[HN Gopher] FBI Looking for Hashflare Victims
___________________________________________________________________
FBI Looking for Hashflare Victims
Author : telis
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-01-06 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fbi.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fbi.gov)
| londons_explore wrote:
| > The government alleges that the HashFlare cloud mining service
| did not have access to the volume of mining power that was needed
| to service the amount of mining contracts it sold to the public.
| The government further alleges that, to enable HashFlare to
| create the illusion that it was mining bitcoin, Potapenko
| purchased bitcoin from a third party and distributed it to
| victims who were requesting withdrawals from their HashFlare
| account.
|
| This seems kinda reasonable as long as it was disclosed... Buying
| and setting up mining hardware takes a while. Buying bitcoins on
| the open market from someone else who has mining hardware is
| functionally identical.
|
| It's a bit like going to a farmer and giving him money to grow a
| field of corn for you, only to find out he actually gave your
| money to some other farmer who grew the corn and gave it to you.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's also how a Ponzi scheme works
| sofixa wrote:
| I think you're missing an important component:
|
| > who were requesting withdrawals from their HashFlare account
|
| So it was more like a ton of people pay a farmer to grow a
| field of corn, and when they ask for corn in return, the farmer
| buys corn somewhere else and presents it as from his field.
| Meanwhile the farmer hasn't planted what they should have, and
| hopes not too many people ask for their cork or they'll crash.
| londons_explore wrote:
| So the real issue is 'Hashflare did not have sufficient
| assets to cover balances in all customer accounts'.
|
| Akin to 'farmer neither has corn growing nor money to buy
| corn to fulfil promises to customers'
|
| _That_ would be the crime...
| itake wrote:
| My understanding is this farmer was paid to grow food, not
| buy it from another farmer.
|
| The expectation was this farmer would grow new calories
| (increasing the supply of food for the region).
|
| You may argue there is a fixed number of crypto released
| and thus not fair, but allocating that money towards the
| open market instead of toward hardware and energy company
| has an impact on the crypto's value.
| paulpauper wrote:
| When are we going to start seeing arrests of fraudulent
| promotions, rug pulls, and shitcoin promotions by celebrities
| astrange wrote:
| Today.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/non-fungible-token-nft-...
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| I'm not sure what people expected investing in a coin called
| "Polybius"[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(urban_legend)
| mhitza wrote:
| POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg
| H8crilA wrote:
| I'm not sure what people expect of crypto in general yet this
| thing as a whole has some insane marketcap.
| sn_master wrote:
| Buying drugs online is a big market and won't go anywhere.
| That, and transferring money to all kinds of people and
| regions where traditional banking tools aren't properly
| functional.
| uconnectlol wrote:
| Why am I meant to care about this? Stop protecting the right to
| be so dumb to fall for this stuff. I'm not saying you should be
| punished for being uninformed. I'm saying the middle ground is to
| do nothing, no need for FBI here. Shave off some unneeded police
| resources. Cloud crap consumers are harmful to society, they
| don't need protection, they created stuff like every door having
| a camera connected to Amazon.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| They also specifically ask for people who made withdrawals.
|
| In a fraud like this, those who lost money often recover from the
| people who got out in time. Eg almost 90% of the losses from
| Bernie Madoff were recovered by suing those who innocently
| withdrew their 'gains' before the ponzi scheme was discovered.
| dboreham wrote:
| Not all the Madoff withdrawals were innocent.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of his clients were "feeder funds", and the trustee
| settled with a lot of them that they should have known
| better.
|
| That's where a lot of the clawbacks/recalls were from.
| badocr wrote:
| Jeffry Picower estate settled for a US$7.2 billion sum
| circa 2010 according to Wikipedia. This Picower character
| seems to have had a shady fortune history, he also was
| found dead at his swimming pool around 2009.
| jandrese wrote:
| Although this is the crypto realm which makes clawbacks harder.
| Usually when one of these exchange scams collapses you'll get a
| news story about how "unknown hackers stole everything" right
| afterward.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I guess they can't just ask people to hand over all "proceeds
| from a crime" and expect much response.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Trendon Shavers operated the first Bitcoin based Ponzi scheme
| out of Texas and it folded in 2014. When he defaulted he tried
| to claim Bitcoin wasn't money, he wiped or lost all his records
| and access to the AWS hosting the scam, he perjured himself and
| claimed to have fully repaid "jcpham" under deposition.
