What decides if a founder will get convicted or walk free like Adam Neumann did / Builder.ai guys did ?
Connections.
Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
191–200 of 366 posts
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#192Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still what she did was fraud. From the article - "Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying “they have a lot to blame themselves” for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was “punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan’s stupidity.” "
Not to justify it, but why isn't the founder of UPS (edit: Fedex) in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino. If you turn a profit no one cares (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works), if you lose it's fraud. When all the winners are doin…
There's no knowledge as to whether he used company money, or personal cash/line of credit. In fact, there's no knowledge of the story is even true, apart from what one dead man wrote!
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to justify it, but why isn't the founder of UPS (edit: Fedex) in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino. If you turn a profit no one cares (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works), if you lose it's fraud. When all the winners are doin…
There is truth to this. She was exposed because JP Morgan ran a marketing campaign that converted extremely poorly. Better purchased data might've prevented significant forensics. The poor due diligence had already been signed off. While she committed fraud, I feel sorry for her because of her naivety. It must've been a sick moment when they asked to examine the data during due diligence. If she'd known that would be…
She's so naive, she just hung around until someone found out the fraud.
It made me wonder what she was thinking when her $30M share landed in her bank account. "Whee, I got away with it", "it's their problem now"?
I don't think I would commit fraud, but if I did it for that amount, I would be on a flight to Malaysia or some other place with no extradition with the US!
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the nineties, Philips was days away from signing a licensing deal for a revolutionary video compression technology that compressed whole movies down to 8KB. The former Philips CTO was a strong believer. And then the inventor died and nothing ever came of it. To be a fly on the wall during due diligence meetings between Philips engineers and management. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-man-who-was-paid-e113000-f…
I came up with a similarly impressive compression scheme as a young teen, shortly after I started programming. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Take 5 bytes, compute a 4-byte checksum, and just store the checksum. After all the chances of a checksum collision is miniscule. When decompressing just iterate over all 5-byte values until you get the correct checksum. The fantastic feature was of course that you could a…
I had another hairbrained idea once. Let's say you want to compress the number 5384615385. Find two numbers x and y so that x/y equals some number whose decimal part is 5384615385. In this case, that's 7/13. So the compressed output is just 7 and 13, which could be encoded very succinctly, thus saving lots of storage space; and decompression is just multiplying numbers.
Unfortunately, while the idea works for some input sequences, most numbers aren't rational, and most sequences would require numerators/denominators that would be larger than the input. So not practically feasible.
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#196Former federal inmate here who was recently released from prison a month ago today (I did 18 months): The big deal here was the loss amount, which can be construed any number of ways whether we like it or not. This will jack up the points and tilt the scale for the sentencing guidelines, and believe me they are archaic. After all is said and done, Charlie Javice will be hanging out at a prison camp—probably down ther…
did u transition out in corecivic?
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#197>> A prosecutor, Micah Fergenson, though, said JPMorgan “didn’t get a functioning business” in exchange for its investment. “They acquired a crime scene.” I do not understand how an acquisition this big got thru due diligence without noticing all the fake users. Anyone in corporate M&A know if it is normal to spend this much money without inspecting the goods? Seems like the most basic of OLAP queries and two days of…
I remember when HP announced their plan to acquire Autonomy. I was very familiar with their tech and their status in the industry at the time and knew they were approaching irrelevance with no chance to boost sales of anything. They completed the deal anyway, which was followed by HP firing their CEO, lawsuits for misrepresenting their financial status and a complete writedown of the total acquisition cost. It seemed…
Reading about Autonomy, it always confused me that Mike Lynch was found guilty of fraud in the UK but exonerated in the US — what's your take on that?
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#198My favorite thing about this case is how she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison, "“Don’t worry — I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit" when she was trying to convince the engineer to fabricate their user data. From the complaint: > In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data. > Engine…
This is why, as an engineer, it seems futile to make an ethical stand against something. They'll just find someone else to do it. Early in my career I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark, essentially to make it seem our software performed better than it really did. I agonized over it because I was a junior developer just starting out my career, and eventually got the courage to tell my manager I wouldn't do…
The ethical stand serves the dual purpose of: a) trying to make sure the company does the right thing, and b) avoiding liability.
Seems like Engineer-1 failed at stopping her, but managed to avoid taking any blame at the end of the day.
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the scam that the codec had the raw video in it, so the "files" could be made trivially small?
The one I looked at had a little video receiver in the box. You can draw your own conclusions from there.
My conclusion is “they were storing the video in the cloud”? (Tongue in cheek interpretation)
Re: Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the nineties, Philips was days away from signing a licensing deal for a revolutionary video compression technology that compressed whole movies down to 8KB. The former Philips CTO was a strong believer. And then the inventor died and nothing ever came of it. To be a fly on the wall during due diligence meetings between Philips engineers and management. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-man-who-was-paid-e113000-f…
I came up with a similarly impressive compression scheme as a young teen, shortly after I started programming. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Take 5 bytes, compute a 4-byte checksum, and just store the checksum. After all the chances of a checksum collision is miniscule. When decompressing just iterate over all 5-byte values until you get the correct checksum. The fantastic feature was of course that you could a…
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