested for fraud before 2025? | Hacker News Reader

Will another Forbes 30 under 30 member be arrested for fraud before 2025?

manifold.markets

92 pointsBrajeshwar14 comments

Note that this is a very large group of people, with 1230 additions annually: https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/directory/

"The American lists recognize 600 business and industry figures, with 30 selected in twenty industries each. Asia and Europe also each have ten categories for a total of 300 each, while Africa has a single list of 30 people." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_30_Under_30

It looks like the US prosecutes about 300 people each year for fraud, out of a population of 300 million. With a pool of about 7000 US citizens on the list you would expect about 1.4% chance of one of them would be charged with fraud in the next two years if fraud was uniformly distributed through the population.

Would be interesting to see how the numbers break down for just C*O positions, as many of the 30 under 30 are founders and other executives.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/facts-statistics

> the US prosecutes about 300 people each year for fraud

That's way too low. [checks link...] That's just cases handled by the DOJ Health Care Fraud Unit, not all fraud.

It’s fraud prosecuted by the federal government for fraud against the major federal public healthcare programs (one of which is joint federal-state program where much of the fraud is prosecuted by state prosecutors, not the feds.)

Its... very much not all healthcare fraud prosecution, much less all fraud prosecution.

Other extreme is field medal in mathematics given once 4 years to encourage young folks to do mathematics. Every decade, he promote,encourage, recognize two and half people. By all accounts, they are already super motivated and accompolished.

On the "fraud" side though, math is about as fraud proof as it comes.

There is lots of fraud in experimental science where it's easier to fudge, like business. It would be interesting to see how many early career research award recipients in experimental fields end up also being frauds.

This strikes me a general problem with these media-generated awards - the judges are media people trained to react to promotability (as measured by self-promotion) over fundamental scientific quality. The people who should be on the list are the ones who shun such awards.

The real problem is that capitalism already has mechanisms to make these lists, but they would be a boring read.

30 under 30 in Finance? Build a list of the top investment banks, PE/VC shops, Hedge Funds, etc. and take the people under 30 with the most senior titles.

30 under 30 in Retail/Ecommerce? Build a list of the fastest growing marketplaces/brands over $Xmn in sales and take the founders under 30 with the highest ranking.

etc. etc.

But then you get a bunch of boring people who work 80 hour weeks and don't have time for your photoshoot/interview.

The judges are experts in their fields, FYI. For the games list this year we had Tyler Blevins, Nicole LaPointe Jameson, Eric Monacelli and Kiki Wolfkill, all heavy hitters.

Exvept for a few rare cases, IMO, awards given by your peers are the only awards worth celebrating.

I understand the 30-under-30 is basically a sham, but however it's conducted, as long as it's a valuable accolade, why would anyone be surprised to find frauds. If auditors and whatnot don't find the fraud, why would Forbes writers? The people conning the writers are also conning their actual business stakeholders, and their good enough at it for it to go on for a while. So no surprise that some of them will go on to get caught. My money's on another one by 2025.

1000+ people a year for 12 years (and running) is a massive pool. A handful of arrests from within it isn't exactly out of the ordinary.

Arrests in general, sure. But this is about arrests for fraud. I don't know the stats on that.

If it includes crypto-adjacent people, the odds are going to go way up.

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