|
| Liars gonna lie. My deposit and withdrawal addresses and the
| blockchain kinda shows no, I wasn't made whole
|
| It takes awhile to come to grips with this and actually see
| yourself as victimized- I mean, a really long time. The overall
| personal lesson is don't give strangers money, especially if
| it's too good to be true.
|
| Feeling depressed thoughts and guilt over the greed of seeking
| interest takes awhile to move beyond.
| avsteele wrote:
| That's fascinating.
|
| It would seem to set up a situation where your incentive, if
| you suspect a Ponzi scheme, is to quietly withdraw your money
| early then keep your mouth shut. Unfortunate if true.
| themitigating wrote:
| Or move to another country without extradition, something I'm
| surprised more people don't do.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are a lot fewer of those than you expect. And of
| course if you need to do that, you can never come back to
| see your family even for a visit.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| statute of limitations?
| hermitdev wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but I think statute of limitations only
| protects you against charges being filed for a crime
| performed X years ago. It doesn't protect you if you run
| from charges for X years.
| vkou wrote:
| No, it doesn't, because all Ponzi schemes will always
| unravel. Keeping quiet isn't going to help you.
|
| What this does is it creates an incentive to not invest in a
| ponzi, period. Without this rule, it makes sense for me to
| invest into something that I think is a Ponzi, as long as I
| believe that I'll be able to cash out before it collapses.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It would seem to set up a situation where your incentive,
| if you suspect a Ponzi scheme, is to quietly withdraw your
| money early then keep your mouth shut._
|
| How so? Law enforcement can claw it back, and the earlier you
| withdraw, the less your gains.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The limits depends on the jurisdiction.
|
| And harder to claw back funds after you're already dead and
| the estate has been settled. Or you've already spent it
| all.
| saghm wrote:
| I feel like I'm missing something here. Are you saying
| the optimal strategy is to withdraw early, keep your
| mouth shut, and then...die? Are these schemes usually
| long-lasting enough that a non-trivial number of people
| who invest early would be expected to die by the time
| they're discovered?
| drunkonvinyl wrote:
| As long as you don't claw back after you die.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Or you've already spent it all.
|
| This is only true if you never have income in the future.
| They can garnish and/or reach in and take other assets
| jerf wrote:
| This is an important aspect of the financial world to
| understand, because a lot of things work this way. It doesn't
| have to be a "Ponzi scheme", this happens anywhere where a
| lot of people pool money together, nominally have an
| agreement that they can withdraw whenever they like, and that
| money is used for something illiquid, regardless of the
| reason for the illiquitity, resulting in a situation where if
| too many people withdraw at once, the fund can't cover it.
|
| Ponzi schemes are an extreme example, because the fund is
| illiquid because it lied about its investments and simply
| _stole_ the funds, meaning there 's absolutely no way to
| cover.
|
| But there's a lot of ways this can occur. This basically
| describes a "bank run"; you nominally have an agreement you
| can withdraw your cash at any time, but if everybody does it
| at once there's a problem because the bank is using it to do
| things like fund mortgages, which can not simply be called
| back in instantly if needed. Even if the bank has the right
| to do that, and for various things it sometimes does (taking
| "financial instrument" generally and not just "US mortgage"),
| it would still be squeezing blood from a stone; they can
| demand it but it doesn't mean they'll _get_ it.
|
| In recent news, Blackrock suspended withdrawing from a UK
| real estate fund, because investors have been withdrawing at
| a rate that would require them to liquidate their holdings at
| fire sale rates, further depressing the fund's value:
| https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrock-halts-
| withdrawal... Same sort of thing. No "Ponzi" scheme here;
| there's some legitimate financial stress, but that stress
| would only be exacerbated by letting everyone withdraw.
| (Whether you agree that it is justified to halt withdrawals
| in this case or not, I'm just using it as an example of the
| generality of this structure.)
|
| I can't pull it up quickly in a news article because I'm not
| coming up with the right search terms to pull it out of the
| noise of constant financial news, but when Janet Yellen was
| Treasury Secretary, she had floated a trial balloon about
| trying to fix this incentive problem with bank runs against
| real banks with the same sort of clawback scheme, the idea
| being to disincentivize a bank run in the first place by
| making it so you don't get the pattern where the first few
| people get all their stuff and everybody else loses
| everything, which is a huge contributor to the run occurring
| in the first place. The game theory on this one gets a bit
| complicated if you think about it. e.g., OK, if everybody
| _else_ is going to sit tight because this scheme incentivizes
| them to stay in the bank, then it 's safe for _me_ to
| withdraw everything because the bank run was prevented in the
| first place. If they then hold things together "long
| enough", then I can say I did it for my own reasons, not the
| bank run that was delayed for six months while everyone else
| sat tight, before an ultimate collapse. But if everybody
| thinks _that_ way... etc. Not clear to me whether this can
| actually prevent bank runs, which I mean straight, not as a
| weak sarcastic "no this obviously wouldn't work". Not clear.
