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Comment by thetrumanshow | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but the line that defines fraud is scarily unclear, IMO.

Should the Airbnb founders be sent to prison for spoofing interest in Craigslist ads and breaking their TOS? If the consensus shifts to yes, then our industry will become a very scary place to invest time and energy.

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Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud. It says a sad thing about the industry that shady practices like that are considered important enough that it would be "scary" to have to abstain from them.

I've never engaged in any of those kinds of practices, but did find them both clever and fascinating when I read about them ~3 years ago. I never thought of them as being illegal until today.

I guess I'm just concerned with the trend. Things we think of as clever today may land people in prison. Its interesting and scary that we might not see it coming.

There is nothing clever about misrepresenting yourself to people in business dealings. It doesn't necessarily have to be illegal, but it's always shady.

Don't misrepresent yourself - That's actually an incredibly good and concise guideline for avoiding trouble.

Also it'll save you a lot of money on marketing costs.

> Tricking people for profit is the definition of fraud.

This would make 90% of all applications/websites fraud. Most free(gratis) Windows software tricks you into installing spyware & toolbars. Almost every app on your phone tricks you into giving away personal data. Almost every website tricks you into being tracked across multiple websites.

Putting people in prison for doing this stuff sounds fine to me.

90%? Are you sure you're not exaggerating that a little bit?

Yes, tricking people for profit IS fraud. Tracking you across the web like Adsense does is NOT fraud. The act of stealing someone's contact list like Path does is NOT fraud either (but may be a different crime).

And very very little of web sites or applications engage in fraud. The world does a pretty good job of blocking these things, the way Chrome won't even let you go to a web site that has been known to deliver viruses. And yes the FBI should arrest these people.

I don't think that's an outrageous exaggeration.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...

But going beyond that, even when differences are not subtle as in that blog post you still have a large swath of people who won't be able to distinguish ads from non-ads. Just go in the heart of a large city and observe the web-surfing habits of some regular Joe Shmoe and you'll be pretty astounded with his ad-detection heuristics. Large internet companies know and understand this very well, and indeed design their products as such. Heck, when I'm designing webapps I do this too, I guess I'm just cognizant about what actually I'm doing.

He didn't make that up; he just summarized it. The elements of fraud are (a) a false statement, (b) intentionally made, of (c) a material fact that (d) someone reasonably relied on and (e) was injured (usually, financially) by.

In other words, "tricking people for profit" is fraud. The Internet did not obsolete the crime of fraud.

While that line might be vague, are you arguing that this example _isn't_ fraud? I'm sure they violated the affiliate network terms of service — which is one thing if you're an individual user, but when it's a business contract, terms become much more important. Moreover, these guys had to know they were in violation of the spirit of these programs — affiliate marketing is _marketing_, which they were doing none of.

Heh. Nope, not _arguing_ that, because arguing what constitutes fraud and what does not belongs ONLY to the administrators of said governing laws.

If I were presiding over this specific case, and had a breadth of understanding that confirmed they were cookie-stuffing beyond a doubt, I would move to convict them.

I do think the line that separates a civil matter and a criminal matter is unclear at times.

Further edit: Oh, were you asking if I thought the Airbnb behavior an example of fraud? Well, now I guess I do... based on what I read today. I still think its a civil issue, but it doesn't matter what I think. Prosecutors be prosecutin'.

Nope. Was't referring to Airbnb. You say you think fraud is vaguely defined. Which might be true (I don't know enough). But this seems like it crosses a pretty bright line.

It's tricky, and depends on exactly how they represented their actions. They did send traffic to ebay, but it was worthless traffic.

Also, legally it's only fraud if the victim doesn't know you're lying. I'm not at all convinced that was the case here.

They _didn't_ send traffic. They just set cookies and waited for people to go to eBay who would have anyways.

By my reading they used iframes (or maybe img) to literally send traffic to eBay, and it was eBay's servers that set the cookie. As far as I understand it you can't set a cookie on a domain you don't control. But I admit I might be wrong, the article is confusing on the technical details.

A big difference between that and the original story is that Hogan and Dunning defrauded a single entity out of millions of dollars, which of course gives that single entity a strong incentive to sic auditors and private investigators on the fraudsters and push for an indictment.

Also, the US legal system takes very seriously it role in setting precedents and has a strong commitment to following precedents -- specifically to make the law more predictable to folks like us. There're probably a lot of preceding criminal cases around affiliate-marketing fraud, and none for the kind of shenanigans attributed in these comments to AirBnB.

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