> Nothing wrong with this ...

Depending on where they're located, failure to report certain types of crime to law enforcement may itself be a crime.

You check other proxies relating to services rendered vs. money earned for an initial estimate.

I was there for one instance, 2 guys had asked him for a meeting to get some advice on opening a pizza place or something and wanted the input of a non-competing experienced business owner in the area so he agreed to meet with them and I was there so I sat in just to see if I could learn anything from the exchange. Like we're in some cheesy movie, these guys make small talk before one sets a briefcase on the table and opens it to reveal gobs of what appeared to be 10s and 20s and proceeded to tell him they actually wanted to buy a percentage of the club cash and he shut them right down and asked them to leave. After they left he told me he was approached multiple times in the first couple years of business with such offers. People wanting to dump a bunch of cash in his lap that, presumably, he would then trickle into the coffers via fictional sales as a way for them to launder some money via their cash infusion and potentially get far more back if the club remained successful. At the time I legitimately thought they were friends of his and he was pranking me or something, it was so absurd. I came to realize though that those selling drugs definitely love clubs as we'd have kids in their early 20s coming in 1-2 times a week and buying bottle service at 300$+ a bottle to impress friends/girls week after week with no realistic way of having that much disposable income.

This guy was super shady in general, and his shadiness is why we ultimately parted ways, but even that was too much for him.

It would not surprise me in the least if there was a market for this for bars and clubs that had "creative" income streams on the side. He would regularly have the bartenders pour house shots (An "IV" of OJ/shot of soda water/cheapest well vodka) for free for a group of people to get them to stay (often it was bridal parties) to make the club appear busy and doing stuff like that would certainly be a way to legitimately burn through some cheap liquor that you could ring up as premium-priced cocktails. I could see restaraunts that do free refills on drinks also being able to do this by ringing up some extra drink/burger/fries sales and fudging the numbers several percent, if not ten percent, to similarly sneak illicit money in.

Notice that this kind of argument could have been (and probably was) used against the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, universal suffrage, gay marriage or religious freedom. If you have a minority position against the status quo, you can always be accused of arrogance. "Who are you to think you know better?". However, sometimes the arrogant are right.

> These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism.

And capitalism, don't forget. The ideology of infinite growth is destroying our habitat.

Where did that happen? It certainly isn't alleged by OP.

It’s not difficult to find people who believe, rightly or wrongly, the tax system is unfair.

Even a lot of the things that are legal these days are extremely unethical. The system is a mess. Capitalism is destroying society, rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior.

All the good companies/projects I worked on over the years (e.g. education) are struggling in this economy while all the evil ones (gambling, finance) are thriving.

Communism is looking better with each passing day. Especially with the level of automation we have today.

Every day, automation is getting better but people are getting worse. The systemic inefficiencies caused by fraud and other unethical behaviors under capitalism has outpaced the inefficiencies of a communist society whereby everyone gets paid the same and each person does as little work as possible.

Though it is very natural for people to think "how bad I am" or "how bad is that company compared to the other companies" and so on. Also in the end the justice system has to sentence these crimes and there has to be some kind of "badness" metric that should be seen as fair by the general public. I don't think this "they are all just crimes" approach works.

Similarly, people often conflate something morally good with something morally bad and ask/argue ”If I mix the two is it overall good or bad?". Which similarly doesn’t matter.

The good should never be conflated with the bad. Otherwise, the good will just be used for rationalizing the bad...

(That’s not to say morality is not somewhat ambiguous. I just often see people trying to justify immoral behavior by doing this)

I never denied that. I wanted to know what exactly is the fraud that the company is causing. Also, spamming is all about matter or perspective. All major consumer companies send billions of emails. I would love to know what this company was doing differently .

This was later proved to be true when the CEO(Amir), admitted in the ARIN(American Registry for Internet Numbers) trial, he was really behind these entities."

No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity.

>the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose.

Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in responding to subpoenas, or any illegal use of the IP addresses by spammers, etc.