| Complicated analysis.
|
| This structure is not intrinsically morally wrong or
| anything. It's a basic tool, and you need some kind of
| structure to bridge between high liquidity and low liquidity
| like that, and such a thing will intrinsically have some
| "impedance mismatch" to it, to use a favorite technical
| metaphor. But it does have a certain amount of risk intrinsic
| to it that can be a bit difficult to characterize; the
| problem is that a given instance of it failing is likely to
| be highly correlated with a lot of other instances of it
| failing at the same time. Naive analysis of the risk is
| utterly inadequate, and being sophisticated and correct about
| it is easier said than done.
| mindslight wrote:
| I get the general concept, but trying to apply it to bank
| deposits is terrible. The whole point of banking
| regulations and FDIC insurance are to make it so banks are
| an abstraction where the customers don't have to care what
| a bank is invested in (for better and for worse). The
| straightforward way to reduce the risk of bank runs is to
| increase the reserve requirements which I believe is the
| exact opposite of what the Fed has been doing.
| jerf wrote:
| The FDIC has already come perilously close to running out
| of money once. It can happen again.
|
| I believe risk can be moved around, but it can't be
| eliminated. This is probably fairly mainstream Wall
| Street analysis, too. I also believe that all attempts to
| move around risk must also _increase_ it on the net,
| e.g., if you do the extremely popular financial move of
| taking a modest chance of modest loss and stuffing all
| the risk into a small chance of total loss and then
| hoping that just never happens, that the total risk has
| increased. This is probably less mathematically provable,
| and depends on a lot of assumptions about how one
| compares various classes of risks. (I base my thinking on
| a variant of what you might call the "more or less
| efficient market hypothesis"; if there was a way to net
| reduce risk overall, it would probably already have been
| taken.)
|
| The bank abstraction you refer to is in my opinion in
| that class of "extremely popular financial moves". Yes,
| it removes the modest risk of partial loss, but it moves
| the risk entirely into a small chance of total loss when
| the entire system comes down instead. I worry about the
| net effect of millions of little financial transaction
| that all perform that particular risk management move. It
| ends up creating a lot of easily-hidden correlations in
| the system, and no one entity (let alone person) can have
| a view of the whole situation.
|
| In the end, the risk is moved around, but the bank run is
| still a possibility and no amount of financial
| abstraction can truly remove the fact that the liquidity
| term mismatch is a fundamental aspect of such an
| operation that can't be erased, only managed.
| mindslight wrote:
| While I see where you're coming from about shifting risk
| around, I disagree with its applicability to what I said.
| The amount of risk can still be increased/decreased by
| changing the fundamentals. The straightforward way to
| reduce the risk of running out of slack in the system is
| to have more of a buffer to begin with, which is why I
| mentioned reserve requirements.
|
| Furthermore I'd argue that insuring deposit banks through
| the asset-limited FDIC is yet another setup to socialize
| catastrophic losses. If bank deposits were guaranteed by
| the Fed directly, the Fed could print an unlimited number
| of dollars to make depositors whole, thus completely
| eliminating the risk that a USD-denominated deposit
| simply vanished. (The realized damage would instead be
| expressed as monetary inflation)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hmm. Duration mismatching is kind of fundamental to the
| loan business. There used to be a lot more savings accounts
| that didn't offer at-sight withdrawal, partly because of
| this; if you make people wait 30 or 90 days you can have
| more time for things to settle.
|
| On the other hand, in order to do that, you have to pay
| them a higher interest rate to make it worthwhile. And
| rates have been driven to the floor.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Low rates have certainly broken a lot of incentive
| structures that used to work.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would imagine the FBI to be able to trace the holders of
| all the big withdrawals through the blockchain.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| How? The blockchain doesn't store names or SSNs for every
| address. If the victim/user uses a mixer they can get their
| coins out easily and anonymously.
| chrisjc wrote:
| I've been watching some of Coffeezilla's videos lately
| and he often gets into the analysis of "following the
| money" from one crypto wallet to another to show how lots
| of his subjects conducted their scams.
