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Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

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Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#91

Post by M2Ys4U »

thirsteh wrote: post #45
ubernostrum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I do not understand how a NY prosecutor can subpoena a Japanese business? If you offer services to, or engage in financial transactions with, a person in Jurisdiction A, Jurisdiction A can enforce its laws on you. You should not in any way be surprised by this fact.

That's all well and good, but Mt. Gox likely won't conduct any more business in NY. It gets even more problematic if they don't actually operate any legal entity in the U.S. The U.S. may enforce its laws upon U.S. entities, but it has no authority to do so on e.g. a Japanese one, unless a treaty/agreement exists that facilitates it. This is why China-only companies that engage in IP theft (or vice versa) aren't being…

>The U.S. may enforce its laws upon U.S. entities, but it has no authority to do so on e.g. a Japanese one, unless a treaty/agreement exists that facilitates it.

The US has a history of extending its jurisdiction to practically anywhere if the Internet is involved. effective enforcement is another matter entirely, though.

>This is why China-only companies that engage in IP theft (or vice versa) aren't being hauled into court on the daily.

"IP theft" is pretty much impossible to achieve. You're thinking of infringement.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#92

Post by jasonzemos »

sheetjs wrote: post #65
downandout wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find his accomplishments dubious because a) I believe that there are substantially more effective ways to deter crime and punish offenders than the lengthy prison sentences that his office pushes for in most cases, and b) he uses every major case he brings elected office, and is unnecessarily destroying many lives in that pursuit. In my opinion, that negates any positive things he may have done and renders all of h…

> I believe that there are substantially more effective ways to deter crime and punish offenders than the lengthy prison sentences that his office pushes for in most cases ... like fines? The fines we end up seeing are paltry compared to the profits of the activity, effectively incentivizing illicit practices

> The fines we end up seeing are paltry compared to the profits of the activity, effectively incentivizing illicit practices

Then the problem that should be addressed is the size of the fines. Consider that can be scaled all the way up to every asset the company has, straight through to the office furniture. The company can even simply be disbanded and the offenders barred from ever setting foot near the industry; their lives ruined to whatever degree necessary.

The point is putting people in a metal cage because of this stuff is nothing more than a fetish. Actually seeking excessive time for it when given prosecutorial discretion is indeed a dubious accomplishment.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#93

Post by mcv »

tomelders wrote: post #87

If a bank lost everyones money, we would expect governments to subpoena them. This is news like "Sun rises for 1.6425 × 10^13th time in a row" is a headline.

The news here is that bitcoin is apparently considered to be money by this prosecutor. Or at least close enough to it.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#95

Post by rayiner »

sheetjs wrote: post #77
rtpg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is parroted so often but is usually quantifiably false. Usually the fines are small compared to overall profit of a company because the actions are relatively small compared to total operations, but most fines defintely cost the company more than not doing the actions would have in financial cases.

HSBC paid 1.9B fine for money laundering related to Mexican drug cartels. To understand this number, lets look at the DOJ claims: > Between 2006 and 2009, according to DOJ, HSBC failed to monitor $670 billion in wire transfers and $9.4 billion in cash transactions from its Mexico bank operations. We don't know exactly how much HSBC profited from these specific alleged activities, but even a 1% rate (pretty low if the…

So they failed to monitor $10 bn in transactions. 1% of that is $100 m. The fine was 19x larger. What am I missing?

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#96

Post by ddeck »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #10
nwh wrote: post #5

Article without the paywall — http://archive.is/JWikk

It's pretty embarrassing that you can read most of the article with the paywall intact.

I've never understood how WSJ operate their paywall. They seem to allow it to be bypassed on any article by simply using Google as a referrer.

For any given paywalled article, if you Google the article headline and click on the WSJ link in the results, the full article is displayed.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#97

Post by eliasmacpherson »

rayiner wrote: post #95
sheetjs wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HSBC paid 1.9B fine for money laundering related to Mexican drug cartels. To understand this number, lets look at the DOJ claims: > Between 2006 and 2009, according to DOJ, HSBC failed to monitor $670 billion in wire transfers and $9.4 billion in cash transactions from its Mexico bank operations. We don't know exactly how much HSBC profited from these specific alleged activities, but even a 1% rate (pretty low if the…

So they failed to monitor $10 bn in transactions. 1% of that is $100 m. The fine was 19x larger. What am I missing?

"HSBC failed to monitor $670 billion in wire transfers"

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#98

Post by saalweachter »

appleflaxen wrote: post #43

Where were these zealous prosecutors during the global financial meltdown in 2008? It would be nice if people went to jail for fraudelently representing mortgages. I'm fine with Gox getting investigated, too, but justice shouldn't depend on who you are.

In the US, we have a fetish for proving people guilty. That's not to say our false conviction rate isn't through the roof, but even though everyone knows that someone is totally guilty, we don't do anything unless we can prove it.

So the sad fact of the matter is, if someone is a good enough criminal -- for instance, a CEO of a company with dozens of lawyers to advise him, who actually manages to not put anything in writing, and has enough firewalls between him and the activities in question to create reasonable doubt and plausible deniability -- he can totally get away with it.

On the other hand, if someone shows up and it's all amateur hour, and they all but gift wrap a big pile of evidence of their misdeeds, notarize and hand-deliver it to the authorities, we shouldn't hold off on prosecuting them just because smarter, bigger criminals are getting away with it, any more than we should hold off prosecuting the easy homicides just because the hard ones go unsolved.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#99

Post by dmix »

rodgerd wrote: post #82
appleflaxen wrote: post #43

Where were these zealous prosecutors during the global financial meltdown in 2008? It would be nice if people went to jail for fraudelently representing mortgages. I'm fine with Gox getting investigated, too, but justice shouldn't depend on who you are.

They were cheerfully going after targets, until it turned out that the public are easy to convince that effective prosecuters should lose their jobs if they visit sex workers. The fact the current top comment in this thread is someone slagging off a prosecuter for going after insder traders demonstrates that HN's as dumb an audience as the average tabloid reader when it comes to convincing people that enforcing the l…

He wasn't trashing the fact they are going after insider trading, it's that they use lengthy jail time as a badge of winning. When there are better metrics and means of enforcement than endless jail-time.

Re: Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source

#100

Post by kalleboo »

ddeck wrote: post #96
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty embarrassing that you can read most of the article with the paywall intact.

I've never understood how WSJ operate their paywall. They seem to allow it to be bypassed on any article by simply using Google as a referrer. For any given paywalled article, if you Google the article headline and click on the WSJ link in the results, the full article is displayed.

If they activated the paywall for Googlebot, they'd get no visitors from Google searches.

If they deactivated the paywall for Googlebot, but activated it for visitors, they'd get banned from Google for expertsexchange behavior.

They must figure that random Google visitors are worth more than the people who are clever enough to Google the article titles they want to read to work past the paywall.

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