The article lists a bunch of things and either implies or explicitly says they are crimes, when none are. This includes having multiple shell companies, which is perfectly legal. Submitting false documentation for those shell companies is illegal, but is not mentioned by OP, presumably because they would not have been in a position to observe any of that documentation.

Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police.

You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver.

That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.

This standard would work for about 5 minutes before a criminal complicated things enough that their crime was no longer obviously wrong.

Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET

What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.

> I remember reading about cases of scientific papers that were advertisements pretending to be research work. I'll update this point when I find some actual examples.

Not exactly the same but related: soda manufacturers have been stressing the correlation between inactivity and diabetes, and in the process sliding in the message that sugar intake is not that big of a factor. That messaging goes with ads of healthy people in movement enjoying life and drinking sugar water.

Complexity seems indeed very good at enabling bullshit - bullshitters caught spreading lies can just plead ignorance and point towards complexity.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con...

Would the creators of VPN software need to consider ethics since it could break government censorship? Or if the government requested I create a backdoor for them, would that also be an ethical issue?

Sure, what's not is:

Having the registered principals of those shell companies be fictitious (as in this case).

Having agents of your company who have received a warrant addressed to your company pretend that your company has not received it, whether the purpose is to evade the warrant or to avoid drawing attention to your fraudulent front companiest (as, again, in this case.)

> Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying.

A subpoena or warrant is a command. Receiving it and not obeying the command fully is a crime.

> It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on

No, it says a warrant was addressed to Micfo but received by Micfo employees at the “Channel Partner”. It does not say it has both companies info on it. Even if it did, directing employees to pretend your firm has not received a court order naming your firm when in fact your firm has received it is not legal.

> Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.

If the intent was to preserve the illusion of the distinct identity of the channel partners tonorent discovery of the fraud, it absolutely was an act in furtherance of the crime, and a knowing participant (that is, knowing of the purpose, not just the act itself) in it would, even if they had no other connection to the concealed crime, be an accessory after the fact.

The trial is about different alleged wrongdoings than OP is going on about.

I would say it is often even opposite of it - black/grey markets help to stay in power. When everybody is breaking some law, buying something [almost] illegally, everybody wants to stay quiet.

And it helps [totalitarian] government a lot.

You think for example the North Korean government happily tolerates the black markets there? No way. If it would be easy for them to control them they would close them down. The black/grey markets happening in totalitarian countries are more like compromises - it would be too difficult to stop the activity without murdering half of the population or so.

Income you were able to earn because infrastructure allows businesses to operate, police forces protect their property, physical safety and the shipment of goods, a court system allows peaceful resolution of conflicts, armed forces protect you from invasion, fire departments prevent entire cities from burning down by putting fires out early etc.

Taking the benefits without paying the democratically set price for a wide array of services is not that different from stealing.

> Yes if the government can prove that you knew about it without telling, you can be charged with it.

That's not generally true. In the vast majority of cases, simply knowing about a crime and not reporting it is not a crime in itself. You only become liable when you aid-and-abet or join in a conspiracy to commit the crime.

However, it depends very much on the specific crime. Tax evasion may be entirely different than say selling drugs.

>But your claim was that this was unrelated to the trial. The response was that, no, it actually corroborated the core allegation in the Micfo case.

Now you're misreading both OP and the response to my comment. ghostbrainalpha claimed that the OP says the CEO was the same as the customers that were allegedly committing crimes like spamming. The OP does not say this.

>That doesn't make the IP fraud point somehow not corroboration.

OP never mentions this as one of the crimes he's listing. He lists:

1. Mishandling of warrants

2. Child endangerment

3. Enabling spamming

4. Enabling ToS violations

None of the things OP says are crimes are actually illegal, and none of them were at issue during the trial. That's what I pointed out.

> replacement) with a straight pipe ($20 pipe and $200 of

> time) many years ago because they (correctly) assessed me

> to be a broke-ass student who wouldn't tell on them.

The mechanic may have even made even more money by scrapping your catalytic converter.

In the UK, swapping the exhaust out for a straight pipe is a common (illegal) modification for greater performance and sound. To get the car through the MOT, you either need to find somebody willing to "look the other way" or re-weld the original exhaust in place.

