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Honestly, the pitch here is so over the top, so brazen, and so patently unbelievable, I don't think he should be charged with fraud. I think the people he defr
by jovial_cavalier 5y ago
Honestly, the pitch here is so over the top, so brazen, and so patently unbelievable, I don't think he should be charged with fraud.
I think the people he defrauded should be charged with incompetence.
- teddyh 5y agoYou are quite literally blaming the victim.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNo the victims are the dead people it didn’t protect - they aren’t blaming them. They’re blaming people who didn’t do due diligence when buying it.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoExactly, these people are in position of power, with mutiple degrees, staff and million dollar equipment. They are not just a rando off the street
- jovial_cavalier 5y agoExactly. I'm being tongue-in-cheek when I say he shouldn't be charged with fraud. But if people died because of this, he definitely should not be considered liable for their deaths. That lies strictly with the people who bought this without thinking about it for even two seconds.
- teddyh 5y agoPeople who spend money on a useless products are also victims. Of fraud. Yes, even particularly clueless people should be held blameless of the crimes of fraudsters.
- jaywalk 5y agoTo be fair, you have to be pretty damned stupid to actually believe this device would work. So it's hard to believe that the "victims" weren't in on this somehow.
- fnord77 5y agothe victims were the people who died from undetected bombs going off. I doubt they had any knowledge of what devices were being used to sweep areas for bombs
- jaywalk 5y agoIt's incredibly unfortunate and disgusting that people died because this fake device was used in real settings, but that's obviously not the context being discussed here.
- jpxw 5y agoBlaming the victim isn't necessarily always wrong.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoThe definition of 'Victim' is thay they are not the one at fault
- jpxw 5y agoNo it isn't. Someone who succumbs to lung cancer after smoking 1000 cigarettes a day for 20 years is still a victim of lung cancer. The definition of victim says nothing about causation.
- MBCook 5y agoSo as long as your fraud is funny enough or over the top enough you should get a free pass?
- jovial_cavalier 5y agoIt's not that it's funny. It's that it's obviously false. It's so false and wrong, I think that the people who bought it from him are more criminals than he is. You can't buy a tricorder from star trek for $60k.
- samhw 5y agoIt does seem rather astonishing that they don't test these devices. It's not only fraud you need to rule out, but also genuine manufacturing errors, equipment wear and tear, etc. The only explanation I could understand is that these were deliberate false positive machines (either for illegitimate profiling or parallel construction), but that doesn't seem to be how they functioned.
- mrob 5y agoAlthough exact numbers are hard to determine[0], something like 90% of the global population believes in the supernatural. I don't see how a magical bomb detector is any less plausible than the other things they believe in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism
- jovial_cavalier 5y agoYou're very intelligent. Have an upvote on me, good sir!
- Corrado 5y agoI think the appropriate saying here is "You can't con an honest man"