[HN Gopher] South Korean prosecutors say Do Kwon 'obviously on t...
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South Korean prosecutors say Do Kwon 'obviously on the run', asks
Interpol help
Author : 0xChain
Score : 170 points
Date : 2022-09-19 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| pavlov wrote:
| "CEO is wanted by the Interpol" is to web3 as "CEO rings bell at
| Nasdaq" was to webs 1 and 2.
| Garvi wrote:
| I understand the point. But why is that?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why is that?_
|
| The web3/crypto community seems to select for individuals
| with an almost proud ignorance of the law and state power.
| The same personality that can make a 21st-century gold bug
| pitch ( _e.g._ a world on crypto is one without wars, Bitcoin
| is impossible to ban, or Luna is magically stable _et cetera_
| ) is one that reacts to an arrest warrant by no showing and
| tweeting.
| Garvi wrote:
| So it's a counter-culture thing like hippies and punks of
| the past? I thought those all died with moderated social
| media. Is it at all about "sticking it to the man" or is it
| purely profit motivated (by the followers of those
| individuals)? It's most likely a mix of the two, but to
| what degree.
| [deleted]
| naet wrote:
| A lot of the crypto culture is IMO not counter-culture,
| but almost "hyper-culture". Crypto lives on hype. Most
| rhetoric used by the likes of Do Kwon is focused around
| building hype for their particular brand of crypto,
| hoping to entice other people to invest in it.
|
| They may use some terminology that sounds similar to
| counter culture at face value (eg "stick it to the big
| banks!") but they aren't doing this in the counter
| culture mode of rejection, they are simply using it as a
| sales pitch towards moving more crypto.
| lexapro wrote:
| You know, it's kinda funny that you mention gold bugs.
| Because gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and
| therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN. Yet
| somehow it sits currently at $1,670/oz and is owned by all
| major central banks in the world.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| We could argue (and agree) that Canada isn't major, but
| their central bank sold off their bullion gold reserves ~
| 2 decades ago. And finished off its hodl of gold coins ~7
| years ago.
|
| https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-26/Gold-is-an-antique-
| ins...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gold-canada-
| reserves-1.3443...
| ipaddr wrote:
| Canada did it to increase diversity of investment
| "investing in financial assets that are easily tradable
| and that have deep markets of buyers and sellers"
|
| The truth is probably based on the money they received
| from selling the gold as a retail coin
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _gold shares a lot of properties with Bitcoin, and
| therefore should be considered a sham by most of HN_
|
| Gold and gold buggery are separate. Gold and silver have
| deep precedence as money. They're also useful
| commodities. Gold buggery involves retail investors
| disproportionately allocating to gold as a buy-and-hold
| asset, often with emotional attachment. Those buying
| crypto because it's going to free the world or whatever
| resemble the latter.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > gold buggery
|
| This could be an interesting thread in itself.
| lexapro wrote:
| Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's such
| a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Central banks definitely don 't own gold because it's
| such a useful commodity. Are central banks gold bugs?_
|
| Are central banks retail investors? Are they buying gold
| to "to free the world or whatever"? No [1]?
|
| Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. This leads
| to them trading as haven assets, _i.e._ their price rises
| when financial conditions deteriorate. Bitcoin doesn 't.
| It trades as a risk asset, _i.e._ its price falls when
| financial conditions deteriorate. This could change! But
| that 's true of literally every thing traded.
|
| [1] https://www.bis.org/publ/work906.pdf
| ipaddr wrote:
| "Gold and silver have deep precedence as money"
|
| Bitcoin has that rep as well.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Bitcoin has that rep as well_
|
| No, it doesn't. The evidence is crypto trading as a risk
| asset. People believe it could one day trade as a haven
| asset, but that hasn't happened yet. Not close.
| tim333 wrote:
| >Central banks definitely don't own gold because it's
| such a useful commodity
|
| It's proving quite useful to Russia's central bank which
| is selling gold to China as many of its other reserves
| have been frozen.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Thousands of years of cultural significance enables gold
| to be assigned more value then it otherwise would have.
| lexapro wrote:
| But this could also happen to Bitcoin and crypto bros
| would certainly argue it has already started to happen.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Exactly. There are plenty of other precious metals that
| could have been used for the same purposes as gold (e.g.,
| platinum, palladium, iridium). But they aren't. For
| various historical reasons.
| mcguire wrote:
| https://images.app.goo.gl/kYh4i5pcJupVpacR8
|
| Gold scams have been around for a significant number of
| decades. Bitcoin has been hyped to death for its entire
| existence, in spite of the "properties" it shares with
| gold.
|
| Note: I own neither.
