6 ms·

"Jeff Bezos and Amazon tried to imprison my husband"

229 points by FlamingMoe 2y ago

FlamingMoe 2y ago
For those who don't want to log-in to X: https://nitter.poast.org/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822318185556648348#m https://nitter.poast.org/Amy_K_Nelson/status/182231818555664...
- hawski 2y ago
  I thought Nitter died. Is there any revival project?
  - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
    Isn't that what is linked?
- riiii 2y ago
  People like you make the internet a better place. Thanks!
- layer8 2y ago
  There’s also xcancel.com, which has the benefit that you only have to insert “cancel” into the existing x.com URL.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    What makes this work where Nitter doesn’t (from what I heard)?
    - layer8 2y ago
      Less users because it's not well-known. You can't do this at scale.
- gh02t 2y ago
  Tangent but is Nitter still around? I thought they had shut down the project because Xitter was locking them out. I used to rewrite search results to point to nitter and it was rather nice. Edit: looks like some instances are still alive and I assume coasting under the radar, but the original nitter project is still dead.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Nitter.net is defunct, but the software is open source and alternative instances exist.
    - gh02t 2y ago
      Ahh, yes I used to self host it but turned it off when they stopped development. When I saw the parent comment I was briefly hoping someone had picked it back up or forked it.
      - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
        Why would you stop hosting just because development stopped? Did it stop working?
        gh02t 2y ago
        When I read the announcement I misunderstood it to mean that it was going to stop working in general, and that was right around the time I was migrating my selfhosted stuff to a new server and doing some cleanup. So I didn't bother migrating it over.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    I think twitter rate-limits everyone. For example, I don't think that the nitter instance up there will survive the requests of HN-ers.
    - lern_too_spel 2y ago
- wffurr 2y ago
  “Tweet not found”
  - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    Refresh the page
    - wffurr 2y ago
      Now it says “instance is rate limited”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hiddencost 2y ago
I would hope that these folks would have the ability to use Amazon for expenses, lost revenue, anguish& suffering, and punitive damages. Making them whole seems like the necessary remedy, and making it so expensive that Amazon nor its peers do it again seems like the appropriate recourse.
FredPret 2y ago
What a shithole company. Also, how in the world is "civil asset forfeiture" (aka pure government theft) legal in the US of all places?
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  I can’t imagine ever working for a company like that and being capable of falling asleep at night.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Civil asset forfeiture originated from (and kinda made sense in the context of) dealing with smuggling. Its expansion to all sorts of other situations (such as this one) are abominable perversions of justice though.
- curtis3389 2y ago
  Civil asset forfeiture is wild shit. John Oliver had a great episode on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks They make criminal accusations against your property and not against you, and because of that, you have no rights or recourse. This is just blatant nonsense under the US legal system, but that's kind of irrelevant. Civil forfeiture was introduced to take houses and cars from drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs, which was really started as war on minorities and hippies. The government wants to take stuff from drug dealers, so it gets to do it (see legal realism: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_realism https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_realism).
gist 2y ago
First this type of information should be on a web page or blog post. Not a hard to read twitter thread. Second saying that Jeff Bezos wrote (and further that he tried to imprison her husband) it makes the OP loose credibility (especially as an attorney) for her argument (regardless of the outcome). While it's possible Jeff did write it (in the sense that a plant in the garden couldn't have written it because plants can't write) it's not credible to imply that fact to prove your point. Also a law degree is not 'helpful no matter what route you take' from my many many years of business experience and interactions it can actually hold you back. Because you might tend to look at edge cases (such as this one) and make judgements based on things you know. Not to mention it takes years of study which detracts from other things you might learn that might be more helpful.
- janice1999 2y ago
  > Second saying that Jeff Bezos wrote ... it Do you sincerely believe she meant that literally? She's clearly being sarcastic and using it to name drop Bezos via his twitter handle.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    All praise to the wife fighting for her husband, but it doesn't exactly make her claims more trustworthy, rather the contrary, it makes one wonder what other claims there we must consider to be "sarcastic" or performative exaggeration instead of literal truth?
    - thoroughburro 2y ago
      It doesn’t make “one” wonder that, no. You, I guess, weirdly struggle to understand fellow humans.
      - smsm42 2y ago
        Well, it should. Of course, the existing twitter "outrage first, thinking never" culture doesn't really allow for that, but there's a better way.
PessimalDecimal 2y ago
I wouldn't touch employment at Amazon with a 30 foot pole.
- xyst 2y ago
  Yet your 401K (or whatever investment portfolio you own) probably holds some AMZN; you buy products from Amazon; or use AWS products directly or indirectly. Boycotts don’t work against a multibillion dollar company. We need government to break up big tech like they did to the railroads
  - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
    I'd also like to see AMZN get investigated for antitrust violations. But my statement was less about performing a boycott, and more about quality of life, personal ethics, and avoiding situations like in the linked thread.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    Not buying causes the stock to drop and your 401K to sell/not buy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
amatecha 2y ago
Stories like this are why I reduce my usage of Amazon (which is basically becoming "American AliExpress") further and further.
- FredPret 2y ago
  AliExpress has all the same cheap crap as Amazon, except cheaper. It's a great pity Audible is under the Amazon umbrella because I'm hooked on that.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    That's what I mean! These days you browse Amazon and it's just a bunch of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress, but with a massive markup.
  - layer8 2y ago
    There are alternatives to Audible. I have been using AudiobookStore.com. There’s also Libby and others.
  - brunoarueira 2y ago
    Yeah, buy from AliExpress is good if you search right! Many things from there are crap, indeed, but many others are pretty good!
