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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Even if the legal fees weren't many times the revenue, I never understood why couldn't the justice system default to fines like "All income arising out of crime + $XYZ" for all crimes, so that the fine is never a cost of doing business?

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This is called disgorgement and is indeed frequently used for certain types of crimes (particularly financial crimes).

I'd argue that it's shouldn't even be only income + $xyz, it's income * (1 / chance of succesful enforcement) to reduce companies that thought that as long as it's hidden enough you'll be safe. It'll be a lot more arbitrary though.

Perhaps laziness? Determining which profits are due to a crime could be difficult to separate from legitimate activity. That said, they could write the law to claw back anything that's easily accounted for, and just use some approximations when that's impractical.

It doesn't even need to be an exact or accurate accounting of money made due to crime. The legal system could impose fines high enough to hurt regardless of where the money came from, and pretty much everyone agrees that they should because otherwise fines are just a cost of doing business. The fact that the legal system refuses to do that when it's so obvious that not doing it is harmful to everyone except criminal corporations is troubling.

The technical term for it is "disgorgement" and it does exist in some contexts. I agree it is shockingly absent in far too many.

My guess: it's too expensive to keep track of what constitutes "income arising out of crime" for the statutory period / lifetime of the perpetrator, especially if it could spawn an endless stream of minor cases for whether any specific income is truly "arising out of crime".

Easy fix, have the perpetrator pay for the investigation.

I thought that was what criminal forfeiture laws were supposed to be about. Is there are reason why they aren't routinely applied in cases like this? Seems to be a much more productive use than typical civil forfeiture.

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

What percentage of viewer income was due to the crime?

I presume this is hypothetical. A reasonable start would be to see the difference average views on a video and views on this particular video times as revenue per view.

Admittedly I’ve never heard of this guy and avoid most YouTube “creators” and it got a view out of me out of morbid curiosity and so I could speculate on whether it was pre planned.

That question, as posed, represents why this isn’t often done. It’s very difficult to determine the contributing revenue fraction when one illegal action is laundered among many. Seizure tends to be all or nothing as a result.

This is a thing (this is the whole thing about treble damages). Despite what people say on HN, "Fines are a cost of doing business" is more a statement of fact (running a business, you sometimes fuck up and pay for it), rather than a statement of intent (do things that get fined but make money off of it). For most people anyways.

If you run scam X and earn Y from that scam, then get caught doing X, it is extremely unlikely that you are walking away with a fine less than Y. The problem is of course maybe the feds only notice Y/2 or Y/10. There's some hand wringing about scam X earning you Y directly but helping to support scam Z in the future that you will do better (or legitimate businesses A,B,C that earn you Y * 1000). But there's a base principle, and "let's just fine off of overall revenue" things leading to "some case officer in Omaha lied on forms, so we will fine this bank $2 billion" is kinda silly[0].

But generally speaking illegal activity where you get caught is going to end badly for you. And illegal activity you get away with will end better for you, but that's true independent of the fee structure.

[0] the case officer might be part of a larger pattern. This is what discovery and investigations are for! Do enough work and you can prove that the earnings from the illegal activity is higher!

Probably because it's not necessarily always a proportional punishment?

Like if you drive somewhere with a suspended license somewhere and make a million dollars as a result, should all that money be subject to seizure?

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