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Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

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Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#101

Post by vintermann »

j_bum wrote: post #61
defen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.

He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos. E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s). That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.

When people leave autoplay on, they might not even realize they watched an ad, I guess?

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#102

Post by vintermann »

ariwilson wrote: post #7
trollbridge wrote: post #4

Circa 2010, I met Tai and he wanted some work done for his portfolio of dating websites he had back then. (He had a whole bunch of them targeted to various ethnic groups, religious subgroups and so on.) It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third w…

I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.

Earning a lot does the heavy lifting here (and rent of various kinds does the heavily lifting of that in turn). It's far, far easier to be "frugal" in % of your income when your income is high.

People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#103

Post by filoleg »

loa_in_ wrote: post #92
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know. Pre-Trump that is NOT what used to happen in these cases. Defrauding your investors used to actually land rich people in jail.

But it's not investor fraud if it actually makes the company money and is at least somewhat in the gray area.

No, it is still fraud, even if your fraudelent actions ended up making the investors/company money. And it will land you in prison.

This is exactly what Martin Shkreli spent his time in prison for (and not for anything related to Daraprim drug price increases, despite what some people apparently believe, as I discovered).

TLDR (with a great deal of oversimplification): he ran a hedge fund (MSMB) and was lying to investors about how much money the fund had and about the investment strategies. He then started a pharma company called Retrophin and used some of his equity in Retrophin to compensate the MSMB investors for their losses (without their knowledge, i.e., basically the exact same issue with lying about investment strategies to investors he had earlier). It just so happened that Retrophin ended up performing fairly well at the time, and that equity actually ended up making profit for those investors overall.

Investors/company making money in the end is not a valid defense against fraud charges. If a hedge fund manager or a CEO cashes out the investor/company accounts in secret, goes to Vegas to place it all on red, makes a gain, and then puts it back into the investor/company account, it is still a crime. Despite the fact that the investors/company made money in the end, I don’t think it is wrong to call this a fraudelent move.

However, the wheels of justice tend to be slow, and it might take some time for the consequences to catch up. Those fraudelent actions on Shkreli’s part were taken around 2012-2013, the investigation was opened in 2015, and he got convicted in 2017.

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#104

Post by filoleg »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #58

Tai Lopez, the lamborghini youtube influencer, bought Radioshack? The company that once challenged Apple for the home computer market with Tandy Computers?

Yes, he bought a dead husk of a company.

After tons of internal crisises, mismanagement, and consecutive revenue losses, Radioshack got delisted from exchanges and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015.

After that, Radioshack got acquired, got mismanaged again, the parent company went broke, and Radioshack filed for bankruptcy again in 2017.

By the time Tai Lopez got his hands on it (late 2020), there was pretty much nothing of value left there, except the brand (and even the brand was a questionable value proposition at that point tbh).

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#105

Post by lolc »

monkeyelite wrote: post #25

I wonder if his prominent online persona made him more likely to be targeted. People at the SEC are very likely to be in the age range who is familiar with him. Not to suggest he is or is not guilty but that being loud often makes others watch you more closely.

I think it's the other way around: There are many fraud cases like his. We only hear about this one because he is notorious.

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#107

Post by DonHopkins »

hattmall wrote: post #41
nenenejej wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it is all legal had he been forthcoming. I heard the "borrow money to pay dividends" thing was a well worn playbook. Not necessarily a ponzi. ut usally borrowed money serviced by earnings. Is it illegal because it wasn't stated? How to they prize apart ponzi from just aggressive debt.

It's only a Ponzi if you are not actually engaged in any real business activity. Financing payments to early investors with later investors money isn't a great indicator of the quality of the business but it's acceptable if you aren't misrepresenting things to get the new investors and there is legitimate business activity.

It's only a Ponzi scheme if it comes from Ponzi Vineyards. Otherwise it's just sparkling fraud.

https://www.ponzivineyards.com/

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ponzi+Vineyards/@45.379619...

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#108

Post by walthamstow »

nextworddev wrote: post #18
iammrpayments wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately he has been promoting “AI automation agency” course. He says anyone can label themselves “AI automation expert” and charge thousands of dollars for it, then just use vibe coding tools to do the job or outsource it. He also says he built an entire app using replit.

Unironically the gap between his AI automation agency and VC backed "Enterprise Automation" startups is smaller than you think..

Quite. Sounds as much like Builder.AI, the London startup where AI genuinely did stand for "actually Indians", as it does Amazon Go, whose pick-and-go stores had their cameras monitored by people in India to ensure it all worked as they said it did.

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#109

Post by UltraSane »

an0malous wrote: post #90
UltraSane wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that some people work so hard at running scam companies like this guy.

Wait until you hear about tech startups Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do. The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly

I true scam company is one that was never intended to make a profit but just steal investor money.

Re: Buyers of Radio Shack, Pier 1 brands accused of running $112M Ponzi scheme

#110

Post by foxyv »

primitivesuave wrote: post #57
modeless wrote: post #5

People may remember Tai Lopez from his "Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here" YouTube ad, subject of several parodies such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about…

He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.

Oh god, I can just imagine how LLMs could make this even worse. A dating site where half the people are just bots stringing you along.
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