  - smsm42 2y ago
    Makes sense. We despise Amazon for their abusing people, so instead we choose to buy from... The Chinese Communist Party!
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Amazon’s products are sourced from there anyway. Next time you buy something on Amazon, search it on AliExpress. You’ll likely find the same thing for 0.1x the price, but with a long lead time and minimum order quantity.
      - 2y ago
smsm42 2y ago
Hard to understand the details from that description, but it certainly looks like Carl Nelson (the husband) took money ("referral fees"?) from RE developers who were doing business with Amazon, while also being employed by Amazon. Now I am not a lawyer and don't play one on TV, but I sat through enough corporate ethics training to recognize this is exactly the case where they want you to at least get an official approval from Legal before getting any money, because this has "conflict of interest" written all over it. Again I don't know what the contract Amazon had allowed and disallowed and what the lawyers can or can't prove in court, but it certainly - at least from the quick reading of it - does not seem like the case of "Amazon prosecuting innocent person out of the blue" but seems a lot like "Amazon employee did something which looks a lot like your standard kickback scheme". And their argument "but the deals I brought were awesome" does not really sound impressive - they may be awesome, but if you work for company A and bring an awesome deal with company B, you expect a bonus from the company A, not a kickback from the company B. If you do the latter, you're in a hot water regardless of how awesome the deal is. Do I miss something substantial in this story?
- michaelmrose 2y ago
  You missed the entire point. Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime which the government itself finally admitted in court after they spent millions of your tax dollars and several years destroying these people's lives and extorting guilty please from 4 men for what was manifestly and on its face not a crime. Even after they recognized that the government was entirely full of shit they took 7 months to recognize that you can't plead guilty to helping someone commit something that was not itself a crime and at time of writing seemingly haven't returned the money the government illegally robbed victim of. The start of the prosecution was a material misrepresentation by Amazon. Amazon would have been correct to fire him. They deliberately misrepresented the nature of the law and conduct to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    > Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime I have no idea. US Criminal code is literally thousands of pages long, and I have no idea whether any of the specifics of what Nelson did fits any of those pages. What I do know is that every corporate training I ever had drilled not to do exactly what Nelson had done, repeatedly, at length, with the test at the end which asked "can you do what Nelson had done?" and would not let you pass until you answered "no, never ever!". And Nelson must have known it. There's no way a person at his position wouldn't be aware of what's going on. This is pure George Constanza defense. So if Nelsons claim "we may be scammers but you can't prove it" - sure, maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. That's for the lawyers that get paid my monthly salary every time they open their mouth to argue out. Fortunately both sides can afford them. I an not nearly qualified to predict the outcome of their argument. What am I not missing here is that the story is not "Bezos attacks my innocent husband for nothing". On the contrary - if I am getting the story correctly and not miss a substantial fact here - the story is "My husband and his friends tried to scam Bezos using what they thought is a legal loophole and turned out it's not as easy as they thought". Maybe they will get away with it, maybe not - that really doesn't matter that much to me. But if they expect me to be all outraged "how dares Bezos to go after people who scam his company" - sorry, I'm out of that one. Unless somebody can explain to me how it wasn't a scam, "may not technically be criminal because we have good lawyers" does not do much for me. > to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense I'm all for law enforcement to not be an attack dog of rich and powerful people. I dream about the day where it would be true. But this is not a good showcase for that, to be honest - Amazon and the government may have screwed up the prosecution on this one (not a rare occurrence for the government - I mean, they still have trouble to properly prosecute 9/11 attackers, what do you expect on less obvious cases?) but the defendants aren't exactly the sympathetic innocents, I'd say they as close to deserving all of it as I can think of.
cpach 2y ago
Related links from The Seattle Times – easier to skim than the very long Twitter thread: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles-amy-nelson-still-fighting-amazon-and-doj/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles... (https://archive.ph/R6xfZ https://archive.ph/R6xfZ) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/doj-withdraws-guilty-pleas-in-alleged-amazon-real-estate-fraud-scheme/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/doj-withdraws-g... (https://archive.ph/BGGe8 https://archive.ph/BGGe8) Related HN thread from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184540
kasey_junk 2y ago
I don’t have any knowledge about this case or opinions about it (other than this side of the story which is damning). But the thread itself is internally inconsistent. One post claims that we’d never hear about this because the mainstream media is in Amazon’s pocket (with an explicit appeal that they aren’t for some reason in Musks). But then she links to a Wapo article about the case. The post is famously owned by Jeff Bezos.
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]
xyst 2y ago
If you ever needed a reason why it’s a bad idea to hold all assets in a single fiat currency. This is exactly the reason. Gov PR, media, tv, film tells you it only does this to “bad” people. While that _may_ be true, it also impacts a small amount of innocent individuals caught between the crosshairs of a multibillion dollar company, their army of retained lawyers, and politics.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Is there any real defense you can have? Cash? No they raided their house. Other accounts? Those will be frozen too. Crypto? They'll lock you out of exchanges. What can't be seized? It seems like the only real thing you can do is have a support network.
- azemetre 2y ago
  All this thread tells me is that Amazon (along with Google, Meta, and Apple) need to rightfully be sliced and diced to never again hold as much power as they do now.
coolspot 2y ago
For context, her husband was in charge of buying land for Amazon data-centers. Somehow, Amazon would decide to buy exact parcel that his real estate friend just acquired couple weeks before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > On July 30, 2019, Ramstetter and Camenson, working without Watson’s knowledge, bought the land and then sold it to Amazon for $116.4 million, turning a $17.7 million profit on land they owned for less than a day. Attorneys for Amazon contend Casey Kirschner supported the price internally at Amazon in exchange for a $5 million kickback, which he then allegedly split with Nelson. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-managers-accused-taking-millions-kickbacks-challenge-amazons-motives-amid-fbi-investigation/ https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-manager...