|
| Were these individuals just sloppy (probably) or is there
| some kind of forensic analysis that can be performed
| blockchains to trace the path of tokens/funds/credits
| through a mixer?
|
| Although I know nothing about crypto, blockchain, defi, I
| imagine credits/tokens/funds can be split and merged in
| every imaginable way by a "mixer" and transactions can
| probably occur across different blockchains via exchanges
| as well as occur outside in the real world, but I'm
| curious about any sort of signal that might be extracted
| from such analysis, other than signals arising from just
| pure sloppiness.
|
| BTW, I'm not disputing your asserting about being able to
| track people... more about breadcrumbs in general, even
| if they're anonymous.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I watch those videos as well but many of those
| influencers are dumb enough to put their wallets in their
| twitter bios (eg their ENS names), or its because they
| are linked to their project from the flow of large
| amounts of tokens.
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| You are anonymous as long as you have not used your
| wallet somewhere where you can be identified. Read about
| "welcome to video" child porn bust possible due to
| chainanalysis. From https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-
| in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
|
| Chainalysis had combined these techniques for de-
| anonymizing Bitcoin users with methods that allowed it to
| "cluster" addresses, showing that anywhere from dozens to
| millions of addresses sometimes belonged to a single
| person or organization. When coins from two or more
| addresses were spent in a single transaction, for
| instance, it revealed that whoever created that "multi-
| input" transaction must have control of both spender
| addresses, allowing Chainalysis to lump them into a
| single identity. In other cases, Chainalysis and its
| users could follow a "peel chain"--a process analogous to
| tracking a single wad of cash as a user repeatedly pulled
| it out, peeled off a few bills, and put it back in a
| different pocket. In those peel chains, bitcoins would be
| moved out of one address as a fraction was paid to a
| recipient and then the remainder returned to the spender
| at a "change" address. Distinguishing those change
| addresses could allow an investigator to follow a sum of
| money as it hopped from one address to the next, charting
| its path through the noise of Bitcoin's blockchain.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Note that everybody who uses a mixer is potentially
| participating in money laundering, sanctions evasion,
| etc.
|
| The whole premise is that you put money in and are given
| some different money out. But where does your money that
| you originally put in go? If it went to North Korea,
| congratulations on your crime.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I would be interested if you've heard of any prosecutions
| against individuals solely for using a mixer. In itself,
| I don't believe that it is illegal to use a mixer, but it
| is likely illegal to operate a mixer in most countries.
| _throwawayaway wrote:
| I've never seen a Russian name written like that: Ivan Turogin
| icepat wrote:
| That's an Estonian name. Estonians are _not_ Russian, though
| there 's a Russian speaking city, Narva, in the east.
|
| Calling Estonians Russians is not taken well at all. The
| relationship between the Russian minority, and the Estonian
| majority is... tense.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| Of course Turygin is a Russian name. Spelling it using
| Estonian script doesn't change anything.
|
| Looking up other Turogins in Estonia, they all have very
| obviously Russian first names and zero obviously Estonian
| names.
|
| There's no doubt that Ivan Turogins parents fully intended to
| give him a Russian name, even if Estonia requires Estonian
| script on Estonian identity documents.
|
| Even Estonians call these names "Russian names", that's what
| they are. If someone in Estonia decides to name their kid
| Muhamed, that doesn't magically become an Estonian name.
|
| > Calling Estonians Russians is not taken well at all
|
| I suspect that your comment wouldn't be taken very well by
| Estonian Turogins
| icepat wrote:
| > If someone in Estonia decides to name their kid Muhamed,
| that doesn't magically become an Estonian name.
|
| Correct, but it does not suddenly make them another
| nationality. Also, it's not spelled as you spelled it for a
| reason -- it's Estonian you're looking at. Not Russian. The
| reason it looks different, is because they're Estonian, so
| the name will be different.
|
| My second point, which is pretty clear in the first place,
| is that a nation of people illegally occupied by Russia for
| decades, isn't keen on being labelled as Russian.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| Nobody was called Russian. _throwawayaway correctly
| called it a Russian name, you incorrectly replied with
| "That's an Estonian name", which it isn't.
|
| Most of the Estonians with Russian names do identify as
| Russian, even if they aren't necessarily Russian
| nationals. It's an ethnic group, these are ethnic
| Russians.
|
| > The reason it looks different, is because they're
| Estonian, so the name will be different
|
| This is false. It's spelled the way it is spelled because
| that's how Estonian government wants names spelled. Also,
| because it would be awkward to interact with a society
| where most people do not know the Cyrillic alphabet.
