Block loses 20% of value as Hindenburg Research alleges fraud(finance.yahoo.com) |
Block loses 20% of value as Hindenburg Research alleges fraud(finance.yahoo.com) |
> A review of songs mentioning Cash App shows that the artists are not generally rapping about Cash App’s smooth user interface and robust software integration toolkit.
> Instead, lyrics describe how easy it is to move money through Cash App to facilitate fraud, traffic drugs, or even pay for murder.
If you're fucking wealthy, it's also very easy to move money for fraud, drugs, murder, literally anything. They just don't use the Cash App
It is not an an attack. Neither is it an "attack".
Nobody got hurt, nobody needs stitches, nobody was in fear for their life, autonomy, or well-being. Nobody brandished weapons, nobody damaged physical objects. That is why it is not an attack.
In modern parlance people started calling it an "attack" when someone was ever slo slightly mean to them. I think this usage is contemptible and should be called out. It devalues the meaning of the word. If a market participant publishing research is now an attack then what will you call when someone throws a punch and breaks a nose, or douses someone with gasoline and lights them on fire, or fires an intercontinental ballistic missile at a city?
Coming soon: the CashApp ransomware API.
This sounds disingenuous. Not every fan of Bitcoin supports fraud, drug trafficking.. etc. The dollar is used for such bad activities, should we label everyone that loves the dollar as a supporter of fraud and drugs?
> Misleading investors by overstating its genuine user counts, with former employees estimating as much as three quarters are “fake, involved in fraud, or…additional accounts tied to a single individual.”
Do they really know? Or is it just a feeling that they have, or a rumour somebody spread? Is it a rumour a former disgruntled employee blew up out of proportion?
The risk to the short seller is clear, but if they're going to advertise themselves as a "new breed of short sellers, relying on deep research", then they should come up with deep research, not this. Of all the things listed, I didn't see one thing that is based on any real data. They obviously hold clout because if I came up with this, the market wouldn't really care.
But maybe it can't really be fixed, don't know. Maybe the short seller is the fraud and it needs to take down several companies before people realize it's BS and eventually gets wiped out.
[0]: https://investors.block.xyz/news/news-details/2023/Blocks-Re...
Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The “magic” behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.
I do not know if that is fraud, but if so, Hindenburg should pay attention.
BTW, this was done in Superman, and used to build an [evil] AGI. Of course, that is just science fiction. Just to be sure though, is Square a partner in OpenAI?
Hindenburg criticized the ability for a user to get a debit card by mail in any name but that is a form of KYC. It is true many companies including PayPal don’t force you to provide your social security number. But the user can still be tracked.
I have never provided my social security number or face or ID to Venmo, PayPal or Cash App.
And the name I use on all those accounts is not my legal name. I do pay my taxes, I don’t commit crimes and it’s the name I use in real life and on social media.
This is more an attack on privacy rights and easy access to financial services. If fraud happens, law enforcement should prosecute. Don’t punish the lawful consumer.
Hindenburg’s just a more sophisticated scammer who apparently made $5 million off this trade-
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/163897860486766592...
Not sure I understood you correctly, but this is the opposite of KYC.
Jack doesn't do anything but meditate and grow a beard like he's young Steve Jobs. Why the board let him be CEO when he didn't do any apparent work is a different question.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-01/musk-sued...
Full disclosure: I'm heavily invested in SQ.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/western-union-admits-anti-mon...
I’m surprised that it’s legal to short sell then go on the attack. If it is, imagine having the cojones to do that and then go live with this report.
This is why the report is surgical in its wording.
(And in case someone argues that this is the same as anything else, it isn't. I own an iPhone. I recommend them to people, it works well etc. I don't benefit at all from Apple stock price going up.)
Personally, I used to be quite antagonistic to shortsellers, but at least the ones holding onto the principles of journalistic integrity and good research provide good value to society. Just look at Wirecard.
Which ones don't provide value to society, and how do they differ from shills with a long position?
Of course, then came Terra Luna, FTX, and all that shebang, and Block wasn't the hot name it was anymore.
Yesterday. But today is a good second choice.
Right now, the financial system is extremely unstable - bad actors with an awful lot of exposure have been exposed, and a lot of people are like sharks in the water, smelling blood. It looks like we're due for another come-to-Jesus moment in the banking scene, they haven't learned enough from 2008.
I think it looks like they learned a lot! I.e. make sure you get too big to fail.
“Well, it’s the safest way, isn’t it?”
"apps" that do nothing more than transfer money two parties, representing 0 innovation and doing nothing new are valued in the 10's - 100's billions.
Most banks and payment platforms will facilitate fraud to some extent, but it’s their duty to reduce this with compliance procedures.
dress up blood testing as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics - someone went to jail for fraud for that recently
Oh no! Please, oh please, let's protect these fiscally impoverished criminals. What horrible social injustice!
Good grief. Just give it a rest please? Ridiculous.
See [1] for example, where Hindenburg was able to acquire a debit card for "Donald Trump" with a fake ID.
I wonder how far you could get, if they provide a bank like statement you might be able to get phone servce / utilities (in parts of the world where your SS number isnt your password). Likely never able to get an actual bank account through however.
The point here is to prevent money laundering and KYC is one instrument out of many for this.
Now come to think of it, in Germany for example, if it can be shown that if a bank employee, even after a good KYC had reasons to doubt that the account holder is the ultimate recipient of the funds or if the client is involved in money laundering, they might be personally criminally liable. Wonder how that is in the U.S.
You don't want to be too big to fail! There's a lot of businesses only small banks can do, like backing sweep accounts and neobanks like Simple/Aspiration.