| rurp wrote:
| Among other reasons, it's non-trivial to walk off with
| $10M worth of solid gold owned by someone on another
| continent.
| lexapro wrote:
| It's also non-trivial to guess a private key or to run a
| 51% attack.
| rurp wrote:
| Judging from empirical results it _is_ quite easy to
| steal crypto currency; it happens all the time. I don 't
| know why you only care about those two approaches.
| notch656a wrote:
| >The web3/crypto community seems to select for individuals
| with an almost proud ignorance of the law and state power.
|
| And the problem with that is what? State power and law
| failed us.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the problem with that is what?_
|
| Generally: if you're trying to fix something,
| understanding how it works is usually a good start.
|
| Specifically: pompous ignorance leads to gross negligence
| and criminality so stupidly brazen a B-list editor would
| send it back for being unbelievable. The sort that is
| rampant in crypto/web3.
| notch656a wrote:
| >Generally: if you're trying to fix something,
|
| Yes the fix is clear to me. Remove KYC+AML from the
| banking/monetary system. The expansion of crypto is in
| part a response to a pompous ignorance of government
| officials, attempting to impose a search of your papers
| merely for banking and the government implementing
| policies so stupid even a B-list editor wouldn't believe
| it.
|
| The government failed so other actors came in, then
| everyone made a sad face that when the government failed
| alternatives were found.
| freen wrote:
| Chesterton's fence fail.
| notch656a wrote:
| >Chesterton's fence fail.
|
| Excellent point.
|
| The legislature ripped quite a bit of privacy and freedom
| from the banking system post 9/11 on an almost blind
| rampage, without doing much stopping and asking why
| things were they were. I admit it was the ultimate
| Chesterton's fence fail on the government's part and
| likely a big reason why a new fence seems to have been
| built with crypto.
|
| Honestly even bitcoin the white paper seems to have had
| more thought poured into it than the Patriot Act, which
| kicked off much of the KYC reforms in the US. In reality
| I think many of the adopters of cryptocurrency realized
| exactly the dystopia that the banking system was going
| down and very deliberately tried to take some of the
| failures of government into account.
| freen wrote:
| The libertarian fallacy: the solution to bad regulation
| is no regulation whatsoever.
| notch656a wrote:
| The freen fallacy: anything between 'Patriot Act era KYC'
| and 'the <freen> solution' is libertarian nonsense.
| freen wrote:
| Look: current financial regulations in the US and Europe
| mean we've been leapfrogged by Africa: M-Pesa etc.
|
| Don't disagree, but throwing the baby out with the bath
| water and going full raw dog lets speed run the entire
| history of financial fraud is not a good idea.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| People just don't want to pay their taxes,buy
| drugs/weapons/illegal porn or launder cash. Couching it
| in high minded ideals isn't fooling anyone.
| notch656a wrote:
| Clearly anyone not happy with (or seeking alternatives
| to) the post 9/11 banking surveillance apparatus must be
| cast down as a nefarious character who isn't fooling
| anyone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Remove KYC+AML from the banking /monetary system_
|
| Luna's downfall and Do Kwon's pending red notice have
| nothing to do with KYC or AML.
| notch656a wrote:
| >Luna's downfall and Do Kwon's pending red notice have
| nothing to do with KYC or AML.
|
| I disagree here. The 'killer app' feature of crypto is
| that it's basically imperfect banking without KYC/AML.
| Without crypto's popularity it's doubtful Do Kwon and
| Luna would have gotten such a foothold.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _[crypto is] basically imperfect banking without KYC
| /AML_
|
| Pretty solid case for why these folks should go to jail.
| Or at the very least, be disgorged of their gains and
| banned from finance.
| rurp wrote:
| This reminds me of an old skit, I think from Monty
| Python. Where a bunch of people in ancient rome are
| pissed off. "What has Rome ever done for us?!".
|
| "Expect for roads"
|
| "And sewers"
|
| "And protection from invaders"
|
| "And enforced contracts"
|
| And so on...
| notch656a wrote:
| No roads have ever been built without a government.
| Surely an entity that support nun-raping in El Salvador
| and blowing up brown people in Iraq is needed to build a
| road.
| vkou wrote:
| Surely you realize that if the power vacuum isn't filled
| by a democratic or mostly democratic or even somewhat
| democratic government, it will be happily met by a despot
| or a warlord?
|
| The steady state of parts of the globe that don't have
| governments is 'government, but by cartels or warlords or
| revolutionary people's liberation armies'.
|
| Which have all the powers of governments, without _any_
| of the self-constraints, legal processes, protected
| abilities for petition or redress, or mechanisms for
| peaceful transfer of power.
