10 ms·

Everything everywhere is securities fraud

288 points by dwohnitmok 7y ago

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
I bet today EE[1] is really glad that it rebranded from "Everything Everywhere" to EE [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ee https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ee
- rudiv 7y ago
  You're downvoted, but on my mediocre desi internet LTE connection, for the ~2 seconds it took for the article blurb to load I did wonder whether it was about the UK telco or a literal statement of everything everywhere being securities fraud.
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    UK telco was my first thought too. "what did they do now" was literally on my mind :)
  - twic 7y ago
    The amount they're charging me for my mediocre anglo internet LTE connection is definitely securities fraud.
robocat 7y ago
Summary: a third party in the US provides synthetic Toshiba shares (without Toshiba's consent or input). But the buyers have sued Toshiba using the US court system! "Toshiba Corp. is a Japanese company whose stock is listed in Japan. It has unsponsored Level 1 ADRs in the U.S., through no fault of its own. [Toshiba] did a fraud. U.S. investors lost money on their ADRs and sued, and Toshiba objected that it had nothing to do with those ADRs, or with U.S. securities markets in general. Last year a U.S. federal appeals court let the lawsuit go forward". I also love this quote from Matt "If you are a member of the global insider-trading Illuminati, please tell me about it over unencrypted email."
- duxup 7y ago
  I guess the question is, if you feel a company lies about something (just for the sake of argument let's assume that is true) and it hits the stock price, even if you don't own the stock directly... is that still fraud and do you have legal standing to sue?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    The question is rather: Why should a foreign company have to care about whether it is fraud in your jurisdiction? I can see that you possibly can sue whoever is offering the ADR in your jurisdiction, and that they can possibly sue the company in their home jurisdiction, but not like this.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Hasn't the question of if a foreign company can be sued in another country largely been answered in most countries as, yes?
      - testvox 7y ago
        No, most countries will not allow their courts to assert original jurisdiction for torts or crimes committed in other countries by foreign actors. The US has more exceptions to this then most other countries, for instance the controversial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute But even the Alien Tort Claims Act only applies to torts, and only to those which are "...committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States."
        rolltiide 7y ago
        Other countries have a mixture of ideology and consequences which limit the scope of their jurisdiction. The ideology itself formed mostly from historical consequences and collaboration with neighbors. The consequences being their relationship with other countries. Specifically related to negative consequences that have an impact. The US ideology has no limit to its scope, and the consequences are non-existent. When other countries disagree with US ideology, their desire to maintain a relationship with the US is greater. This allows the US to so far operate with impunity, with notable exceptions being Russia and China, which do ignore administrative requests from the US for things within their territory. This should give a lot of color and context to why the US has a different meaning of jurisdiction than what people expect. A future US could be subject to unilateral drone strikes and internationally coordinated sanctions, forcing more mutual cooperation and limitations in its enforcement scope.
benj111 7y ago
It seems to me theres some kind of balance between ignoring crimes that aren't committed inside your borders, and prosecuting crimes regardless of where they are committed. It seems to be a generally good thing to punish a company for employing slaves on their African plantation. Less good to be suing a European bar for selling to 'underage' 18 year olds. If you start prosecuting everything and trampling over the laws of other nations, aren't they then going to start trampling back. Internet companies are largely US companies, how are they going to be able to function if they have to follow mutually exclusive laws. Eg if promotion of homosexuality is illegal in X, and free speech is protected in Y and both nations enforce their laws globally, what do you do?
- ndiscussion 7y ago
  You defer to the most powerful. Right now you bow down to the United States. If the United States doesn't care about your case, you bow down to China. And if they don't care, you bow down to Russia. If they don't care, best of luck to you... you're on your own.
  - benj111 7y ago
    But the US benefits from global trade as much as, if not more than other countries. This isn't a 'tax' that will just be paid by foreign countries, it will be passed on to US companies, it just seems incredibly short sighted.
froindt 7y ago
Matt Levine does a great job writing, and I highly recommend his newsletter. He talks extensively about the weird things that happen in the finance and hedge fund world, such as Windstream botching a bond and getting called out on it years later by a hedge fund. Or dozens of examples of things where you'd think "that's gotta be insider trading" but is completely legal.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  A lot of the things that people think are insider trading are legal only because those doing them have paid for enough lobbyists to make it legal.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    Do you have examples? In my own personal experience, people are most often mistaken about what is insider trading due to a combination of a vague sense of unfairness and a lack of background knowledge about the reasons for insider trading laws and the exact harm those laws are designed to prevent. Matt Levine has written extensively about this and it's all quite interesting!
    - JaimeThompson 7y ago
      There have been some rather weird price moves in some stocks relating to various congressional committees apparently tipping off people before the info was publicly released. While I can't find it right now I recall studies that showed that the typical return on a Senator's investments was at least 11% greater than would be expected which is a data point to take into consideration. I do agree it is all very interesting and will read more of his works when I have time.
      - ksdale 7y ago
        That's an excellent example! Thank you.
      - IAmEveryone 7y ago
elipsey 7y ago
Life hack: don't store anything you don't want to explain in front of a judge. For practical purposes, "store" includes "put in a computer". Consider that: --Saying you committed a crime is definitely incriminating, so storing that is probably not in your best interest. --You are not qualified to know that you are _not_ breaking the law. --In fact, the only way to determine this affirmatively is by trial. --If you think no one important cares, you might still piss off someone important later (Corollary: pissing off someone important is a good way to find out whether you have broken the law).
- 2Ccltvcm 7y ago
  This is the best argument in favor of strong privacy laws I have heard so far
  - imgabe 7y ago
