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Crypto CEO behind $2.5B 'rug pull' arrested
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago> Interpol had issued a red notice on Özer in April 2021, which basically means every police force in the world was asked to locate and arrest him. Yikes. That's like 4 stars of wanted level.
- thifhi 4y agoI remember that one of the technical employees of the said exchange claimed cyber attacks to their servers were so rampant and many succesful that they were simply not able to continue business with all the stolen funds. I honestly believe that incompetentness might have played a huge role in this "fraud" story.
- colechristensen 4y agoBeing incompetent is far less illegal than covering up your incompetence with fraud. If you don't cover up the first stolen funds, people will have a sense of the risk you pose and there will be less opportunity for future stolen funds because your customers will leave or beat you with a stick until your security improves.
- ejb999 4y agoHe shouldn't worry, that sentence will probably be cut in half anyway, and with another 100 years off for good behavior.
- 75w 4y agoWith good behaviour he should be out by the time he’s 20,578 years old
- zamalek 4y agoJust in time for "The Year of Crypto."
- sleightofmind 4y agoI know this isn't a humor site, but the three comments above were worthy of any comedy writing team. Result? Instant, involuntary, and un-stifle-able laughter. Thanks!
- belltaco 4y agoBut still not The Year of Desktop Linux.
- coffeeblack 4y agoSo, will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work? Isn’t it a little silly?
- delecti 4y agoThings like this aren't a single charge with a 40k year sentence, it's ~2000 charges of ~20 years, served sequentially. It means that if he's found not guilty of ~1999 of those charges, he still serves 20 years for the 2000th. And conversely, if he is found guilty of all ~2000 separate crimes, why shouldn't he receive a sentence for each? It might seem like a silly result, but what would you propose changing?
- barbazoo 4y ago> will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work? Imagine how awful that would be. > ~2000 charges of ~20 years And that makes me wonder. Maybe that would be too harsh a sentence then. Do we want to basically "end" someone's life at an insane cost to the tax payer for something with no impact on others other than financial? I have no answer, it just feels somewhat suboptimal to me.
- colechristensen 4y agoI mean, yes. If you steal a billion dollars from a whole bunch of middle class folks, you are, in aggregate "ending" a whole lot of life in small amounts distributed across many people.
- barbazoo 4y agoAre you ending their lives in a comparable way though? Especially if there are ways to get back what you stole as it is often the case? I just feel like the aggregate punishment does not at all fit the crime in a case like this.
- colechristensen 4y ago
- paxys 4y agoOnce again crypto investors have to be bailed out by the same government regulation they hate so much.
- chollida1 4y ago> Once again crypto investors have to be bailed out by the same government regulation they hate so much. Are they being bailed out by the government? I didn't see anything that said the government is making the investors whole here, do you?
- paxys 4y agoProsecution of crime discourages further crime, so yes the ecosystem is being helped directly by the government regardless of whether these few investors get their money back or not. And while it is too early to say in this case, the government has reimbursed crypto victims in several cases in the US (see https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/11/ftc-sends-refunds-victims-deceptive-money-making-schemes-involving-cryptocurrencies https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/11/... and https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/18/22789507/crypto-scam-government-bitconnect-56-million-victim-reimbursement https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/18/22789507/crypto-scam-gov... as examples).
- djschnei 4y agoEspecially in Bitcoin circles, the classical economic view of property rights is pretty much a cornerstone of the ideology. Many would argue defending property rights is one of the most legitimate utilizations of Government force. I'm not sure I understand your point, at all.
- paxys 4y agoThe ideas that: • The blockchain is an immutable distributed source of truth outside the control of any central authority and • The government can pass judgement, seize your assets and give them to someone else are fundamentally contradictory. If you want the government to be the final arbiter of property rights then you are conceding that they control property allocation, not some global ledger.
- aqme28 4y agoI always curious how this crime starts. You’re already presiding over a popular exchange with billions in customer funds. Surely you could just run that legitimately and still make a ton of money?
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoGreed.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Greed This is often thrown out as a shorthand for systemic failures, e.g. renters blaming individual landlords for rising rents. But I think it applies here. Short-term optimisation at the expense of long-term value. Optimising for the margin at the risk of the whole. Irrational, self-destructive maximalism: greed.
- KiranRao0 4y agoA book named "How will you measure your life?" by Clayton Christiansen that dives pretty deeply into the topic, among other things. The theory presented was called "The Trap of Marginal Thinking". On the margin, it may appear to make sense to do something or push some boundary or take on some more leverage because it, on the margin, is most likely going to work out. But by doing so, we end up putting ourselves and companies in a dangerous position when looking at the whole.
- Bakary 4y agoI agree with his view overall, but the current atmosphere seems to reward boundary-pushing more and more. There's never been a better time to be a stress-resistant psychopath or its company equivalent.
- maerF0x0 4y ago> never been a better time when we define better as financially compensated. It's still very much at a net loss to humanity, but for personal (or small group) gain. IE it's become very profitable to shrink the pie
- mtgx 4y ago
- rvz 4y agoSo not exactly the great Houdini after all. [0] Oh well. You can run but you can't hide alive. Now he has all the time to practice his disappearing tricks in prison. By the time he has perfected it, he would have already disappeared from life itself. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26911159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26911159
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ralmidani 4y agoJust wait for Proof-of-Stake to be implemented. It will solve all of the problems people complain about with Crypto.
- djschnei 4y ago/s
- ycta20223249009 4y agoAlong with the rapture and the year of the Linux desktop, I'm sure.
