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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

On top of everything else, Scientist-1 doesn't come off looking too good.

He was contracted to make a synthetic dataset, based on a small set of records which were supposedly randomly sampled from a larger original dataset. He didn't really have any way of knowing he was being lied to at that point, or what his work would be used for.

But when he invoiced $13k for his services, including a detailed breakdown of what he did, Javice came back and offered him an extra $5k if he would change the invoice to a one-liner that just said "data analysis services". And he immediately agreed.

I find it hard to believe someone could get that request and not understand that they were being asked to be complicit in fraud. At best, it's really poor judgment.

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Hindsight bias, and you're wrong by saying that the $5k were conditional on the line item change (they weren't). Here's the quote from the indictment:

    >  JAVICE responded to Scientist-1 that same day, “Can you send the invoice back at $18k and just one line item for data analysis?”
    >
    > Scientist-1 replied, “Wow. Thank you. Here is the new invoice.” Attached to this email was a new invoice, now for $18,000, with the previous specific descriptions removed and replaced by the one-line description, “Data science services”

It is very common for large companies to ask for changes to line items as it helps the finance team categorize. Also, it's clear from this conversation that the scientist believed the $5k to be a generous tip.

Even if all of that weren't the case, this should be a case of innocence until proven guilty; it's easy to see the crime in hindsight, but if you suspect nothing that thought might just not cross your mind in the first place.

You can call it hindsight bias if you want. What you seem to be saying is that your heuristics would have told you that Javice had no nefarious intent based on that exchange, and you would of course have been wrong. My heuristics are very different.

It is very obvious to me that the extra $5k was "conditional" because if Scientist-1 hadn't sent back an invoice for $18,000, he wouldn't have gotten paid $18,000.

I have never heard of a company giving a 40% "tip" after the fact to a contractor who was already billing $600/hour. It seems like Scientist-1 did not question this tip because it didn't benefit him to do so. He didn't suspect anything because he was motivated against suspicion. That's a lack of integrity.

I've done consulting work a bit like this. Being asked to change the invoice: consolidate lines and change the description, is very common. If I were asked to do that I'd just do it, without questioning the reason. Being asked to do that in exchange for extra money is...very odd. Like she did something completely unnecessary that signals wrongdoing. Was she trying to get caught?

I am sure if she could pull the wool of JP Morgan's eyes, she could convince Scientist-1 that it was legit. "I want to expense it under Marketing not R&D, which would let us pay you more. My CPA's eyes glaze over, can you uplevel it?" or something

You could imagine something like that happening, but from the email conversation quoted in the indictment, it doesn't seem like there was even a token attempt at justifying it.

To complement this, once when I was earning some money to type documents through computer and print them for many purposes (rent contracts, college homework and others), a woman asked me to fake their printed pregnant exam which was saying that her wasn't pregnant, I rejected, she insisted to print a simple "Yes" and I persisted without a sweat! I was young at the time about 14 years old.

try to search for samples of lab results (OCR dev, long story)... don't include anything about pregnancy or any keyword even close to it. and you will be shocked how the entire first page will be services selling positive pregnancy tests. I had no idea there was a market for that.

That was after he generated the data. It's not like Scientist-1 could just not do the work at that point.

> she falsely represented that the data she provided to Scientist-1 was a random sample of a much larger database of Frank users

Makes me wonder if Scientist-1 believed they were merely anonymizing real data; and/or generating data for some other purpose?

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