from

Yes but those have higher barrier to entry, MAD dynamics and the fact that you can't clone a nuclear weapon off Github.

The trick is:

> Using a "clean account with a character with a little history," Flan_Hill and an unnamed partner applied for membership in the EHEXP corporation. After the account was accepted, Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO. The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.

> This was vital, because after 72 hours the two "yes" votes carried the day. The infiltrating agent was very suddenly made CEO, which was in turn used to make Flan_Hill an Event Horizon Expeditionaries director, at which point they removed all the other corporate directors and set to emptying the coffers.

Which reminded me of this paper I read about Russia in the 1990s:

> In a similar scheme, raiders call a shareholders' meeting but fail to provide other shareholders adequate and timely notice, either by mailing notices to the wrong address, sending the notices only a short time before the meeting, or holding the meeting in a remote, inaccessible location. At the meeting, they exploit the artificially created majority to vote in a new board of directors.

[Criminal Corporate Raiding in Russia, Thomas Firestone](https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con...)

It's unclear why none of the other shareholders voted though. Did they quit the game or something?

> In 2011, Junker admitted to all of this when he pleaded guilty to one count of criminal conspiracy. Specifically, he acknowledged conspiring to solicit political campaign contributions from Fiesta Bowl employees and to later reimburse those employees in the guise of employee bonuses. (https://rollcall.com/2014/04/08/do-campaign-finance-violatio...)

There are campaign finance violations that I would not consider corruption in the quid-pro-quo sense but are still illegal. I am sympathetic to your line of reasoning though I think the current sentencing guidelines are by and large fair. I would like to see less emphasis on "intended loss" and more rewards for making victims whole.

What about receiving stolen property, perjury, campaign finance violations, etc? There are enough ethically flexible people out there and if you remove the major deterrent from doing these societally bad but nonviolent things I think occurrences of them would all increase a decent amount.

There are investment fraud prosecutions literally all the time, they just get 5-10 years in prison usually, not life. They aren't on national news because few people know the scammer or the victims.

Here are a handful from this year alone:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67034239/1/united-state...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66964256/1/united-state...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66760869/1/united-state...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65767429/17/united-stat...

Mandatory sentence reductions for milestones like 50%, 75%, 100% of ordered restitution/forfeiture would almost certainly incentivize repayment. Right now the federal government collects 7% of what they are owned from criminal defendants, see https://sci-hub.se/https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/d... (page 2). It has been proven that white collar criminals are typically the more calculating type and that they weigh the risks of getting caught so if there is a good reason to preserve at least some of the money they fraudulently obtain instead of spending it all on luxury goods they will likely do so. It's very difficult to argue that the current system is effective when there are people who caused bank failures through million dollar frauds getting 7-8 years in prison and $100 a month restitution payment plans. Right now your "intended loss" (not actual loss) is all that matters for the purpose of sentencing guidelines calculation - for instance if you submit a fraudulent loan application for $50k and don't get it (or get it but pay it back) you're just as bad as the guy who got it and spent it at all.

Article says 4% of SARs lead to law enforcement followup (and of those how many actually result in a conviction? Probably not even a third of that). So 95%+ of them are useless! The current system has terrible incentives because there are massive penalties for not filing but no penalty for useless filings. So they just file and file and file...

There is no "federal government" list other than sanctions/commerce department lists. These are both public. Either both banks decided they didn't want to deal with Pakistan anymore (maybe there was a warning about Pakistan by the Treasury department or in some AML publication they read, Pakistan was also recently on the FATF greylist) or he or the people sending him money mistakenly ended up on something like the [World-Check](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-Check) database. Someone can publish slander about you online and the monkeys that run World-Check will automatically find the article and put a note on their file about you saying you are "high risk."

> Whats the incentive for these sites? How do they stay operational?

Intelligence gathering operation?

In their agreement with the IRS, Scientology got spending on courses/"auditing" to be tax deductible in contravention of a Supreme Court ruling! I guess you just need time and money.

Where is that alleged?

Wouldn't they need to get some kind of court approval to use NSO software on an American?

Yes that's true, in fact they can freeze some of your untainted money pending trial in order to preserve it for forfeiture. I just don't think the lawyer would get in trouble for it and in the worst case would have to give back some of the money. If you read the Blair decision it is way different than this case because he was laundering money on behalf of his narcotics trafficking clients through real estate.

> One interesting thing a lawyer pointed out to me is that a lawyer has a duty to ensure that the money used to pay them wasn't from the proceeds of a crime.

I don't think this is true in the US. Lawyers do not have any obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act or laws that would require this and there are other things like the text below that would make prosecuting a lawyer for this very difficult,

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1957

> (1)the term “monetary transaction” means the deposit, withdrawal, transfer, or exchange, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, of funds or a monetary instrument (as defined in section 1956(c)(5) of this title) by, through, or to a financial institution (as defined in section 1956 of this title), including any transaction that would be a financial transaction under section 1956(c)(4)(B) of this title, but such term *does not include any transaction necessary to preserve a person’s right to representation as guaranteed by the sixth amendment to the Constitution;*

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-105000-money-laundering

> Because the Department firmly believes that attorneys representing clients in criminal matters must not be hampered in their ability to effectively and ethically represent their clients within the bounds of the law, the Department, as a matter of policy, will not prosecute attorneys under § 1957 based upon the receipt of property constituting bona fide fees for the legitimate representation in a criminal matter, except if (1) *there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the attorney had actual knowledge of the illegal origin of the specific property received (prosecution is not permitted if the only proof of knowledge is evidence of willful blindness);* and (2) such evidence does not consist of (a) confidential communications made by the client preliminary to and with regard to undertaking representation in the criminal matter; or (b) confidential communications made during the course of representation in the criminal matter; or (c) other information obtained by the attorney during the course of the representation and in furtherance of the obligation to effectively represent the client.