| icepat wrote:
| > This is false. It's spelled the way it is spelled
| because that's how Estonian government wants names
| spelled.
|
| He's quite literally an Estonian national, go check the
| FBI report that was released.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| Yes, he is an ethnic Russian who happens to be an
| Estonian national. "Russian" does not refer to the
| nationality, it is an ethnicity. There are vast amounts
| of Russian nationals who are not Russian.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians
|
| In Estonia these people are referred to as Russians too,
| because that is what they are and what they identify as.
| icepat wrote:
| I've met plenty of Estonians who have a Russian ethnic
| background, however identify as Estonian, speak Estonian,
| and do not consider themselves Russian. Again, I think
| the point of what I was getting at should be clear.
|
| And, to your point about them being called Russian in
| Estonia, I've heard them called "Russian speaking" more
| than Russian. Then, again, the Estonians I know take a
| pro-integration position on the matter. The "ethnic
| Russian" terminology is often used in pro-separatist
| circles to justify non-integration, or by anti-Russian
| Estonians.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| The point you were getting at simply doesn't exist. Ask
| those ethnic Russians if that's an Estonian or Russian
| name, they will tell you it's a Russian name.
|
| Writing Russian names in Estonian script does not make
| them Estonian names.
| [deleted]
| garganzol wrote:
| This whole story sounds like an intro track of an imaginary "Wild
| Crypto of ICO 2017" album if it was a thing. There are so many
| tracks yet to be discovered.
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| I'd wager 10C/ that this is primarily driven by AML efforts.
| deafpiano wrote:
| only took them 7 years, great work!
| fortran77 wrote:
| If someone wants to pour money into a crazy scheme, why should
| our government waste resources to protect them? The website says
| "The FBI is legally mandated to identify victims of federal
| crimes that it investigates" so I suppose that's the stated
| reason, but why should they care?
|
| If someone was illegally selling securities that they claimed
| were regulated or audited, or that depositor's funds were FDIC or
| SPIC insured, certainly law enforcement should step in for the
| "victims." But why waste FBI manpower in this case? Why not just
| let "a fool and his money" go anyway they want? (Is it because
| the stolen money went to fund nefarious things, like North
| Korea?)
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > But why waste FBI manpower in this case?
|
| Because half of the purpose of punishment for crime is
| deterrence?
|
| If "they should have known better" was a valid legal defense
| for fraud...
| everfree wrote:
| Are you asking why the government should prosecute crimes, or
| are you asking why securities laws exist in the first place?
| astrange wrote:
| North Korea can steal crypto directly and doesn't need help
| from Estonians.
|
| Though Lazarus doesn't seem to have been indicted for anything
| yet.
| 123123213444 wrote:
| [flagged]
| andrewfromx wrote:
| seems to be a legit request from the fbi about a web3 token
| 123123213444 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| csomar wrote:
| Related arrests of the individuals involved:
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/two-estonian-citizens-a...
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| [flagged]
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| Who in their right mind would share their wallet info with the
| FBI. That's an easy way to get shortlisted.
| voytec wrote:
| Not sure about the right mind but the BTC core developer who
| "lost" 216 BTC a few days back apparently tried asking FBI for
| help[1].
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1609630432546406404#m
| redog wrote:
| [flagged]
| judge2020 wrote:
| As long as you were going to pay taxes and weren't actually
| defrauding people, might as well file a report in case
| anything comes of it.
| lfodofod wrote:
| It's worth noting that Luke would be a prime target for
| nation state hackers from DPRK and the likes.
|
| What happened here was likely a failed attempt to slip a
| backdoor into bitcoin core, attackers pulled out and took
| his bitcoins as a consolation prize after he realised his
| server had been compromised.
|
| The FBI should absolutely be jumping on this, not because
| of bitcoin, but because of the likely perpetrators.
| luma wrote:
| Luke had his wallet sitting on a server that he knew to
| be compromised for months. There is no reason to expect a
| nation state actor, his loss was 100% his own poor
| security. It also says a lot about the "wisdom" of
| hosting your own wallet. Can't trust the exchanges, and
| you can't trust your own wallet.
| gggggg5 wrote:
| > Luke had his wallet sitting on a server that he knew to
| be compromised for months
|
| How do you know this? Luke has denied this over and over
| again. It seems like you've invented this in order to
| defame him.
| astrange wrote:
| Well, he can now take a $3000 capital loss deduction for
| the next 1223 years.
| neilv wrote:
| I default to pro-privacy, on principle, but are you talking
| about a more specific threat?
|
| A threat that outweighs the benefits of: possibly increasing
| the likelihood/degree of takedown of an alleged scammer, and
| also possibly being more likely to be compensated for losses?