| notch656a wrote:
| No I don't realize that.
| rurp wrote:
| Large scale infrastructure? Yeah that's pretty much
| always built by governments. This has held true for
| millenia, over hundreds of different societies. But yeah,
| just a fluke I'm sure. Thank God crypto is here to knock
| some common sense into the world.
| [deleted]
| eatonphil wrote:
| Given South Korea's fairly lenient prison sentences [0] (or maybe
| I'm just biased up by the very long US sentences) and that South
| Korea has a history of not extraditing to the US [1], I don't
| understand why he would risk worse leaving the country and trying
| to evade South Korean authorities.
|
| [0]
| https://msccsp.org/nasc/downloads/HyungkwanPark_supplemental...
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/world/asia/south-korea-
| ch...
| m4jor wrote:
| Because he's 100% guilty.
|
| He left South Korea to go to Singapore but has now fled from
| there as well. He's on the run.
| eatonphil wrote:
| I'm saying South Korea seems like a relatively safe place to
| be guilty in/serve prison time.
| duxup wrote:
| Is it possible he stole a lot of coin, put it in a place he
| controls, is worried they would find that, and just doesn't
| want to give it back?
| jahewson wrote:
| In other words, he lacks good judgment when it comes to risks?
| anm89 wrote:
| He's not the Korean elite. He screwed over the Korean elite.
| They will throw the book at him I'd guess.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _He screwed over the Korean elite_
|
| There is zero chance they're falling for crypto. This is a
| problem for the gambling masses. To the degree it harms any
| elite, it's by introducing political instability in Korea
| and reducing Singapore's standing as a stable financial
| centre.
| anm89 wrote:
| a) Screwing over a large amount of the Korean population
| is screwing over the korean elite(because it creates a
| populist outcry) (I lived in Korea for years. And I can
| tell you that a way higher percentage of the population
| is betting on crypto than in western countries
|
| b) This appears to be across the socio economic spectrum.
| If you think there aren't a ton of rich people throwing
| money into crypto I guess I'll just say I think you are
| wrong.
| tim333 wrote:
| I know a friend of a friend who is Korean elite and who
| made then lost a lot in Luna.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Countries have extradition treaties. Hell even when they don't if
| you're a diplomatic nuisance you'll be thrown on an airplane-
| which is what happened to a Dutch drug cartel leader in Dubai.
| notch656a wrote:
| Countries often won't extradite unless their own nation has a
| similar law though. Perhaps what he did isn't illegal in
| Singapore.
| perihelions wrote:
| This tweet aged well.
|
| - _" none of us were notified of this at all; when i found out
| about this, the south korean prosecution told me they usually
| don't notify people of this because they might destroy evidence
| and/or leave the country beforehand"_
|
| - _" tbh people being treated as potential criminals like this is
| absolutely outrageous and unacceptable"_
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220622034155/https://twitter.c...
|
| (To be clear, this is a different Terra person; not Do Kwon).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| He knows the light charges filed is a lure to come back, and then
| they level additional(real) charges on him for screwing everyone
| over
| gandalfian wrote:
| Do you think really $43 billion lost? Or rather that was the
| theoretical peak valuation? It just seems a staggering amount of
| money to be available for a new startup crypto project.
|
| Hmm, wonder if Do Kwon is reading this :)
| 55555 wrote:
| Money was not lost, it either changed owners or it never
| actually existed.
| [deleted]
| hailwren wrote:
| It's just the peak market cap. Not the amount of $ invested.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I naively thought that it would take centuries of inflation
| before seeing ponzi schemes beating the magnitude of Madoff, it
| only took 10 years.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| The future is now!
| nullc wrote:
| 81% of the Madoff losses were recovered (not including funds
| paid for taxes on false gains), not so in the land of "web3",
| "defi", and "ico". Through innovative meta-scam-blockchain
| technology they manage to "accidentally" substantially all the
| monies.
| 1-more wrote:
| I'm trying to square this with the info on the Wikipedia
| page. Is this just "The Madoff Recovery Initiative reported
| $14.418 billion in total recoveries and settlement
| agreementse" divided by "of which $17.3 billion was actually
| invested by customers?" If so that's even better at north of
| 83%.
| Animats wrote:
| Madoff recovery amounts are based on how much cash the
| investor put in, not what their statement said their
| balance was just before the crash. So long-term holders get
| none of their supposed profits. The longer someone invested
| with Madoff, the more they lost.
|
| The recovery project is only for direct investors with
| Madoff. Those who bought into "feeder funds" which fed into
| Madoff's fund don't get anything directly. There's other
| litigation involving feeder funds, which can recover
| something from the Madoff recovery and pay it out to their
| holders.
