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Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

The reason I added that EDIT is because I actually hadn't read that far down yet - I was just referring to his first counterfeiting gig when I first posted the comment: inline search the article for "Kuhl’s counterfeiting career had begun a decade earlier" and read from there.

Of course you have no basis for your claim that he would have eventually found a buyer. This is a "manufactured criminal" and the police certainly got fed up with waiting for an actual market for his work to materialize. Entrapment is so insidious because when you turn a good guy, maybe there's no market for "good guy's evil works" anyway. (Who knows why, maybe he looks like an informant/plant/mole because he's a real artist and normal, genuine, good guy, who only got into 1 single crime - and no corresponding culture or connections, no other crimes, nothing - through an entrapment operation.)

Please read the article more carefully and you'll see exactly what I mean.

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Nerd brain recoiling in attempt to square first sentence of this comment with last one.

Reading carefully affords one the privilege of reading less.

Doubleplusgood. We have always been at war with Reddit.

This is a very good point - because the costs of trusting the wrong person are so high (Jail, them stealing your money) then the most important thing for criminals is a solid understanding of the background of the other person.

This is why families and old school friends frequently figure together. And why jail makes for furure partners.

Perhaps we should start oldjailbuddy.com - networking for criminals

It's actually just one example of my point - we don't really need to speculate on whether there's a market or if not, why not.

It's like if entrapment convinces your performance-oriented daughter who's short on cash (to make this an analogy with the artist in this article) to have sex for money as a kind of performance (same convoluted logic as the artist's in the article).

If afterwards she tries again, there's no proof there's actually a criminal market for her and her criminal soliciting skills learned for the entrapment. But she may or may not know that. One entrapment operation can ruin your daughter's life, who perhaps had literally never given a single thought to prostitution, just as you and I have never thought of armed robbery. It's like a fucked-up internship offered by the government, only instead of setting you up for life with your newfound skills, it fucks you up for life, as in the case we've just read about.

I said Kuhl would eventually find a buyer because there is a market for his work and he's sold in the past. It is reasonable to assume he would have sold the bills he made.

Regardless, since just printing the counterfeit notes is illegal he became a criminal by creating them, not by selling them to the police. The entrapment did not create the crime, Kuhl did.

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