Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes • Hacker News Board

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#171

Post by krackers » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #46

danielvf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a rap video, the entirety of which bragging about fraud against the government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ck7hTsug8 "I just been swipin' for EDD Go to the bank, get a stack at least This ** here better than sellin' Ps I made some racks that I couldn't believe Ten cards, that's two-hunnid large" (For context, "EDD" is California’s Employment Development Department.)

It's interesting to note that some states restrict the use of rap music lyrics as evidence: https://legalclarity.org/using-rap-lyrics-as-evidence-in-cri...

Very related Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#172

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:07 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #158

sdwr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very indirect. The message is "the government is soft on fraud, partially because of liberal values", but the author does everything possible to not actually say it.

I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing. Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge tha…

Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing.

As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence.

The question is: now what?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#173

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #154

Redoubts wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posts like this make it clearer to me every day why Trump won twice

can you explain that please? as far as i can tell trump is all about not trusting people but aggressively enforcing arbitrary rules no matter the cost. exactly what i am criticizing.

Reality makes some people angry and listening to trump lie makes then feel good again.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#174

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #141

650 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.

McKenzie uses paraphrases to avoid writing certain keywords. For example, he never writes "DOGE" or "Elon Musk" in this article. Instead, he writes "We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur." If you've been reading the news then you can decode these paraphrases, but they do make his articles significantly harder to read. I'm tempted to ask an LLM to replace them with more s…

Yeah that part was a bit weird. Is he trying to avoid being sued or something?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#175

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

ejiblabahaba wrote: post #120

wredcoll wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on making it a thing, but my theory is that power can't be destroyed, merely transferred, and in most cases I'd rather have the power be vested in a democratic government.

Suppose an asteroid strikes the Earth and all human life becomes extinct. What power, specifically, has been transferred, and to where?

If a tree falls and no human hears it did it make a noise?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#176

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #167

wredcoll wrote: post #70

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so. What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback. The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens. It's "fine"[2] if stripe or vis…

He literally writes about how the claims of racism and profiling were in bad faith, intended to frighten the state investigators, and that this is known from email communications revealed in discovery on some of these prosecutions where the fraud participants discuss the strategies they will employ to maximize the impact of their bad faith allegations of racism and racial profiling. There is no ambiguity here so I do…

Just to clarify, are these the ones who got arrested and sent to prison?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#177

Post by tptacek » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #172

tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing. Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge tha…

Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing. As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence. The question is: now what?

Run the rest of them down? Figure out the total scope of the fraud, so we can enact countermeasures to prevent anything like it from happening again?

Fraud targeting social welfare programs is a grave crime; it strikes at public support for those programs. It enriches criminals very specifically at the expense of those people who would most benefit from the program.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#178

Post by tptacek » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

martythemaniak wrote: post #170

tptacek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a reasonable way to understand the world. It does not matter if facts are inconvenient on Twitter (why do you care about what's being said on Twitter to begin with? stop now.) This attitude, that if reactionary tech execs are sharing something on Twitter it must be bad to talk about it, is poison.

It's an extremely unfortunate and shockingly stupid way to understand the world, but not unreasonable, because it's a accurate reflection of how the world works at the moment. Take a look at the situation "room" at Mar A Lago during the Venezuelan coup: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/trump-situation-room-photos What's the main thing up in the screen? Fucking Twitter, because that's what the US government cares about…

None of this has anything to do with the article.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#179

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

saint_fiasco wrote: post #135

wredcoll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.

My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught. From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard. But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I sa…

Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.

I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.

This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".

The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.

So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?

I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.

Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#180

Post by wredcoll » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

saint_fiasco wrote: post #157

wredcoll wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ultimate take on the article is "so what?" Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article. I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't. If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower sta…

There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through. The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened. A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do…

I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.