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I Worked for a Criminal Organization

openmonstervision.github.io

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Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#181

Post by dragonwriter »

missingrib wrote: post #179
wongarsu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is primarily your earned income where you pay taxes from. Income you were able to earn because infrastructure allows businesses to operate, police forces protect their property, physical safety and the shipment of goods, a court system allows peaceful resolution of conflicts, armed forces protect you from invasion, fire departments prevent entire cities from burning down by putting fires out early etc. Taking th…

The "benefits" were forced upon you without your consent, though. And some of those are blatantly misleading. For instance, most of the defense budget isn't spent on protecting the US from invasion. Most companies protect their property by hiring security guards, not calling the police.

> The "benefits" were forced upon you without your consent

Yes, but one of those benefits is privilege of excluding others from the use and enjoyment of goods—i.e., property—so if you reject it...

> Most companies protect their property by hiring security guards, not calling the police.

No, they hire security guards who call the police, not instead of calling the police.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#182

Post by tomatotomato37 »

everdrive wrote: post #167
bArray wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A shop replaced my failed catalytic converter ($1200+ > replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of > time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me > to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them. The mechanic may have even made even more money by scrapping your catalytic converter. In the UK, swapping the exhaust out for a straight pipe is a common (illegal) modification for greater p…

Frustratingly, removing your catalytic converter has a very tiny effect on performance, and an enormous effect on emissions. Kids into car culture tend to hold very superstitious ideas about cars and performance. (eg, the manufacturer intentionally hobbled your car with a restrictive cat-back exhaust, and replacing it with something loud and terrible will "unlock" a significant amount of hidden horsepower.)

The reason for the superstition is that it is true ...in the 70s when the latest in emission technologies was clogging the exhaust with platinum balls. Now-a-days converters are built intelligently & removing it just reduces performance by fucking up the O2 sensor readings unless you also dump a grand on a new ECU

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#183

Post by ryanmercer »

didericis wrote: post #48
nitrogen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these used to inflate records of customer bills for laundering, or to deflate customer bills for tax fraud?

> pockets the unreported tax I’d assume tax fraud is much more common than money laundering. Maybe drug dealers and the like create enough of a market for “reverse zappers” to exist; not sure.

This is anecdotal but when I was involved with an "Ultra Lounge" (upscale club) the owner had, on several occasions, individuals approach him wanting to buy a % of the club with cold hard cash.

I was there for one instance, 2 guys had asked him for a meeting to get some advice on opening a pizza place or something and wanted the input of a non-competing experienced business owner in the area so he agreed to meet with them and I was there so I sat in just to see if I could learn anything from the exchange. Like we're in some cheesy movie, these guys make small talk before one sets a briefcase on the table and opens it to reveal gobs of what appeared to be 10s and 20s and proceeded to tell him they actually wanted to buy a percentage of the club cash and he shut them right down and asked them to leave. After they left he told me he was approached multiple times in the first couple years of business with such offers. People wanting to dump a bunch of cash in his lap that, presumably, he would then trickle into the coffers via fictional sales as a way for them to launder some money via their cash infusion and potentially get far more back if the club remained successful. At the time I legitimately thought they were friends of his and he was pranking me or something, it was so absurd. I came to realize though that those selling drugs definitely love clubs as we'd have kids in their early 20s coming in 1-2 times a week and buying bottle service at 300$+ a bottle to impress friends/girls week after week with no realistic way of having that much disposable income.

This guy was super shady in general, and his shadiness is why we ultimately parted ways, but even that was too much for him.

It would not surprise me in the least if there was a market for this for bars and clubs that had "creative" income streams on the side. He would regularly have the bartenders pour house shots (An "IV" of OJ/shot of soda water/cheapest well vodka) for free for a group of people to get them to stay (often it was bridal parties) to make the club appear busy and doing stuff like that would certainly be a way to legitimately burn through some cheap liquor that you could ring up as premium-priced cocktails. I could see restaraunts that do free refills on drinks also being able to do this by ringing up some extra drink/burger/fries sales and fudging the numbers several percent, if not ten percent, to similarly sneak illicit money in.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#184

Post by Kaiyou »

dragonwriter wrote: post #162
Kaiyou wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint, so I imagine nobody losing sleep over dealing with it in an appropriate way.

> Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint, It's odd how the people that think this are generally the same ones most likely to argue that “positive rights” that impose a cost on others are an incoherent concept, and positive entitlement can at most be a limited privilege granted by others based on available resources and expected utility of the grant. But they fail to recognize that the “right” to wall off goods from…

You're using some words that I do not know if I understand them correctly, but let me just say that I personally think of rights as something that is either given to you by someone or taken by force and the only rights you truly have are the ones you can personally defend with your own force, since the other ones can be taken from you at any time. If you think you should have rights that you cannot take with your own force, that is the definition of entitlement.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

ikeboy wrote: post #166
dragonwriter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell The fake “Channel Partners” addressed in the article are paragraph 4 of the indictment. The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment, the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. It seems preposterous to view those as unrelated.

>The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. >the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in respondin…

> It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity.

It says that when a parent company agent was in possession of a warrant addressed to the parent company at the location of one of the fraudulent “Channel Partners” they were ordered to interact with law enforcement as if they were exclusively an agent of the “Channel Partner”.

Now, I suppose that could be argued to not be primarily intended to evade compliance with the warrant but instead to maintain the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners”, but either way it's a deliberate act in furtherance of a crime that could be separately prosecuted.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#186

Post by Kaiyou »

Frondo wrote: post #157
Kaiyou wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint, so I imagine nobody losing sleep over dealing with it in an appropriate way.

Taxes are not theft, they are an agreed-upon payment for being a member of a society. Your parents, as guardians of a newborn, made your initial decision for you to bring you into the society. You maintained your consent by retaining your citizenship when you reached an age of majority. Taxes are the price you pay for retaining the benefits of your citizenship. Not theft.

They are a forced payment. To add insult to injury they are wasted on stupid things in a very inefficient way all the time.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#187

Post by jotm »

psychoslave wrote: post #145
jotm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, look, ethics is great and all but when you risk being homeless or hungry, it quickly goes out the window. Especially for "victimless" (i.e. no one is directly affected) illegal activity.

I would be very curious to be presented with a single case of tax evasion chiefly decided to avoid becoming homeless or hungry. Also, ethics include one own integrity, it is not about sacrificing everything to others - at least not all ethical inquiries will conclude that.

Oh, I apologize.

I have employed an exotic concept called an example, which would allow me to reply to an insightful comment such as "Ethics. Where were yours?" (a magnificent contribution, might I add) with an explanation for the apparent lack of ethics in some situations.

These examples are usually not completely related, but also not totally unrelated, to the original article.

I sometimes forget that not everyone learns this communication concept early in life. It's a worthwhile endeavour, in my humble opinion.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#188

Post by kylehotchkiss »

ta999999171 wrote: post #86
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is: every old Japanese car with their hood open on a Friday evening at sheetz.

This guy knows what he's talking about! Also, Sheetz is a regional gas station (once) popular with street and track racers. I guess it still is, but their food quality has gone through the floor.

It's always been through the floor. If it seemed like it was good before, that's the nostalgia filter kicking in.

Wawa for life.

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#189

Post by TeMPOraL »

wpietri wrote: post #178
TeMPOraL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Also, with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently complicated business model is indistinguishable from fraud.

That's beautiful. And so very true. I think the very best liars and fraudsters are the ones who they themselves don't know what's true. And what better way to not know than complexity!

That's related to Frankfurt's definition of bullshit[0]. If you purposefully say something that's not true, you're lying, but if you don't care at all whether what you say is true or not, you're bullshitting.

Complexity seems indeed very good at enabling bullshit - bullshitters caught spreading lies can just plead ignorance and point towards complexity.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con...

Re: I Worked for a Criminal Organization

#190

Post by ikeboy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #185
ikeboy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. >the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in respondin…

> It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. It says that when a parent company agent was in possession of a warrant addressed to the parent company at the location of one of the fraudulent “Channel Partners” they were ordered to interact with law enforcement as if they were exclusively an agent of the “Channel Partner”. Now, I suppose that could be argued to not be primarily intended to evade compliance wi…

>the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners”

You still don't get it. The fraud was submitting false documentation to ARIN. Operating multiple shell companies is perfectly legal, as long as you don't submit false sworn affidavits and otherwise lie in the course of your activities.

Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying. It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on it, and he says he wasn't permitted to reach out to LEO to clarify.

Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.

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