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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

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Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#91

Post by nickff »

wredcoll wrote: post #90
nickff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a TLDR; style take-away, the last paragraph is a good place to start: > "Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telli…

Ahh, reminds me of the classic appeal. "If you don't do now, the real fascists will take over!"

Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic?

From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by large-scale media. I am not sure what part of this is fascist.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#92

Post by notahacker »

joe_mamba wrote: post #82
notahacker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt Patrick is the world's biggest Nick Shirley fan, but that's not really how it's conveyed in the article. Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota governme…

[flagged]

The mainstream media was reporting on it 6 years ago. They reported on the 50 convictions too, which people whose information environment is YouTube tend to be unaware of.

Of all the things that threaten the future of mainstream reporting, YouTubers running round Ohio for an hour trying to find people who think Haitians are eatinng the local pets isn't one of them.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#93

Post by zahlman »

dispersed wrote: post #19

Under "In which we briefly return to Minnesota": > And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera. In... the same section where he cites all of the evidence the government has put together against the fraudsters. What is the issue? That these i…

> What is the issue? That these investigations should have been more prominently featured in the mainstream news?

Important points throughout the article include: relatively little prosecution or enforcement occurred despite the awareness of rampant fraud; officials were naive to the common wisdom in fraud-prevention circles that people committing fraud in the past correlates strongly with the same individuals committing fraud in the future; "pay-and-chase" policies don't preempt funding flows to individuals suspected of fraud until it's established and feel the need to account for every fraudulent dollar instead of just blacklisting known bad actors the way that actual financial institutions do. FTA in particular, all emphasis FTA:

> For example, the primary evidence of a child attending a day-care was a handwritten sign-in sheet of minimal probative value. Prosecutors referred to them as “almost comical” and “useless.” They were routinely fraudulently filled out by a 17 year old “signing” for dozens of parents sequentially in the same handwriting, excepting cases where they were simply empty.

> To refute this “evidence”, the state forced itself to do weeks of stakeouts, producing hundreds of hours of video recording, after which it laboriously reconstructed exact counts of children seen entering/exiting a facility, compared it with the billing records, and then invoiced the centers only for proven overbilling.

> On general industry knowledge, if you are selected for examination in e.g. your credit card processing account, and your submission of evidence is “Oh yeah, those transactions are ones we customarily paperwork with a 17 year old committing obvious fraud”, your account will be swiftly closed. The financial institution doesn’t have to reach a conclusion about every dollar which has ever flowed through your account. What actual purpose would there be in shutting the barn door after the horse has left? The only interesting question is what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and clearly what you intend to do tomorrow is fraud.

Moving on,

> I don't think the serious response to Nick Shirley's "journalism" is that there was no fraud; rather, it's that he came into the situation with a thinly veiled agenda and fed his audience exactly what they wanted to hear.

My take is that there's no good reason to suspect that, except for holding an opposed thinly veiled agenda. And there is no serious dispute of the fact that billions of dollars of fraud occurred.

> Did his video make it more or less likely that we'll be able to investigate and resolve the fraud situation in MN?

It clearly made it more likely, as demonstrated by federal senate hearings that have extensively referenced the video (I've seen a segment where a senator literally had a prop photo of the "Quality Learing Center").

> the fact that they seized on this as an excuse to send in 3000 ICE agents is not exactly promising.

Your premise is that a YouTube video published Dec 26, 2025 somehow motivated a federal law enforcement action that commenced on Dec 4, 2025. Also, this claim conflates ICE with CBP. Also, per Wikipedia, out of thousands of arrests, only 23 have been of Somalis; and it's been abundantly clear in all the press functions that the targets have overwhelmingly been Hispanic — because they're overwhelmingly represented among illegal immigrants in the US, including in MN.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#94

Post by wredcoll »

kmeisthax wrote: post #88
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…

I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past. The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught…

My take is that we lack granular punishments.