    I don't think privacy laws extend to things that have been subpoenaed by a court or collected as evidence.
    - milankovic 7y ago
      Well, if it's collected as evidence, it is obviously too late.
    - elipsey 7y ago
      They might prevent fishing expeditions though. I would encourage readers to see Moxie Marlinspike's essay on this subject. The thesis is that the ability to capriciously and selective prosecute anyone is stiffing to dissent, and prevents political change. Students of recent US history understand that this is far from purely theoretical. "if everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all. Even ignoring this obvious potential for new abuse, it’s also substantially closer to that dystopian reality of a world where law enforcement is 100% effective, eliminating the possibility to [directly] experience alternative ideas that might better suit us." https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ Edit: To be clear, I think you make good point that privacy laws won't save you from a subpoena. However, they are probably useful for other reasons; this was why warrants and other notions of due process were created to begin with, including the requirement that a warrant or subpoena be limited in scope to that material which is relevant to a particular charge or investigation. I think one big problem today is that people are ordered to surrender "everything on your phone and cloud", etc. This is at least equivalent to search warrant for "your filing cabinet", if not "everything you have ever written or said."
vasilipupkin 7y ago
unpopular opinion: I find his writing style annoying.
- dang 7y ago
  Fair enough, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- tanderson92 7y ago
  If I may add a substantive counterpoint, this newsletter's use of ValleySpeak to talk about occasionally complex technical topics (as well as moving to SoCal, and also reading other more focused things like: https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistake...) taught me that my youthful naive (and possibly unknowingly racially-tinged) ideas about language and communication were far off -- specifically that anything apart from the Correct English (TM) mode of communicating was inferior and a sign of poor education or intellect. This is important, because if we unjustly filter people by their dialect then we may be making significant Type-I errors.
  - twic 7y ago
    I'm a huge fan of Matt Levine, but i'm an even bigger fan of Geoffrey K. Pullum! Here's his proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, in verse: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html
AznHisoka 7y ago
"You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud." Immediately telling them would still make the stock price plummet and you'll still lose probably the same amount of money. I think what most people want is: Tell me and only me first when there is something bad, so I can sell before the stock goes south.
- kolbe 7y ago
  And then shareholders sue their own company, and for every dollar of the settlement that they take out of their own pockets to give to themselves, they give 20 cents to a lawyer.
piker 7y ago
In the unrelated later article about the "Chicken Libor" later in the document, he says: > Anyway it totally worked? “Georgia agriculture officials suspended the index late that year after some poultry companies declined to provide documents attesting to the accuracy of the data they submitted.” One possible reading is that companies were willing to lie about chicken prices, but they weren’t willing to lie about whether they were lying about chicken prices. 4 I suppose you could try that with real Libor too. He missed the point. These guys were willing cause the company to lie. But, as the certifications presumably came from the individuals making them, were unwilling to be personally liable for the statements' accuracy. It's the same principle that underpins executive liability under SarBox. [Edit: Huge fan nonetheless. Incredible volume of high level content comes from this guy.]
- ineedasername 7y ago
  He missed the point That depends on how the certification worked. If it was an internal compliance officer or someone that had to sign off, then you're right. But it also sounds like it might just have been that Company X has to hand over some documents, in which case no specific individual is accountable for certifying accuracy.
- feintruled 7y ago
  I loved that article. You might be right about the personal liability aspect but maybe there is something else at play too? Perhaps the amount of cognitive dissonance increases beyond some bearable threshold when asked to specifically confirm the lie (basically lie twice). Similar to how when you ask a child "Are you sure it wasn't you who broke the vase?" They made the additional denial, surely once that step has been taken, the hard work is done.. but you can practically see the additional psychological pressure!
jluxenberg 7y ago
Ah, Matt Levine is always worth a read! You can receive his column by email (for free!) if you subscribe here: http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-signup?source=msweb http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s... (sharing this here because Bloomberg's website makes it really hard to find)
beezle 7y ago
I have strong feelings about spoofing - that it should not, in almost every case, be illegal. While it is true that the spoofer may eventually cancel their orders the fact remains: their orders were dealable by any other party for a set period of time. You want to teach a spoofer a lesson? Deal on their price for size. That anyone would base a trading or investment decision on the size of the bid or offer at any moment of time is frankly, crazy. Algos are constantly changing(edit) price and never dealing. Brokers allow orders to be only partially display, balances kept in 'reserve'. There are many, many ways people attempt to "manipulate" by not showing their hand just as their are ways that show a hand (or many hands).
jmull 7y ago
This probably isn't the greatest case to lament that everything is securities fraud. It seems fairly likely that Toshiba committed securities fraud and that if they did, that Americans making transactions in the US were detrimentlly affected. It's certainly an interesting legal question. It would be nice for a perpetrator if they could use an international jurisdictional legal loophole to limit liability for their fraud. But in terms of actual justice, it would be bad. In general, you shouldn't have to directly control the mechanism by which your fraud causes damage to be held liable for the fraud.
jessaustin 7y ago
Hmmm, the way to be convicted of this crime is not to commit it and be caught, because that shit ain't gonna happen. The way to be convicted is to make a permanent record claiming you've committed the crime, and then have the misfortune that a federal prosecutor discovers that record. What tiny percentage of these crimes are ever prosecuted? Wouldn't we expect prosecutors' discretion to be the only thing that could matter? Do we really need such arbitrary and thus unjust laws?
londons_explore 7y ago
It's time we just made all kinds of securities fraud legal behaviour. It is pretty much impossible to police as-is, leading to the more shady people gaining an advantage. It doesn't hurt real people, and if it's legal, everyone has an equal opportunity to do it.
- bregma 7y ago
  ... and besides, it's pretty much 100% prosperous white men who do it, so it's not really a crime but a benefit to society.

