In this day and age if you're committing fraud it's pretty hard for it not to be wire fraud given how everything is transmitted digitally. And penalties for wire fraud are extremely steep (up 20 years for each charge), and it automatically makes it a federal crime. So just don't...
While counterfeit stuff are sold by sellers in the marketplace that Amazon provides, that is not equivalent to Amazon being the one selling the stuff.
I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, Amazon is selling the item.
Substance over form.
2. There is so much counterfeit stuff on Amazon that they should know about it, and should be held responsible since they do nothing about it. "Should have known" is sufficient for guilt in a court of law, when the thing is blatantly obvious.
Anecdotal, second-hand story I remembered being told by a former colleague with some significant time working in the Postal service: state or city police pulled over a contracted semi truck carrying mail from one station to the other on suspicion of running un-taxed cigarette shipments from a reservation manufacturer. Because the semi was contracted by the postal service, they had the requisite security: tags, seals and the magical panic button in the cab of the tractor. The driver pushed the button when the state/city police broke the seal and started rummaging through parcels which summoned the inspectors, guns drawn to the scene. Apparently the Postal Inspectors arrested the -police- at that scene on breaking and entering mail facilities.
Some of the details pertaining to why the shipment was actually legal and the police didn't have cause/jurisdiction yadda yadda yadda I don't remember, but still a good story even if the telling of it by my former colleague was more engaging than I can recount.
As the story goes, one of the scientists there copped a warrant high grade enough for the Federal Marshals to come by and make an arrest. They were stopped at one of the gates into a more secure area, asked their business, and told that security would send out the person in question. The Marshals balked at this and demanded to be let in to make the arrest, lest the fugitive make good an escape somehow. After security asked for their requisite clearance, which the Marshals could not provide, it continued to escalate. Fingering their pistol butts, the Marshals insisted they were on lawful business and must be let in, while the guards with rifles replied that by all means the Marshals might make their entry but as armed intruders into a secure laboratory they would promptly get shot.
The pissing match took long enough that the fugitive was finally marched up to the gate and taken into custody before it could escalate further, at this point I believe the Marshals were on the phone with their higher ups trying to plead their case to be let in.
My coworker went to the local police, who wouldn’t do anything, but then his lawyer advised him to go to the postal inspector (he had mailed the check to the contractor.)
The contractor ended up getting five years in federal prison for mail fraud.
Not only do I have absolutely no idea how to get from here to there, I also assume the degree of simplification I desire — to the point that normal people know what's going on most of the time — is the legal equivalent of saying "Twitter doesn't need 6000 employees because Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facebook by himself in college" in a software engineering context, and wrong for much the same reasons.
And, oh boy, do we have many laws.
It is by design, to oppress the people.
In terms of civil disputes between citizens from different member countries - well, we don't have any phone/internet/post police.
I very much agree. And I live in the US.
77k fine for a net worth of $10-14 million from his businesses, and a 5 years sentence at a minimum security prison (with the likelihood of parole much earlier) is not a bad retirement plan.
The Belgian guy I was in with got raided by the police. His hard disks had been hidden behind a brick wall with only the cables visible. They didn't find the hard disks so he got away with it, and I never got arrested or charged.
Good times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci...
IANAL but to get 20 years they'd have to commit a massive fraud that ended in some serious damage like costing victims million of dollars with some other mitigating circumstances.
You mean aggravating circumstances.
Idk where the “postal inspectors are bad ass” meme comes from online, but from my sample size they’re just as useless as any other government org.
For some reason, the internet thinks they are a group of James Bond secret agents. In my experience dealing with them, they are TSA level, totally indifferent schlubby federal workers waiting for their pension to vest.
It's a psychological thing as far as I have been told. As in, the smaller the "amount" or "area" of power you give someone to enforce / defend the fiercer they will do so.
I saw this live once. A tiny office building's front entrance security guard. Had a sign in/out list for visitors. He was o the stereotypical leaned back in his chair, far away from the heightened desk type guy. Our visitor wanted to sign out. He knew the procedure from other days. The list sat behind the counter but in plain view. Our guest thought nothing of it so as he mentioned he'd leave and just sign out he grabbed the list from behind the counter. You should have seen how fast the security guy got up from his chair and started shouting at the guy what the... he was thinking just grabbing that list! He pulled the list back out of our visitors hands and then we heard a littany of other stuff. Until he finally let him actually sign out
I guess one can make use of this in some cases :)
I've read of someone who worked at a bank who was told that after getting a counterfeit, looked them up in the phone book, and they dealt with it promptly.
But in all fairness, the distinctions are all pretty arbitrary, I'm sure people were laughing as much when the navy spun off their weather stuff and when the army spun off their flying stuff as they do now with the air force spinning off the space stuff.
[0]: https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2019/pb22524/html/cov...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspect...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5S74kKimFs
Jake (Andy Samberg) and Charles (Joe Lo Truglio) form an unlikely alliance with Jack Danger (Ed Helms), a nerdy lead investigator at the United States Postal Inspection Service, as they embark on a mission to crack the case to bring down a drug dealer.
That to me is the definition of victimless.
I lost imaginary income that never would have actually existed doesn’t make you a victim.
This was your original comment.
The opposite is true here: a person received addresses at low costs reserved for people who don't have any addressing of their own, and then sold the addresses for millions of dollars to companies who already have a lot of addresses and would be ineligible for this.
They pretended to be dozens of new companies to do this. They filed false affidavits where they swore facts that were untrue.
Meanwhile companies actually eligible for ARIN's initial block policy had to wait indefinitely because this scalper had snatched up all the inventory. Were they not harmed?
Fraud basically means lying to someone to steal from them. Wire fraud means doing that using electronic communications.
Of course there can be bogus charges and you should vote to acquit on those, but wire fraud seems squarely in the set of things that should be illegal if we have laws at all.