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DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

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Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#341

Post by alephnerd »

bugbuddy wrote: post #330
alephnerd wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citations needed HDI comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [0]. Notice how Cambodia and Bangladesh used to be developmental peers until 2010. Life expectancy comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [1]. Mean years of schooling in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [2] Gross GNI per Capita PPP (log normalized) in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [3] - the only metric Cambodia is roughly comparable…

How and where in the Merriam-Webster are these supposed to be measures of “desperation”? Where is the citation for Cambodians going to work in Vietnam and not the other way around? Also, cherry picking PPP GDP instead of commonly used nominal GDP to avoid conceding a point is quite desperate. Cambodia has a higher GDP per capita than Bangladesh but you won’t admit that. Can you buy a barrel of crude oil with PPP doll…

> cherry picking

Then why are you ignoring Cambodia's abysmal education rate and life expectancy against Bangladesh?

Cambodia has Sub-Saharan levels of developmental indicators, and in fact plenty of similarly sized or larger Sub-Saharan countries like Kenya, Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, and Angola have outpaced Cambodia despite Cambodia being within ASEAN and with all the opportunities to take advantage of FDI-driven growth from neighbors like Malaysia and Thailand, let alone South Korea and Japan.

Cambodia has had a geographic advantage that most LDCs did not have, and has absolutely blundered it because of horrid leadership.

Heck, the median age in Cambodia is now significantly higher than much more developed Phillipines, so a demogrpanic crisis is clearly looming.

> the average Vietnamese can also be said to be much poorer and much more desperate than the average Malaysian

They absolutely are.

You don't find Malaysians working under the table in California or the UK, or cleaning toilets in South Korea or Japan. You do with Vietnamese.

Poverty in VN is much more severe than that in Malaysia (and Thailand), and the social safety net is almost nonexistent.

And that's the thing - even with such desperation, you still see Cambodians doing the same work Viet would do in South Korea in Vietnam or Thailand.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#342

Post by alephnerd »

jjangkke wrote: post #296
alephnerd wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know they are “desperate” Based on the fact that Cambodian day laborers come to work as migrant workers in a region that Vietnamese (Kinh or Jarai) try to leave if they can. HDI metrics themselves also represents that fact. Gia Lai - one of the poorest provinces in VN - has a higher Human Development Index (HDI) than all of Cambodia. > Given the recent developments in Bangladesh Yet the average Banglades…

[flagged]

I think they are just a hypernationalistic Cambodian, Khmer American, or a former expat in Cambodia. I saw content from similar types of accounts during the Thailand-Cambodia conflict and the Techo Canal crisis.

But yea, it's stupid tbh and shows how badly Hun Sen is wreaking Cambodia.

The only reason Vietnam is where it's at today is because of being friendly to foreign investors and working on rooting out criminalization in the 2010s. Otherwise, VN would have languished. Cambodia has the right pieces to become the next VN, but is completely squandering the opportunity.

This kind of ploy to leveraging hypernationalism to mask weak economic growth (an LDC like Cambodia should not be growing at 5-6%) and increased isolation.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#343

Post by yieldcrv »

vkou wrote: post #99
Reason077 wrote: post #62

Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.

Wait, hold on, I thought the promise of crypto was that: 1. The feds can't take your money. 2. Once your money's gone, it's gone. If criminals can't count on #1 holding true, and their victims can't count on #2 holding true, what is even the point of it?

Its not clear how the feds got the money

More information as the mystery deepens, it's not proceeds from just the pig butchering

https://www.elliptic.co/blog/15-billion-us-seizure-reveals-p...

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#344

Post by dang »

jjangkke wrote: post #296
alephnerd wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know they are “desperate” Based on the fact that Cambodian day laborers come to work as migrant workers in a region that Vietnamese (Kinh or Jarai) try to leave if they can. HDI metrics themselves also represents that fact. Gia Lai - one of the poorest provinces in VN - has a higher Human Development Index (HDI) than all of Cambodia. > Given the recent developments in Bangladesh Yet the average Banglades…

[flagged]

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#345

Post by dang »

bugbuddy wrote: post #239
timtom123 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people. "less-policed" is the entire country. ~50 years since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide . Vietnam was by far my favorite of the three and the contrast between the three countries is stark.