|
| The recovery initiative got back billions of dollars
| through clawback lawsuits, where they went after people
| who'd cashed out of Madoff's scheme before the crash. Those
| people were effectively participants in the scam, and they
| profited from it, so they don't get away free.
|
| If you can track the money, you can un-do a Ponzi. The
| amount of legal effort is huge, though.
| ericjang wrote:
| s/substantially/sublimate ?
| nullc wrote:
| I think I intended to say they accidentally the whole
| money. But substantially gives substantially the same feel.
| paxys wrote:
| The vast majority of Madoff's victims were middle class
| pensioners who had their entire lives upended because their
| fund managers trusted the wrong person. In this case it's hard
| to feel any sympathy for crypto speculators.
| Animats wrote:
| By number, maybe. By dollars, no.
|
| Madoff's core operation was based on scamming rich Jews in
| New York City, Palm Beach, Florida, and Hollywood. In each
| location, he had a prominent Jewish leader steering investors
| to his fund. Ezra Merkin handled New York, Stanley Chais
| handled Hollywood, and Madoff himself worked the Palm Beach
| Country Club. This was very much an in-person scam. A long
| list of celebrities lost big.
|
| That's why the recovery operation was so long, so extensive
| and so successful. The major victims were well connected,
| could afford expensive lawyers, and collectively, they had a
| lot of clout.
|
| The crypto world tends to have less well connected suckers.
| Cd00d wrote:
| Your point would not be weakened if you left ethnicity out
| of it, but risks coming across as un-credible and
| conspiracy driven with the addition. I'd recommend an edit.
| telotortium wrote:
| No, he's not accusing Jews of "running the world" or
| anything like that. It's a fact that Madoff focused on
| finding victims of the Ponzi scheme in his community,
| which is not at all unusual (MLMs often encourage their
| participants to sell to their friends and acquaintances,
| for example). As a well-off American Jew himself, Madoff
| went after his community of well-off American Jews,
| calculating correctly that their in-group trust would
| make them easier targets.
|
| It's also a fact of the world that the rich are generally
| better able to pursue legal action to recover money that
| they've lost than the poor. The fact that these rich
| people were Jewish doesn't make much of a difference here
| (not to mention that the Madoff scheme was extremely
| infamous after it imploded, so it was more likely to
| receive resources to rectifying the wrongs that Madoff
| dealt as compared to an equally-damaging but less well-
| known scheme).
| i_like_apis wrote:
| For anyone who might enjoy some YT regarding this, Coffeezilla,
| who raises awareness about a lot of crypto scams, is covering
| Luna well:
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvzwpbFSi44
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=coffeezilla+do+...
| skc wrote:
| I'm confused about this story. Are the South Korean authorities
| claiming Kwon is no longer in South Korea?
|
| He has a young family (with a child less than a year old) as far
| as I know, where are they?
| mr90210 wrote:
| Singapore as far as I read on an article.
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| It's alleged he transferred vast sums from the terra treasury to
| his personal wallet. South Korea is a relatively lenient
| jurisdiction with a high penetration of blockchain products. But
| if these accusations are true, it is a case of theft rather than
| failed innovation.
| 55555 wrote:
| At least a quarter million South Koreans lost money. If he is
| returned to South Korea, he's going to prison regardless of
| whether or not he deserves to. That's how the world works, IMO.
| somebodythere wrote:
| I am not sure you can be sent to jail simply for creating
| something that turns out to be a bad investment. (goes to 0)
| This is true even in the arguably more regulated stock
| market.
|
| That being said it seems like there is more to his story than
| buggy code.
| enumjorge wrote:
| As the article explains, he's being accused of financial
| fraud, not because his crypto coin flopped.
| wmf wrote:
| The developer of Anchor told Do Kwon that Anchor wasn't
| safe but Do Kwon overrode him and deployed it anyway.
| That's getting into fraud territory because he knew it was
| going to collapse.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _getting into fraud territory because he knew it was
| going to collapse_
|
| Fraud requires intent in most jurisdictions. This looks
| more like gross negligence (and possibly embezzlement).
| In addition to, likely, a host of money transmission law
| infractions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If enough people are pissed at someone for something, the
| government will find a way to throw them in jail.
|
| Take Martin Shkreli, for instance. I don't doubt that he
| was probably guilty of what he was charged with (unrelated
| to his price hikes of drugs), but I doubt he would have
| been charged if not for his infamy otherwise. I suspect
| what he was charged with would also encompass many other
| business people in the US who are less infamous.
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