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  Perhaps that's the real reason for the lawsuit? This sounds like fraud, CoC or not. Also IANAL, but I would imagine no breach of employment contract on its own constitutes a criminal offence.
- letitgo12345 2y ago
  Looks like her argument is that code of conduct is not legally enforceable and that Amazon itself has argued it cannot be used by employees to sue Amazon. Hard to feel sorry for Amazon here for me despite Amazon seemingly being morally in the right in this case
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  You contend that something illegal took place? Or just that you don’t like it?
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    Something being against the law doesn't make it immoral or unethical, and conversely something not being against the law doesn't make it not immoral or not unethical. The treatment by Amazon and the feds in this case seems to be horrible (assuming the wife's account is accurate) but her husband's kickback scheme definitely wasn't ethical either.
bitzun 2y ago
Preface: Obviously everything done to the Nelsons by the FBI/Amazon is despicable. That said, it's not addressed here whether her husband actually did something unethical, just whether it was against the employee agreement or strictly illegal. I find this situation kind of interesting as it's incredibly rich real estate developers who did seem to be playing some kind of game vs the third richest person in the world who runs a vastly larger scummier enterprise. I don't really think either party is "regular people".
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  > That said, it's not addressed here whether her husband actually did something unethical Is there some reason you want to bring his ethics into it? I don’t want Amazon to jail people for what they take to be ethics.
  - throw310822 2y ago
    Why? Do you find it unethical?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
People who haven't dealt with the legal system in the USA don't understand -- and perhaps can't understand -- how bad it is. I've been involved in (commercial) civil cases in numerous countries. I can say from experience that the civil legal system in China, of all places, is ~50x cheaper, 4x faster, and in the end it attains better results -- in large part because it is cheaper and faster. In the US, even a totally uncomplicated Federal civil suit is going to cost you $200k-500k(+) and take a couple of years. Families who are forced to defend themselves usually end up broke, or get beaten up by teams of expensive attorneys when they are forced to argue their own cases in court pro se and in forma pauperis. It's surely far worse when criminal prosecution and asset forfeiture are involved, as was the case in the link at OP. Ultimately, it's like that old saying, "the punishment is the process." If you're exposed to the courts, you lose. (Even if you win, you can lose, because the US court system makes it very difficult to collect on judgments.) It's a shame that the courts have become a weapon that companies like Amazon use, as a blunt tool, to gain commercial advantage.
- pstuart 2y ago
  If you were in charge of reforming the legal system, what would you adopt from the Chinese system?
  - noxs 2y ago
    1. Legal assistant (free) is mandatory for every single registered lawyer in China that they have to finish a certain quota every year. 2. Judges in China tend to ask plantiff to negotiate with defendant instead of going through a whole lawsuit process for civil cases.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >2. Judges in China tend to ask plantiff to negotiate with defendant instead of going through a whole lawsuit process for civil cases. That happens in the US as well. Judges can refer cases to mediation before trial. https://www.commerciallitigationupdate.com/what-to-do-when-your-case-gets-referred-to-mediation https://www.commerciallitigationupdate.com/what-to-do-when-y...
rabite 2y ago
[flagged]
fxtentacle 2y ago
My summary: 1. Amazon told DOJ that there was a breach of contract. 2. DOJ did not verify and confiscated everything. 3. Turns out, there was no breach of contract. 4. DOJ did not NOT punish Amazon for providing the wrong information which triggered all this. And I think the author makes two very valid points: The DOJ should have been forced to actually read the contract in question and verify that there was a criminal breach BEFORE destroying someone's live. And the DOJ should have punished Amazon or its lawyers for misrepresenting what the contract contained. That said, what her husband did (buying land based on insider information) was certainly unethical. It just wasn't illegal.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kcplate 2y ago
  What is really sad is that civil forfeiture can happen without court adjudication. If you remove #2 from the mix, this would become a pretty routine business dispute.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deschutes 2y ago
Author is untrustworthy and misrepresenting the actual details of the purported misdeeds if the sources cited in this thread are accurate. Whether or not there is some legal argument that he didn't violate his employment contract anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud. Seems like the feds or Amazon just bungled the case. This is funny to juxtapose with Neil Gorsuch giving accounts of honest people getting tied up in criminal cases or byzantine regulations for reasonable behavior. Hard to escape the conclusion the system is tuned to reward those with resources rather than find justice.
- givemeethekeys 2y ago
  > anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud Thankfully we have the law and contracts to save us from this kind of sentiment.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This is a good series of tweets to read and make up your own mind on. I found this one (https://x.com/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822329323715441128 https://x.com/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822329323715441128) interesting: > Lying to the FBI is a federal crime. > But prosecutors selectively enforce the law. They choose winners & losers. > So forgive me if I think it's empty when AG Garland says DOJ enforces law "without fear or favor." This is true in most local jurisdictions as well. For example in LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle the city prosecutors regularly choose to not enforce the law against offenders, and simply release them back into the public without consequence. The same thing happens at all levels of the government. For example the DOJ doesn’t pursue cases against states like California that maliciously violate constitutional law or SCOTUS rulings. And so it is the same in this case too it seems.
- NautilusWave 2y ago
  "For example the DOJ doesn’t pursue cases against states like California that maliciously violate constitutional law or SCOTUS rulings." Do you have specific examples of this?