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| The FBI maintains databases of individuals that they consider
| potential terrorism with such weak definitions that anyone
| who uses a blockchain application would qualify[1]. When you
| are put on the list, they will never confirm or deny whether
| you are on the list. However you will find yourself losing
| rights to internationally travel freely without harassment,
| may have computing devices compromised by agents, may have
| wiretaps or microphones placed in your residence, and more.
|
| I will admit that they do target US citizens less than
| others, but most hashflare victims are not US citizens and do
| not get those protections.
|
| [1] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/terrorism/tsc
| pjc50 wrote:
| If you're not a US national, you've no reason to appeal to
| the FBI anyway; speak to your local authorities.
| nindalf wrote:
| Yeah! Don't trust the man! The man is only interested in ...
| something! There must be an ulterior motive in trying to bring
| scammers to book!
|
| Just think for a second. If someone has been scammed out of
| millions, you think they're not going to talk to law
| enforcement about it? They wouldn't only if they were
| perpetrating their own scam.
|
| At some point privacy nuts on HN have to really stop and think
| before typing.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I'm not exactly sure what the FBI would gain here, and it may
| be nothing, but distrusting them by default seems rational
| given their long history of corruption.
| nindalf wrote:
| Again, this communication from the FBI is specifically
| targeted at victims of a particular scam. The victims have
| already lost more than what the FBI could hypothetically
| maybe do to them.
|
| Unless we live in Scooby Doo-verse and the FBI agent
| removes his mask to reveal that he was the IRS all along
| and this was all a ploy to get people to pay their taxes.
| jojobas wrote:
| I guess if you used crypto to trade in heroin you could
| lose quite a bit more.
| kolbe wrote:
| I think the real fear is that you never know what the FBI
| really wants. So unless you feel confident that you've
| covered all of the possible angles that an intelligence
| agency with 10000x the information you have could only be
| seeking exactly what they claim to be seeking, then sure,
| answering their call is fine.
|
| But the general rule is to never ever talk with them
| unless you have a lawyer present. You have no clue
| whether you're the target of an investigation. You have
| no clue whether the FBI knows some percentage of their
| targets were victims of this scam, and are using it to
| get an in with them (you). You just don't know anything
| going on behind the scenes.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Do you get to write off rug pulls like any other capital
| loss?
|
| For that matter, what are the tax implications of getting
| mugged?
| nradov wrote:
| Losses from theft are generally tax deductible.
|
| https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc515
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| By corruption I assume you mean "a 100yr history doing
| nasty things that benefit the agency and/or the political
| goals of specific agency leaders and/or the political goals
| of specific people close to those leaders in direct or near
| direct contradiction of the organization's mandate and/or
| law.
|
| Basically they're evil, not corrupt.
| themitigating wrote:
| Their long history of corruption compared to all the non-
| corrupt things they have done?
| burner9918 wrote:
| Give the Minneapolis FBI whistleblower account a read and
| then think for a second
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/magazine/fbi-terrorism-
| te...
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| When considering which corporate bodies to trust, I consider
| their public statements and policies, their historical
| behaviors, and reports from other users of their services.
| The FBI's official policy is to harasses individuals they
| place on secret watchlists. Historically, the agency has been
| one of the most corrupt from the beginning, especially the
| Hoover era, and has never gone through a period of
| substantive reform to resolve these issues. Additionally,
| multiple victims of crimes who have reported their situation
| to the FBI have either seen no positive actions or have even
| been harassed themselves by FBI employees. Currently there's
| a severe shortage of reputable cybercrime security providers
| that also have enough capabilities to enforce the result of
| investigations, but the FBI is such a poor organization that
| it would be foolish to even consider requesting their
| services.
| themitigating wrote:
| "Historically, the agency has been one of the most corrupt
| from the beginning,"
|
| What proof do you that the FBI is more corrupt than other
| government agencies?
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| Most USG agencies did not have programs similar to
| COINTELPRO. The FBI is the USG secret police and as such
| share they same set of problems other secret police have
| in other countries - since secret police suppress
| internal dissent with tactics veiled in secrecy, they are
| able to violate human rights much more easily than
| agencies that have more openness and less political
| valence.
| prettywoman wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
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