I'm pretty sure the reason "verification code" is blocked is because people will buy a bunch of retail prepaid unlimited plan sim cards and use them to send A2P messages like verification codes instead of paying Twilio or someone like that. Carriers don't like this because they charge more for A2P SMS than P2P.

In the case of BNP Paribas, 10 times that.

So... some compliance officer received information about terrorists allegedly using Binance and made a light hearted comment about it? The CFTC is not going to mention whatever preventative measures they took to prevent similar transactions from occurring in the future, they're trying to make them look bad through innuendo for this lawsuit and also probably to jeopardize their banking relationships.

Russian criminals use Binance accounts (and actually every exchange, including Coinbase) registered in the names of jobless 25 year old women from CIS countries. You can buy these accounts on basically any gray market forum with a marketplace section including sites like exploit.in or even forums used by 15 year olds like mpgh and ogusers. I am doubtful that a Binance customer data leak would have anywhere near as many interesting people as say the Credit Suisse leaks.

It's also curious that there was no mention of blockchain analysis anywhere in the complaint or even an attempt to quantify the amount of criminal funds on Binance and the complaint instead relies solely on a handful of excerpted chat logs to show compliance failings (the CFTC is obviously not going to mention all the times they ended up blocking the bad accounts). They also don't even list any specific Hamas transactions or say that Binance knowingly processed them.

> Kalanick and Neumann didn't steal money or finance terrorists. The wrongdoing in crypto/web3 is on another level.

Not VC but ever hear of Marc Rich? He was ultimately pardoned after being accused of evading 8 figures (in 1983 dollars) of taxes, trading with Iraq, Iran during the hostage crisis, the USSR during the grain embargo, and South Africa during Apartheid [0]. He lived in Switzerland just fine for a couple decades and the only trouble he ever faced was attempted kidnapping by American law enforcement [1]. He paved the way for the awesome company we now know as Glencore.

0. https://www.congress.gov/event/107th-congress/house-event/LC... 1. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/-king-of-oil--discloses-his--se...

Ctrl-f for fraud reveals three matches that are not related to the charged conduct.

https://app.tether.to with wire transfer. There are high minimums, KYC requirements, and excluded jurisdictions (notably the US). Depending on your opinion these onerous requirements exist either for regulatory reasons or to prevent a bank run because Tether is not fully backed.

I've been scouring this 74 page document for a while and I cannot for the life of me find the victims of Binance's alleged conduct. Anyone want to help me out?

What do you think are the odds this goes beyond fines? I get the feeling other agencies are gonna pile on and then there will be a huge global settlement to resolve all the cases but the Hamas stuff and the fact that they weren’t even checking OFAC list or countries makes me think there’s a sealed indictment with at least the compliance officer and probably CZs name on it too.

Why are routine technical questions constantly appearing on HN? Ask on a specific subreddit Reddit or Stackoverflow.

The decision to grant bail is in part based on the strength of the evidence and the danger to the community calculation is also in part based off past convictions. Not saying that is entirely fair, but the truth is most people in jail really are guilty which is the reason voters either don't care about this issue or even want to make the system more stacked against defendants.

Why would someone lie about that? Having 30 bank accounts does not confer any prestige upon you. There are companies that do this for people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Deposit_Account...) and if you Google "FDIC sweep" or "insured cash sweep" there are a bunch of banks talking about how they support automatically moving money out when an account gets more than $250000 in it.

The government tried to compel Apple this way (not through a subpoena but an ancient law called the All Writs Act) in the San Bernardino shooting case but they were able to unlock the phone through other means so the case just ended up going away. It probably depends on whether Whatsapp can argue it's unreasonable, the government has other investigative techniques available, etc.

> if Defendants attempt to attack the thoroughness of the Government’s investigation, the Government may need to present evidence that its investigatory avenues were limited by Defendants’ use of encrypted messaging

Because this line of reasoning would result in outcomes that are contrary to the entire legal tradition of this country? Should the government be able to charge anyone who uses Signal because they can say "well, there would be evidence but it's all encrypted"? No one is calling the judge unreasonable, it's more a commentary about aggressive prosecutors.

Based on the user rank in the BleepingComputer article's screenshot ("kilobyte") it looks forum.exploit.in. Anyone can buy a membership for ~$100 in BTC. I've read some of these places and honestly it's pretty boring. It's basically just a marketplace for software to steal money from people in first world countries (stealers, n-day exploits, crypters, AV scanning services, phishing services) and a bunch of supporting services like residential proxies, hacked RDPs, SSN lookups, and "drop" bank/crypto exchange accounts.

There are others that are public: antichat, wwh-club, bhf. I'm not on it but I think the most "elite" forum is called Mazafaka and requires a substantial deposit and a recommendation from existing members.

Exploit.in is more technical than most of these forums but a lot of these people are not really very technically skilled they just have a very good understanding of how anti fraud systems work and how to circumvent them.

But all the customers of Netflix are already paying for this traffic? The reason consumers are even willing to pay what they do for Internet is because of services like Netflix. Being an ISP is already a high margin business, there is no shortage of funds for investment. EU countries have had the fastest connections in the world for a while now. If you want wealth transfer from American companies that innovate to stagnating European companies you can just say so, no need to rationalize.

So... I am supposed to believe that ultra high income people that are known to engage in a high degree of conspicuous consumption while using minimal government services contribute nothing to the budget? They don't pay way more in VAT than the average person? They don't create any construction employment that in turn is taxed? I'm not saying they're good people or anything but if anything it seems like their obvious benefit is that they contribute to the economy.