- salawat 4y agoDon't forget the ascension of Hurd as the globally preferred kernel.
- nominusllc 4y agoy'all are ruthless
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoChromebooks are being anti-trusted out of schools globally. I think Desktop Linux came, won, left, and nobody wants to admit it.
- bsedlm 4y agoessentially turning that crytpo into the financial system that the original crypto (bitcoin) was trying to differentiate itself from (or make obsolete, we do not know satoshi's political intentions)
- browningstreet 4y agoWhat I most enjoy about crypto is the special language it has for everything.
- knorker 4y agoIt's how they can claim to "invent" things, as opposed to what's actually going on which is regurgitating failed and banned (for good reason) ideas.
- dereg 4y agoReally? Can you tell me where perpetual swaps and automated market makers were used in the past?
- knorker 4y agoAre perpetual swaps inherently impossible outside the cryptocurrency space, or is this just a "… on the blockchain!" invention? I'm unconvinced that AMM is an actual good. It's like HFT, where you're counting centimeters of fiber to the exchange, to win algorithmically. The solution there isn't to democratize HFT by (in the analogy) allowing the little guy to also colocate with the exchange. The solution is to remove the penny tray theft that is HFT altogether, as it can't be justified as paying for value added. These last nanoseconds don't actually add any liquidity.
- daenz 4y agoThe phrase "rug pull" is almost cartoonishly evil. It implies waiting until the victims are feeling nice and secure, and then you rip everything out from under them as quickly as possible. The fact that the phrase has become so closely related to crypto activities is really telling.
- mikotodomo 4y agoWhat did you say, ?
- jmyeet 4y agoWith good behavior he could be out in 28,395 years do he’s got that going for him. We need more of this, more jail for corporate malfeasance. Fine just become the cost of doing business. Compare this to China who executed two executives over contaminated infant formula [1] whereas we were almost rewarding Abbott for similar malfeasance. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/world/asia/25china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/world/asia/25china.html
- capableweb 4y ago> The Albanian minister for internal affairs, Bledar Chuchi, said that the fugitive's identity was confirmed post-arrest by biometric results: Özer had apparently shaved his head. Seems they might not even have realized who they arrested until they tested him, or they just re-confirmed who it was post-arrest. If the former, any idea what he initially got arrested for?
- xmprt 4y agoDifferent countries have different laws but generally you're allowed to arrest someone when you have reasonable suspicion that they've committed a crime (say 99%) and then only confirm it 100% once they're arrested.
- capableweb 4y agoYeah, I understand that, but you still need reasonable suspicion, and I don't think generally police in various countries are A) aware of all the faces on the Interpol lists and B) suspect people of fraudulently closing down cryptocurrency exchanges and running away from their countries.
- rosnd 4y agoThe guy steals over $100M and decides to hide in Albania of all places? What's the deal with that? He could've paid less than $10k to get into Schengen (super low risk, the "high end" operators will drop you from a plane with a skydiving instructor) and had much more places to hide and way better places to spend his money at.
- bestbuyer__ 4y agoOr someplace where Interpol does not operate, or which doesn't have an extradition treaty with Turkey.
- rosnd 4y ago> Or someplace where Interpol does not operate That's hard. But Interpol isn't a real concern anyways, how often have you had your fingerprints taken during your daily life? Fake IDs aren't hard to come by, even manufacturing a good enough EU ID card at home isn't very hard.
- gzer0 4y agoWouldn't it be easier to simply pay someone to hack you and then tell the public, "We were hacked and all of our funds were stolen"? What prevents someone from doing this? It allows for perfect plausible deniability, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> What prevents someone from doing this? Paranoia probably. Is there anybody you could trust to do something that illegal with that much money, that wouldn't ghost you after they had it? Maybe close family or friends, but the closer they are to you, the easier the plot is for investigators to unravel.
- senectus1 4y agoAsking the wrong question, because "prevention" or prohibition never works. We should be asking what drives people. if we can shift the drive from accumulating wealth to accomplishing great things...
- perardi 4y ago…um, that’s a funny definition of “perfect” when you have a hacker with a Signal message history that they can use to blackmail you to hell and back.
- aqme28 4y agoWhy pay an anonymous hacker when you yourself can just be that anonymous hacker?
- csense 4y agoHow could this possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways: - You pay the hacker to hack you, the hacker takes the payment and disappears. - The hacker hacks you, steals all the money for themselves and disappears. - The hacker turns you in and collects a reward from the government, because the hacker has a moral conscience | is actually a Fed | decides getting a small amount of reward money legitimately from the government or potential victims has a better risk/reward tradeoff than conspiring with a stranger to steal a huge amount of money. - The hacker hacks you, but keeps records of messages showing your complicity and blackmails you with them. Basically it boils down to: - No honor among thieves (you can't just trust the hacker to keep his word if he has a lot of incentives to break it) - The courts won't help (generally if you say in court "I paid this guy to commit a crime and he took the money but didn't commit the crime," not only will the court refuse to enforce the contract and order the hacker to pay you, but you've now confessed -- under oath, no less! -- to being involved in a crime, which makes it quite likely you'll be arrested on the spot and prosecuted for your actions) - Physical violence doesn't work well on the Internet. (Traditional organized crime enforces its "contracts" by threatening or carrying out physical violence against contract breakers or their family. This would only work if you knew your hacker's real name and location, and presumably the sort of people who sell illegal hacking services to anonymous strangers are quite, um, shy about giving their clients any information about their identity or location, for exactly the reason they don't want a crazed client to show up and physically attack them.)