[flagged]

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597318 also. I'm sympathetic for where you're coming from, even though I don't fully understand—but this implementation is not working.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#346

Post by dang »

laughingcurve wrote: post #279
bugbuddy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#347

Post by dang »

bugbuddy wrote: post #340
bugbuddy wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism. There is nothing postmodern about it.

Replying to JumpCrisscross response below: >> Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism >It wasn’t racial stereotyping. It was stereotyping a country’s population as sad and desperate. Saying X country’s quality of life sucks isn’t racist. >If they’d said or implied Cambodian Americans are also sad and desperate, sure. But they didn’t. This is a distinction without a d…

Could you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? Other commenters are doing it too, of course, but you've done it the most. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

I totally get that you have good reasons for feeling so strongly about Cambodia, Vietnam, and so on, and I also get (to some extent) how the root comment was provocative. It did sound like it was putting down an entire population, or at least was easy to take that way.

But going into aggressive abstract argument is not a helpful way to respond. It just degrades the discussion, poisons community further, and causes everyone to dig in.

A more helpful way to correct any misperception in the OP would be to share something of your own background that leads you to perceive things differently, i.e. to express your own personal experience and what it has taught you, that's relevant to the topic.

You don't have to do that, of course—it's just an option. But we do need you to respect the site guidelines when posting here, and you've been breaking them badly in this thread. That's not ok, even if your views are entirely correct and your feelings entirely justified.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been posting nationalistic flamewar comments in other threads too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45587866

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649278

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626401

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44626241

We ban accounts that do this, so we really need you to stop.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#348

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bugbuddy wrote: post #335
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism I’m not in Cambodia. The only way I can relate to its people is by stereotyping. Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country or you’re a racist, which is absurd.

> Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country This logical fallacy is a False Dichotomy (also known as a False Dilemma or Black-and-White Fallacy). This fallacy occurs when an argument incorrectly presents two opposing options as the only possibilities, when in fact a wide range of other options exist. How it applies to the statement: The statement "Sayi…

> This logical fallacy is a False Dichotomy (also known as a False Dilemma or Black-and-White Fallacy)

Fair enough. Saying "negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism" also permits neutral stereotyping not being racist.

That said, don't you see the problem with ruling out any negative stereotype? Populations have characteristics. Those characteristics can be judged positive, neutral and negative from a given perspective. Not every perspective that judges a population is racially animated. (And not all judging from afar is wrong. To say otherwise dismisses history and anthropology--which study people separated from us by the much-less bridgeable time--as practical fields.)

Dostoevsky and Turgenev consistently portrayed the imperial Russian peasantry in a baseline state of misery. That wasn't racism. It was--based on what I know--an accurate description of their state. I'm (in part) ethnically Indian. I don't think someone saying that Indians were despearate and divided when the East India Company landed would be speaking racially insensitively.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#349

Post by mminer237 »

Muromec wrote: post #247
sethammons wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beating someone with a wrench feels unlawful/forbidden pretty much everywhere.

Unless you are FBI of course

Uh, no, a judge can put you in prison, but it's still very much unlawful for the FBI to beat you with a wrench.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#350

Post by ergocoder »

jjangkke wrote: post #302
wraptile wrote: post #72

Btw this is low-key the reason why Cambodia almost went to war with Thailand recently. In particular what's interesting is that how quickly Cambodia repurposed scam center employees as internet trolls. They're onto a really powerful golden goose here that not only brings in 15B usd but also empowers the current dictatorship. But also it's a pit of doom that is destined to erupt anytime now.

At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters. We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough…

People love to hate US being the world police. For a small developing country, US is a godsend.
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