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U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

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Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#51

Post by nostromo »

Evbn wrote: post #50
nostromo wrote: post #11

I was struck when we incorporated our company and raised financing how much we still use ink and paper to keep track of things like corporate ownership. When signing so many documents I wanted to seal them with paraffin wax and send them to our lawyers via carrier pigeon. In the case of Facebook, a multi-billion dollar company, it seems amazing that someone can come out of the woodwork and with a little effort in doc…

It is called escrow, and it is a longstanding industry.

That doesn't help in cases like these.

In order for it to help, a company or individual would need a way to say, "only contracts held in escrow are valid from the period from x to y" and have it hold up in court.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#52

Post by pg »

alexqgb wrote: post #28
grellas wrote: post #21

A few thoughts: 1. When Ceglia first filed his claims, I called it a "lawsuit full of holes [that was] built up by sensationalist reporting into a supposed major threat to Facebook and to Mr. Zuckerberg" and concluded that, "in the courts, this thing is going nowhere." ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537158 ) My sense of this had nothing to do with any fraudulent tampering with evidence as alleged now in the c…

This Atlantic piece on mob rule in Nigeria highlights three frightening features of lynchings; incredible speed, terrifying spontaneity, and often egregious inaccuracy. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/per... There is an often-hidden virtue to the methodical, deliberative nature of a real court system that's easy to miss until you see how humans can behave in its absence.

It may be something forums in particular have yet to evolve. Now if only I could figure out how...

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#53

Post by grellas »

domainregistry wrote: post #36
grellas wrote: post #21

A few thoughts: 1. When Ceglia first filed his claims, I called it a "lawsuit full of holes [that was] built up by sensationalist reporting into a supposed major threat to Facebook and to Mr. Zuckerberg" and concluded that, "in the courts, this thing is going nowhere." ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537158 ) My sense of this had nothing to do with any fraudulent tampering with evidence as alleged now in the c…

"and retained the prestigious firm of DLA Piper" What are your thoughts on the pox on DLA Piper's house as a result of taking him on as a client? Doesn't it speak to their naiveté after reviewing the materials he was able to present? Or?

A black eye for the firm, for sure, but no lasting damage. Plausible story. Compelling legal position (if true). Big, fat and vulnerable defendant, with a ready-made villain at the center. And (I assume) a big, fat potential contingent fee in the offing. It likely proved irresistible for a Big Law firm trying to slog its way through a steep downturn.

Still, it is bad judgment, as I see it, to take on a high-profile representation of a guy with one conviction already under his belt on what would seem to be a very opportunistic claim ("Yeah, I know innocent investors put in millions, and the company is now worth billions, but I am a ghost from six years’ past who can pull out a piece of paper saying I own more than half of it because of my $1,000 investment.") If you are going to step into this pile of whatever as a law firm, you had better do some strong due diligence to make sure it holds together. I suspect that wasn't done here, much to the firm's ultimate regret.

That said, DLA has a great reputation and the bad effects of this will prove ephemeral, especially since it high-tailed it out of there once forensics showed it had been caught with its pants down. Highly embarrassing, but nothing more.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#54

Post by Tipzntrix »

redthrowaway wrote: post #47

Can anyone give a reasonable argument for why mail fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years? That seems ludicrous in the extreme. Why does mail fraud incur a greater penalty than rape, kidnapping, and most forms of murder?

IANAL, but don't those have a maximum of life (25 years)?

To threaten defendants, they also stack each single charge one on top of each other to make 5 cases look like a maximum of 125 years too.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#56

Post by UnFleshedOne »

pacaro wrote: post #26
SonOfLilit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no technological problem with creating a "contract bureau" - just demand contracts to be in a somehow-digital format (scanned handwritten document counts) and have everyone send [SHA1(document) + names of entities signed on the document] to the bureau. Only problem with demanding this is that you /want/ people to be able to sell their car without access to a computer. That, and authentication.

Ok, I've now seen reference to both MD5 and SHA1 w.r.t. digests which would have long shelf lives. Please either talk in generic terms, or suggest the use of an algorithm that doesn't have known collisions and/or suspected weakness. I do understand that people are using these as a mental shorthand for "A one-way cryptographic hash", but when your instinctive exemplar of a digest algorithm is in the "not-recommended"…

Would collisions in MD5 really matter in case of legal documents? How would you use it to forge a contract? Take original, make alterations, then add data to the non-visible part of the file until hashes match? Wouldn't that be easy to detect? "What is that 15 Kb of stuff doing there? It is not normally part of pdf that any sane program would write."

Or are there some more sophisticated methods?

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#57

Post by rmah »

redthrowaway wrote: post #47

Can anyone give a reasonable argument for why mail fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years? That seems ludicrous in the extreme. Why does mail fraud incur a greater penalty than rape, kidnapping, and most forms of murder?

Maybe compared to what Europe sentences murderers. But in NY State, 2nd degree murder is 25 to life and 1st degree is life.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#58

Post by tptacek »

redthrowaway wrote: post #47

Can anyone give a reasonable argument for why mail fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years? That seems ludicrous in the extreme. Why does mail fraud incur a greater penalty than rape, kidnapping, and most forms of murder?

Because mail fraud cases address a very large spectrum of actual crimes. The typical sentence for a mail fraud case is 21 months; there exists a very large number of aggravating factors that increase mail fraud sentences, including the scale of the operation (if you mass-mail to perpetrate fraud, you'll do more time), the sophistication of the victims (if you try to defraud fixed-income seniors, you'll do more time), sophisticated attempts to conceal your activities to avoid investigators, if you react to investigation by trying to move your whole operation out of US jurisdiction, if you damage the solvency of a bank, things like that.

People fixate on the maximum sentences when they should focus instead on the minimums (here, 10 months). Just by nature of what "mail fraud" investigations represent, you're bound to get wild swings from case to case.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#59

Post by pacaro »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #56
pacaro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I've now seen reference to both MD5 and SHA1 w.r.t. digests which would have long shelf lives. Please either talk in generic terms, or suggest the use of an algorithm that doesn't have known collisions and/or suspected weakness. I do understand that people are using these as a mental shorthand for "A one-way cryptographic hash", but when your instinctive exemplar of a digest algorithm is in the "not-recommended"…

Would collisions in MD5 really matter in case of legal documents? How would you use it to forge a contract? Take original, make alterations, then add data to the non-visible part of the file until hashes match? Wouldn't that be easy to detect? "What is that 15 Kb of stuff doing there? It is not normally part of pdf that any sane program would write." Or are there some more sophisticated methods?

I can imagine (and therefore we should assume that the attacker can imagine with far more craftiness) several ways of hiding junk in a PDF.

E.g. How about in any binary content - embedded fonts, images etc.

My big concern is that in this scenario an attacker may have years to create an attack. One small part of designing a security protocol is understanding timeliness constraints.

Re: U.S. Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multi-Billion Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook

#60

Post by shasta »

tptacek wrote: post #39
shasta wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legality of fraud should have nothing to do with whether the mail was used.

It doesn't, really. The only difference is the venue where it's prosecuted.

It at least affects maximum sentence, right?
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