288 points by dwohnitmok 7y ago

I bet today EE[1] is really glad that it rebranded from "Everything Everywhere" to EE [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ee https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ee

rudiv 7y ago
You're downvoted, but on my mediocre desi internet LTE connection, for the ~2 seconds it took for the article blurb to load I did wonder whether it was about the UK telco or a literal statement of everything everywhere being securities fraud.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  UK telco was my first thought too. "what did they do now" was literally on my mind :)
- twic 7y ago
  The amount they're charging me for my mediocre anglo internet LTE connection is definitely securities fraud.

robocat 7y ago

Summary: a third party in the US provides synthetic Toshiba shares (without Toshiba's consent or input). But the buyers have sued Toshiba using the US court system! "Toshiba Corp. is a Japanese company whose stock is listed in Japan. It has unsponsored Level 1 ADRs in the U.S., through no fault of its own. [Toshiba] did a fraud. U.S. investors lost money on their ADRs and sued, and Toshiba objected that it had nothing to do with those ADRs, or with U.S. securities markets in general. Last year a U.S. federal appeals court let the lawsuit go forward". I also love this quote from Matt "If you are a member of the global insider-trading Illuminati, please tell me about it over unencrypted email."

duxup 7y ago
I guess the question is, if you feel a company lies about something (just for the sake of argument let's assume that is true) and it hits the stock price, even if you don't own the stock directly... is that still fraud and do you have legal standing to sue?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  The question is rather: Why should a foreign company have to care about whether it is fraud in your jurisdiction? I can see that you possibly can sue whoever is offering the ADR in your jurisdiction, and that they can possibly sue the company in their home jurisdiction, but not like this.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Hasn't the question of if a foreign company can be sued in another country largely been answered in most countries as, yes?
    - testvox 7y ago
      No, most countries will not allow their courts to assert original jurisdiction for torts or crimes committed in other countries by foreign actors. The US has more exceptions to this then most other countries, for instance the controversial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute But even the Alien Tort Claims Act only applies to torts, and only to those which are "...committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States."
      - rolltiide 7y ago
        Other countries have a mixture of ideology and consequences which limit the scope of their jurisdiction. The ideology itself formed mostly from historical consequences and collaboration with neighbors. The consequences being their relationship with other countries. Specifically related to negative consequences that have an impact. The US ideology has no limit to its scope, and the consequences are non-existent. When other countries disagree with US ideology, their desire to maintain a relationship with the US is greater. This allows the US to so far operate with impunity, with notable exceptions being Russia and China, which do ignore administrative requests from the US for things within their territory. This should give a lot of color and context to why the US has a different meaning of jurisdiction than what people expect. A future US could be subject to unilateral drone strikes and internationally coordinated sanctions, forcing more mutual cooperation and limitations in its enforcement scope.

