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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

bitsaboutmoney.com

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Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#61

Post by wredcoll »

joe_mamba wrote: post #31
Analemma_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump has pardoned literally dozens of Medicare fraudsters [0] (Lawrence Duran and Philip Esformes are two of the biggest ones, but there are a bunch more smaller ones), and also fired ~20 people who were attempting to investigate Medicare fraud. I haven't seen any HN articles about this, never mind getting to the HN front page twice a day, so I'll take your retraction and apology now. [0]: https://tennesseelookout.c…

[flagged]

Are we now required to ignore the majority of trump related crimes just so we can we report an equal number or something?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#62

Post by tptacek »

Brybry wrote: post #55
danielvf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The report to the government about a more than 50% fraud rate was from six years ago. The Minnesota government was not serious about dealing with problem. Most businesses would not last that long with a 50% customer fraud rate. Yes, there were some investigations and convictions, but nothing to on a scale that would deal with problem, nor any systematic change to a level paying huge amounts of money to scammers.

He cites the 50% number from Jay Swanson, a CCAP Investigations Unit manager, and then dismisses criticism of the number by saying the criticism requires an unreasonable standard (only criminal convictions). But if you read the cited source of how Swanson came up with that number he said it wasn't just for over-billing (claiming more kids than the places actually had). Instead, by his estimation, the employees workin…

This is a great argument. I wish this is what we were discussing rather than Nick Shirley and the partisan politics of the issue.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#63

Post by wredcoll »

tptacek wrote: post #54
martythemaniak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing what to pay attention to says a lot about who you are and what you think. The largest fraud in the history of the country is unfolding in Washington, there is endless potential BAM content that would be of incredible consequence, but you won't find any mention of anything like that on his blog. Anybody that knows who patio is knows where his bread gets buttered understands very well why he would never say an…

No, to all of this. Talking about the largest fraud scheme in the history of the midwest without taking on all of Washington corruption doesn't make you a "gish gallop" or "Banon's flood" (whatever that is). In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a gish gallop. It's a single coherent argument. If you can rebut it, do so.

"the history of the midwest" seems awfully specific and easy to redefine as required.

That being said, it was a fairly interesting article about fraud in general, but if this is the only fraud article he wrote, why is that? There's lots of public frauds going on right now, is he going to write about them next?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#64

Post by wredcoll »

tptacek wrote: post #34
laidoffamazon wrote: post #18

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of…

No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.

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

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#65

Post by tptacek »

wredcoll wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to all of this. Talking about the largest fraud scheme in the history of the midwest without taking on all of Washington corruption doesn't make you a "gish gallop" or "Banon's flood" (whatever that is). In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a gish gallop. It's a single coherent argument. If you can rebut it, do so.

"the history of the midwest" seems awfully specific and easy to redefine as required. That being said, it was a fairly interesting article about fraud in general, but if this is the only fraud article he wrote, why is that? There's lots of public frauds going on right now, is he going to write about them next?

Give it any reasonable definition you like, it'll probably still hold! This is extremely not the only fraud article he's written, and if you don't know that, why are you offering any opinions on his site at all? It's fine not to know anything about it! Just don't pretend otherwise and you'll be OK.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#66

Post by tptacek »

wredcoll wrote: post #64
tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.

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

The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.

It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#67

Post by [deleted] »

clucas wrote: post #10
sdwr wrote: post #3

All I remember hearing about this is how creepy and racist it was to look for kids at a black-owned daycare. It was a scam the whole time?

According to OP, there is substantial evidence indicating about 50% of the daycares are scams. I've seen Nick Shirley's video, I don't think he demonstrated any concrete about any of the sites he visited (he's not a very good investigator), but if the 50% number is correct... well, the broken clock was probably right at least a couple of times that day.

[deleted]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#68

Post by almosthere »

He was able to show all the evidence David had. The evidence had to be leaked out of the government of MN because it was silent whistleblowers that had been turned down after doing internal investigations. The government of MN may be complicit in all of this. It could be that they were trying to be anti-racist, which is why a lot of the fraud is specifically being performed by Somalians. But it can also be pay for vote fraud - where the leaders of the Somalian communities tell everyone who to vote for, and they are doing this because Walz (or some other people) are shielding the daycares from being shut down.

There is literally nothing wrong with stating this, we ought not be political about this. There may also be conservatives being elevated from Fraud as well, all of it should be routed.

At this point it definitely warrants deep investigations, not more articles trying to destroy a 23 year old that went viral.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#69

Post by blurbleblurble »

tptacek wrote: post #34
laidoffamazon wrote: post #18

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of…

No? He dunks on Shirley. His point is that professional investigators found and documented much worse things.

As if: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916838

What if this article is just the rationalist version of the Nick Shirley hit piece?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#70

Post by wredcoll »

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 visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.

It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).

There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.

[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.

[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...

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