I've seen in many scenarios "boy racers" dipping the clutch and coasting the car by the police. If your car is making a sound resembling a Spitfire you're sure to get pulled over, where they'll use a road side test kit and confiscate your car.

Some other popular cheap modifications include completely removing the air-filter (dangerous), stretching tires to create low-profile wheels (extremely dangerous if they let go [0]), putting the car on a diet (ripping out all interior, seats, etc), running contaminated fuel (either diesel/petrol mixes [1] or running farmer's diesel) - the list goes on.

There are also some processes for purposely causing the car to backfire regularly (especially on a down change, with quite large flames) and getting more "bang" from the fuel. At one point we were also experimenting with the idea of using the starter motor strategically to aid engine acceleration - but nothing ever came of it.

[0] We had a car crash on the motorway into the central barrier, which then caused all of the tires to instantly disintegrate - all at ~90 mph (~145 kph).

[1] We once had a vehicle literally explode when unburned fuel collected in the catalytic converter/exhaust and suddenly decide it wanted to be on fire. This in itself wouldn't have been an issue if a) somebody noticed and b) it didn't then ignite the fuel lines.

https://www.bilprovningen.se/boka-besiktning.html

> That's not how democracy works.

That's exactly how democracy works. Unfortunately, a democratic society is not inherently a just society. It's just a bit more stable than autocratic societies due to integrating periodic small revolutions in lieu of less frequent but more severe transfers of power. The better versions have certain protections for minorities, which makes them less democratic but more just.

Moving to another country isn't a solution. That other country (yes, even Somalia) will already be infested with its own form of protection racket, and anything you could do to defend yourself against governments and wannabe governments in some other country you could do equally well right where you are. Moreover, why should you be forced to move away from the place where you were born just because someone else has drawn some arbitrary borders on a map and thinks it's too much work to create the system they have in mind without forcing everyone in that area to participate? How does their inability to exclude you from whatever benefit they think they're creating suddenly become your problem?

Perhaps they thought they were saving the lives of innocents from collateral damage in wars of aggression?

> just reduces performance by fucking up the O2 sensor

> readings unless you also dump a grand on a new ECU

You can also get a piggy-back ECU for the purpose of sending false sensor data - it's quite a bit cheaper.

(I've also seen people argue that they pay for more than they're using, but somehow the concept of derisking and variance reduction doesn't escape these people when it comes to buying insurance.)

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[0] - Ranging from healthcare and schooling to laws, defense and ensuring a safe and stable environment in which everyone can conduct their business.

Right, but when you add a feature that does that and has no other major use, you move beyond 'seen by some' on to 'seen by me'

The "customers" that just happen to be the very same shell companies described at trial, engaged in the very same shenannigans with "their" IP addresses? Those customers?

I mean, come on. I think at this point you're just retreating into pedantry, arguing that the linked article doesn't meet appropriate evidentiary standards when presented in a blog post and therefore we need to assume that Micfo is innocent in the sense of this one article not meeting a sufficient burden of proof. So... OK.

But anyone with a brain can see that this is a personal story about exactly what was going on, and thus that it's clearly describing related activities. Some of which, again, were clearly illegal.

Also, Sheetz is a regional gas station (once) popular with street and track racers. I guess it still is, but their food quality has gone through the floor.

.

>than saving 20% on $200k/yr income

Erm, that's not a standard W2 employee's income. Not even close. The median U.S. household income was $63,179 in 2017.

When people find a way to pay fewer taxes, it means money is not only not going to wars, but also being able to be used for better things for everyone.

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Don’t defend fraud artists dude.

At $200K, the tax rate is 32%, so the tax is really $64K, 160% of your estimate. (all for single filers or married filing separately; married filing jointly has wider bands, and the rates are less overall at the given combined income levels)

You're the one defending someone who's wrong.

Also, I'm not defending the fraud, but the (legality) of the parts of this that aren't fraudulent. I understand that you believe it's ok to smear anyone as long as they've done something else you dislike. I disagree.