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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

He may be safer inside than out in countries without extradition treaties. He burnt a lot of money that wasn't his to burn.

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Extradition treaties aren’t the only thing to watch out for. Plenty of countries without them will happily fall over and hand someone wanted over.

Extradition treaty mainly just lets some foreign country start a process in local courts to hand someone over.

You need to butter up a place with adversarial relations.

Or go somewhere with ironclad constitutional protections against extradition. And even then, e.g. France only has those for its own citizens and may still prosecute you locally for your crimes abroad.

Why would they need go to a country subject to treaties. Unrecognized territories like transnistria (weev!),rojava,Somaliland,Ambazonia, western Sahara, Palestine (before invasion), fractions of Myanmar, idlib, rebel held congo fractions, etc. Basically no diplomatic relations and they will likely not eject someone seen locally as supporting their cause.

Its a big world out there and a shockingly large portion is free of recognized government control. In such places you pretty much live by your own bootstraps rather than what some far away western country says, at least on the individual level.

What really really shocks me though is that SBF didn't just jump on a yacht out right after the failure as he easily could have done. If he had sailed to the right part of Latam or West Africa he'd have a decent chance at not getting caught.

In any unrecognized territory, you risk becoming a pawn in exchange for a prisoner release. And pray that the unrecognized territory continues to exist as is.

There's no riskless path remaining after you've defrauded billions of dollars. Iirc the white girl who bombed the subway in london is thought to be still hiding in such a territory like two decades later.

He doesn't speak the language, had a highly recognizable face and is perceived to have money. Sounds like a recipe for a bad time in the rougher places of the world.

Not sure I'd want to live in Ambazonia but they speak English and would likely not have many that recognize his face. It also would have been easily accessible by yacht transatlantic from the Bahamas into a difficult to patrol estuary. But this is all pure fantasy, I understand why he didn't do that.

That makes a lot of sense.

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