benj111 7y ago

It seems to me theres some kind of balance between ignoring crimes that aren't committed inside your borders, and prosecuting crimes regardless of where they are committed. It seems to be a generally good thing to punish a company for employing slaves on their African plantation. Less good to be suing a European bar for selling to 'underage' 18 year olds. If you start prosecuting everything and trampling over the laws of other nations, aren't they then going to start trampling back. Internet companies are largely US companies, how are they going to be able to function if they have to follow mutually exclusive laws. Eg if promotion of homosexuality is illegal in X, and free speech is protected in Y and both nations enforce their laws globally, what do you do?

ndiscussion 7y ago
You defer to the most powerful. Right now you bow down to the United States. If the United States doesn't care about your case, you bow down to China. And if they don't care, you bow down to Russia. If they don't care, best of luck to you... you're on your own.
- benj111 7y ago
  But the US benefits from global trade as much as, if not more than other countries. This isn't a 'tax' that will just be paid by foreign countries, it will be passed on to US companies, it just seems incredibly short sighted.

froindt 7y ago

Matt Levine does a great job writing, and I highly recommend his newsletter. He talks extensively about the weird things that happen in the finance and hedge fund world, such as Windstream botching a bond and getting called out on it years later by a hedge fund. Or dozens of examples of things where you'd think "that's gotta be insider trading" but is completely legal.

JaimeThompson 7y ago
A lot of the things that people think are insider trading are legal only because those doing them have paid for enough lobbyists to make it legal.
- ksdale 7y ago
  Do you have examples? In my own personal experience, people are most often mistaken about what is insider trading due to a combination of a vague sense of unfairness and a lack of background knowledge about the reasons for insider trading laws and the exact harm those laws are designed to prevent. Matt Levine has written extensively about this and it's all quite interesting!
  - JaimeThompson 7y ago
    There have been some rather weird price moves in some stocks relating to various congressional committees apparently tipping off people before the info was publicly released. While I can't find it right now I recall studies that showed that the typical return on a Senator's investments was at least 11% greater than would be expected which is a data point to take into consideration. I do agree it is all very interesting and will read more of his works when I have time.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      That's an excellent example! Thank you.
    - IAmEveryone 7y ago

elipsey 7y ago

Life hack: don't store anything you don't want to explain in front of a judge. For practical purposes, "store" includes "put in a computer". Consider that: --Saying you committed a crime is definitely incriminating, so storing that is probably not in your best interest. --You are not qualified to know that you are _not_ breaking the law. --In fact, the only way to determine this affirmatively is by trial. --If you think no one important cares, you might still piss off someone important later (Corollary: pissing off someone important is a good way to find out whether you have broken the law).

2Ccltvcm 7y ago
This is the best argument in favor of strong privacy laws I have heard so far
- imgabe 7y ago
  I don't think privacy laws extend to things that have been subpoenaed by a court or collected as evidence.
  - milankovic 7y ago
    Well, if it's collected as evidence, it is obviously too late.
  - elipsey 7y ago
    They might prevent fishing expeditions though. I would encourage readers to see Moxie Marlinspike's essay on this subject. The thesis is that the ability to capriciously and selective prosecute anyone is stiffing to dissent, and prevents political change. Students of recent US history understand that this is far from purely theoretical. "if everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all. Even ignoring this obvious potential for new abuse, it’s also substantially closer to that dystopian reality of a world where law enforcement is 100% effective, eliminating the possibility to [directly] experience alternative ideas that might better suit us." https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ Edit: To be clear, I think you make good point that privacy laws won't save you from a subpoena. However, they are probably useful for other reasons; this was why warrants and other notions of due process were created to begin with, including the requirement that a warrant or subpoena be limited in scope to that material which is relevant to a particular charge or investigation. I think one big problem today is that people are ordered to surrender "everything on your phone and cloud", etc. This is at least equivalent to search warrant for "your filing cabinet", if not "everything you have ever written or said."

vasilipupkin 7y ago

unpopular opinion: I find his writing style annoying.