For example, ones that bet on a stock price where the resulting market cap goes far below the net value of the company (i.e. value of assets - value of liabilities) without any indicators backing that. The "ape army" exposed these shortsellers at GME and iirc, led to the dissolution of at least two of them.
Yes, market regulators can issue halt orders to stop all trade regarding affected stocks, but that still has the potential to cause widespread and immense loss of value.
People going long for no reason but "420.69 $GME" are funny to laugh at, and if they buy the right options they can make a lot of money, but there is no potential of cascade events.
Therefore, it makes sense to keep a close watch and a tight leash on shortsellers.
I'd summarize that under "liabilities"... but even then, a company can be dissolved to stop the outflow of cash and the assets sold at market value.
There is no need to keep a tight leash on short sellers.
So in this case your defense is limp wristed, you ask only 'well what about' without ever answering the core qualm.
This mirrors precisely the ways for a long position to succeed. A holder of shares in a venture can work to cause that venture to be successful. This is pretty common, in fact.
1. Bitcoin (crypto) users who (only) have BC because they hate fiat money
2. Users who have BC because they need it for illegal gains
3. Opportunistic investors
4. Web3ers
I have the unsubstantiated feeling that 1 is overstated.
This category is way larger than people in well-banked Western circles realise. Bitcoin (crypto) is one of the easiest ways for people affected by capital controls or sanctions (on the financial institutions they use, or the country they were unlucky enough to be born in) to freely move their (legally earned, and taxed) money across borders.
Since one of the countries with strict capital controls is China, and one of the countries affected by sanctions is Russia, the scale of this usage of crypto is huge.
I'm not assigning a moral value to this. I'm just commenting that law avoidance is law avoidance, even if you really really want or need to do it.
Tokens are useless in comparison to monay for almost any activity, except for law avoidance. For this task they are amazing.
Russia is currently fighting a war of aggression, applying controls on the flow of money in or out of there is one way in which the war machine can be starved.
Did the bitcoiners forget about paper bills?
> the 80% is normal hard working people who don't like hard working
Another way to look at it is that 80% of Bitcoiners don’t like the value of their hard work to be continuously debased at a rate of 2-8+% year after year or being subjected to the whims of the Fed’s money printer which recently expanded the entire money supply by over 40% then claimed it wouldn’t drive inflation before claiming that inflation was temporary.
2. Hold Bitcoin for illegal uses, probably a small minority as there are better options such as Monero for illegal uses
3. Probably a majority of Bitcoiners are opportunistic investors. Why is that bad?
4. Web3ers, a minority of Bitcoiners. You are thinking of altcoins. (Yes Ordinals on Bitcoin are now a thing and are controversial in the Bitcoin community, but most Bitcoiners are hard money proponents who are not interested in NFTs)
I respect people who believe money should be uncensorable. But at least own that view and the implications, instead of all of this fiat whataboutism.
But it as limits built in - it has to physically transfer hands, true anonymity is difficult, and is practically limited in its scale (moving and then using $1,000,000 in cash is logistically less practical than using a wire transfer).
Ie. it is mighty difficult to use cash for ransomware attacks, and it is not that simple to get paid in cash for a kidnapping (eg. the case of the guys who kidnapped a schoolbus, but while working out how to collect their ransom, the kids escaped.)
Why? That is just another way of saying moneyed interests should be above the rule of law. What could possibly be respectable about a view this odious?
Let's take an experiment. Instead of "I should be free to send money to anyone anywhere", we'll replace money with a car.
"I should be free to drive my car anywhere, anytime". Sounds superficially like a reasonable proposition even? But in fact we have lots of rules that control who can drive a car, where, under what intoxication. There are driver's licenses, traffic signs, road police... Ultimately a judge will put you in jail if you exercise your freedom to drive outside of society's rules.
Now imagine someone using the pseudonym Suzuki Toyotamoto invents a car made out of floating jello with an engine that runs on nuclear waste. Many engineers will marvel at the ingenuity of the design. Some people start building their own jello blobs and driving them off-road without a license. The law says nothing explicitly about transportation inside floating jello. Eventually people take their floating jello vehicles to roads and get fined. (The jello moves barely at walking speed and drips radioactive sludge.) Outrage blows up in the floating jello community. Do the old rules apply to them? Will the whole world switch over to floating jello? (These questions may seem very important to those versed in the world of Suzuki Toyotamoto's floating jello, but most people just don't care and will happily keep using their regular cars instead of sitting in slime powered by radioactive waste.)
There’s a similar situation in Lebanon with BTC’s near ubiquity in remittances.
Just because it doesn’t impact your life doesn’t mean this use isn’t self evident elsewhere.
> Is exchanging cryptocurrency legal in Turkey? Yes, it is legal to buy, sell or trade your crypto money as long as crypto money is not used to pay goods or services.
They also mention they only pay out in USD. That makes it sound like the only possible use is for a Russian to convert Rubles to BTC in their home country, exchange BTC with USD there, then go next door to exchange their USD with Lira. That is so heavily tied to sanctions that it can explain why actual cash exchanges don’t support cryptocurrencies.
[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9774298,28.820529,2a,75y,324...
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0080274,28.9761991,3a,15y,34...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0166738,28.9509347,3a,88.5y,...
[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0150099,28.9752954,3a,25.8y,...
[4]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0086973,28.9713568,3a,60y,64...
And obviously Russia did not believe Ukraine to be a threat - or they would have not done this haphazard invasion with too little preparation and too few soldiers, so there is no excuse.
A state can always find a way to hide the transactions, on the other hand.
I think the risk of sanctions, means that while there are work arounds, the cost of those work arounds, and the restrictions on who will do business with you, dramatically increase the costs of certain goods.
So sure, the cash moves, but now you pay more. A lot more. Death by 1000 cuts, and all that...