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Comment by newprint | Hacker News Reader

Like FTX/SBF, this person would have probably become an accomplished businessman, if his criminal mind wasn't in his way. Fascinating to read how crafty those people in exploiting any gaps where potential profits could be made. They are like is financial "hackers" that can segfault some .org.

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It seems to have been pretty basic VAT fraud. Nothing smart or havky about that. Happens dozens of times every day at various scales. And each and every time it is just plain old tax fraud.

it is very simple fraud, but someone still has to come-up with how to make it work. carbon credits(figure out how to buy them) -> VAT fraud(figure out how/where/to whom to sell them) -> Profit(Hide profit/launder/invest). It is not much different from the cigarette fraud in the US. Buy cheaper in Maryland -> sell for more in New York,where taxes on cigarette are higher. Distance between NYC & Maryland is about 3-4h.

Like SBF?

yes, you are right !

People who say this usually come from a place of privilege. They profoundly misunderstand how the world works and the significant role of luck. If these people hadn't cheated, they would be broke and struggling to make ends meet. I never met anyone in my life who made any serious money without some kind of cheating or fraud or unethical conduct either by them or their ancestors.

>I never met anyone in my life who made any serious money without some kind of cheating or fraud or unethical conduct either by them or their ancestors.

You have picked a wrong crowd. That is on you. Go talk to surgeons, doctors, pharma researchers - very decent people, who made/make serious money.

>> surgeons, doctors, pharma researchers

Who paid their rent and university fees while they were studying for 10 years to become a doctor?

10 years?

Where are you?

It can be 3 year Bachelors degree + 4 years M.D. (seven years total) with the opportunity to earn money as a resident or rural practitioner while completing the M.D.

https://study.unimelb.edu.au/find/pathways/doctor/

If your grades are good you can be accepted and either pay back fees when earning or ride through on a scholarship if good enough to qualify.

You must spend a long time in residency with brutal working hours and typically very little pay. It's been a well known complaint for years that this system tends to naturally exclude people who don't come from privilege.

In my student days there was an entire street scheduled for expansion that had 80 odd houses down one side as cheap rents by the main roads department, I shared a house with seven other students, four were medical, none came from any privilege other than relatively secure working class - two came from farmers, one from a boilermaker, the other from a telecom line working family.

There are people willing to work long hours for little return with the prospect of a better job after an apprenticeship.

Medical degrees are offered globally, not all locations only allow the children of privilege to become doctors.

The time investment is more than ten years easily. In Europe at least.

Who paid? Their parents. Grocers, school teachers, plumbers... also lawyers of course, but in Europe you don't need to have rich parents to study medicine.

Are you insinuating that surgeons, doctors, pharma researchers cannot pay rent and university fees without their parents resorting to illegal activity?

There are such well known things as student loans, working whilst studying (some very successful doctors have talked about having to bus tables whilst studying)

I assume when the parent says "serious money", he means 9 digits plus.

That is "the parent".

Criminals tend to think that everybody else is a criminal too, and get offended when caught because they feel singled out. But it's not true, it's just a coping mechanism they adopt to excuse themselves.

It's amazing how pervasive this mentality is. The premise of buying something for one amount of money, processing it and then selling it for more is totally alien to people in this mode of thinking. In their mind, a man could not possibly make money by buying uncooked hotdogs, cooking them and selling them for more. No, he must be stealing the hotdogs, or using fake hotdogs, or stealing the wages of his employees, or some other scheme. Anything other than simple honest business, which they feel sure cannot exist.

Unfortunately you seem to be thinking in this mode, since evidently you believe that criminal activity is the only way somebody could get through medical school.

Well it's hit and miss but these days you can point me to just about anyone who you think earned their money 'fair and square' and I can point out many different ways that it was not quite as 'fair' nor 'square' as it seems. The role of privilege is just so significant.

Privilege is often the product of unethical machinations that happen behind the scenes or happened behind the scenes at some point in the past. Once you understand that value creation and value extraction are two very different concepts and that only the latter is rewarded AT ALL, you start to understand how we got to where we are today. It's not value creators who are rewarded. Over long periods of time, our system almost completely dispossesses value creators for the benefit of value extractors.

Money, in its current form, is the root of all evil. In a highly competitive global environment, you cannot win without cheating. That's a probabilistic fact because if there are 10K intelligent people competing in the same area (which is very common in global markets), the probability that maybe 100 of them will be cheaters is very high and the cheaters have a huge competitive edge over the non-cheaters, hence the winner in a winner-takes-all market is much more likely to be a cheater.

> criminal mind

Good white-hat hacking (tax|legal|financial|computer) also requires a criminal mind I believe!!! Bending or twisting rules and knowing which rules to break! Criminality is dependent on your context. Risk/reward is a key feature of economics.

My personal word for a drug-dealer is entrepreneur.

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