Right now we have either some form of fine, and while this can be incredibly painful, usually is not, then we go straight to like multiyear prison sentences, with perhaps a few suspended sentences in between there.

I dunno, maybe a world where "you did a small bank fraud so now you have some kind of antifraud system attached to you" is genuinely worse than the one we live in now, but the idea of being able to target more specific aspects of someone rather than just prison/not prison seems interesting.

I guess we have stuff like "not allowed to use a computer for 5 years" (thanks hackers movie!), dunno how effective or practical that is.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#95

Post by zahlman »

cogman10 wrote: post #85
joe_mamba wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Tell you what, go get a camera man and go visit your local daycare center. Post on youtube how they respond.

I predict that they would not spontaneously board up the windows and introduce spelling errors into their signage.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#96

Post by zahlman »

cogman10 wrote: post #40
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.

5 years ago. And it looks like the state was actually taking pretty aggressive moves against the fraud including ongoing investigations and legislation to shut down the fraud. [1] There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals

The volume of prosecution that had occurred or was slated to occur was laughable compared to the amount of fraud known or reasonably believed to have occurred. When it is done at scale, prosecution is inefficient and much less effective than reforming processes so as to preempt fraud, which is not something that happened, as evidenced by the continuing fraud after the initial round of prosecution.

FTA:

> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction. (I commend to you this research on Medicare fraud regarding dialysis transport. And yes, the team did some interesting work to distinguish fraudulent from legitimate usage of the program. Non-emergency transport for dialysis specifically had exploded in reimbursements—see Figure 1— not because American kidneys suddenly got worse but because fraudsters adversarially targeted an identified weakness in Medicare.)

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#97

Post by mock-possum »

mikkupikku wrote: post #56
laidoffamazon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cryptoracist

Crypto[insult] is just a shorthand for saying "I don't actually have evidence to support my accusation."

No, it’s a term for a particular brand of racism -

Like complimenting someone for being ‘articulate,’ or ‘one of the good ones.’ Sounds innocent enough, until you understand the racist underpinnings.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#98

Post by cogman10 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #89
cogman10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell you what, go get a camera man and go visit your local daycare center. Post on youtube how they respond.

You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question: How does having a camera impact the daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?

> You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question:

No I'm not, you just don't like the answer. But at least you've edited to remove the "3 guys yelling at you" portion as I think even you can see how that might be a reasonable thing to do to a creep going around you business filming everything.

> daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?

The answer to this question is simple, a poor one. And I suspect that a daycare that primarily gets it's funds from people using government welfare likely isn't rolling in the dough. Broken windows are expensive to fix, boards are cheap. A misspelled sign is embarrassing but again could easily be something that the owner of the facilities just wasn't assed to pay to replace and properly fix.

My spouse worked for years in that sort of daycare which is why it's unsurprising to me that a daycare in that state exists. She, for example, did a full summer in Utah without AC while the kids were fed baloney sandwiches every day. Her's wasn't a daycare committing fraud, it was just an owner that was cutting costs at every corner to make sure their own personal wealth wasn't impacted.

A shitty daycare isn't an indicator of fraud. It's an indicator that the state has low regulation standards for daycares. Lots of states have that, and a lot of these places end up staying in operation because states decide that keeping open an F grade daycare is cheap and better for the community vs closing it because it's crap quality. They certainly don't often want to take control of such a business and they know a competently ran one isn't likely to replace it if it is shutdown.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#99

Post by mock-possum »

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]

Isn’t that just a case of “reality has a well-known liberal bias?”

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#100

Post by wredcoll »

nickff wrote: post #91
wredcoll wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, reminds me of the classic appeal. "If you don't do now, the real fascists will take over!"

Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic? From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by lar…

Except the article does mention a whole bunch of people who were investigated, arrested and convicted.

So again, now what? Are they supposed to hire more investigators? Work harder? Require less evidence? What part of the system is supposed to change and how?

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