dang 7y ago
Fair enough, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tanderson92 7y ago
If I may add a substantive counterpoint, this newsletter's use of ValleySpeak to talk about occasionally complex technical topics (as well as moving to SoCal, and also reading other more focused things like: https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistake...) taught me that my youthful naive (and possibly unknowingly racially-tinged) ideas about language and communication were far off -- specifically that anything apart from the Correct English (TM) mode of communicating was inferior and a sign of poor education or intellect. This is important, because if we unjustly filter people by their dialect then we may be making significant Type-I errors.
- twic 7y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Matt Levine, but i'm an even bigger fan of Geoffrey K. Pullum! Here's his proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, in verse: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html

AznHisoka 7y ago

"You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud." Immediately telling them would still make the stock price plummet and you'll still lose probably the same amount of money. I think what most people want is: Tell me and only me first when there is something bad, so I can sell before the stock goes south.

kolbe 7y ago
And then shareholders sue their own company, and for every dollar of the settlement that they take out of their own pockets to give to themselves, they give 20 cents to a lawyer.

piker 7y ago

In the unrelated later article about the "Chicken Libor" later in the document, he says: > Anyway it totally worked? “Georgia agriculture officials suspended the index late that year after some poultry companies declined to provide documents attesting to the accuracy of the data they submitted.” One possible reading is that companies were willing to lie about chicken prices, but they weren’t willing to lie about whether they were lying about chicken prices. 4 I suppose you could try that with real Libor too. He missed the point. These guys were willing cause the company to lie. But, as the certifications presumably came from the individuals making them, were unwilling to be personally liable for the statements' accuracy. It's the same principle that underpins executive liability under SarBox. [Edit: Huge fan nonetheless. Incredible volume of high level content comes from this guy.]

ineedasername 7y ago
He missed the point That depends on how the certification worked. If it was an internal compliance officer or someone that had to sign off, then you're right. But it also sounds like it might just have been that Company X has to hand over some documents, in which case no specific individual is accountable for certifying accuracy.
feintruled 7y ago
I loved that article. You might be right about the personal liability aspect but maybe there is something else at play too? Perhaps the amount of cognitive dissonance increases beyond some bearable threshold when asked to specifically confirm the lie (basically lie twice). Similar to how when you ask a child "Are you sure it wasn't you who broke the vase?" They made the additional denial, surely once that step has been taken, the hard work is done.. but you can practically see the additional psychological pressure!

jluxenberg 7y ago

Ah, Matt Levine is always worth a read! You can receive his column by email (for free!) if you subscribe here: http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-signup?source=msweb http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s... (sharing this here because Bloomberg's website makes it really hard to find)

beezle 7y ago

I have strong feelings about spoofing - that it should not, in almost every case, be illegal. While it is true that the spoofer may eventually cancel their orders the fact remains: their orders were dealable by any other party for a set period of time. You want to teach a spoofer a lesson? Deal on their price for size. That anyone would base a trading or investment decision on the size of the bid or offer at any moment of time is frankly, crazy. Algos are constantly changing(edit) price and never dealing. Brokers allow orders to be only partially display, balances kept in 'reserve'. There are many, many ways people attempt to "manipulate" by not showing their hand just as their are ways that show a hand (or many hands).

jmull 7y ago

This probably isn't the greatest case to lament that everything is securities fraud. It seems fairly likely that Toshiba committed securities fraud and that if they did, that Americans making transactions in the US were detrimentlly affected. It's certainly an interesting legal question. It would be nice for a perpetrator if they could use an international jurisdictional legal loophole to limit liability for their fraud. But in terms of actual justice, it would be bad. In general, you shouldn't have to directly control the mechanism by which your fraud causes damage to be held liable for the fraud.

jessaustin 7y ago

Hmmm, the way to be convicted of this crime is not to commit it and be caught, because that shit ain't gonna happen. The way to be convicted is to make a permanent record claiming you've committed the crime, and then have the misfortune that a federal prosecutor discovers that record. What tiny percentage of these crimes are ever prosecuted? Wouldn't we expect prosecutors' discretion to be the only thing that could matter? Do we really need such arbitrary and thus unjust laws?

londons_explore 7y ago

It's time we just made all kinds of securities fraud legal behaviour. It is pretty much impossible to police as-is, leading to the more shady people gaining an advantage. It doesn't hurt real people, and if it's legal, everyone has an equal opportunity to do it.

bregma 7y ago
... and besides, it's pretty much 100% prosperous white men who do it, so it's not really a crime but a benefit to society.