229 points by FlamingMoe 2y ago

For those who don't want to log-in to X: https://nitter.poast.org/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822318185556648348#m https://nitter.poast.org/Amy_K_Nelson/status/182231818555664...

hawski 2y ago
I thought Nitter died. Is there any revival project?
- PessimalDecimal 2y ago
  Isn't that what is linked?
riiii 2y ago
People like you make the internet a better place. Thanks!
layer8 2y ago
There’s also xcancel.com, which has the benefit that you only have to insert “cancel” into the existing x.com URL.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  What makes this work where Nitter doesn’t (from what I heard)?
  - layer8 2y ago
    Less users because it's not well-known. You can't do this at scale.
gh02t 2y ago
Tangent but is Nitter still around? I thought they had shut down the project because Xitter was locking them out. I used to rewrite search results to point to nitter and it was rather nice. Edit: looks like some instances are still alive and I assume coasting under the radar, but the original nitter project is still dead.
- layer8 2y ago
  Nitter.net is defunct, but the software is open source and alternative instances exist.
  - gh02t 2y ago
    Ahh, yes I used to self host it but turned it off when they stopped development. When I saw the parent comment I was briefly hoping someone had picked it back up or forked it.
    - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
      Why would you stop hosting just because development stopped? Did it stop working?
      - gh02t 2y ago
        When I read the announcement I misunderstood it to mean that it was going to stop working in general, and that was right around the time I was migrating my selfhosted stuff to a new server and doing some cleanup. So I didn't bother migrating it over.
- bmacho 2y ago
  I think twitter rate-limits everyone. For example, I don't think that the nitter instance up there will survive the requests of HN-ers.
  - lern_too_spel 2y ago
wffurr 2y ago
“Tweet not found”
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  Refresh the page
  - wffurr 2y ago
    Now it says “instance is rate limited”
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

hiddencost 2y ago

I would hope that these folks would have the ability to use Amazon for expenses, lost revenue, anguish& suffering, and punitive damages. Making them whole seems like the necessary remedy, and making it so expensive that Amazon nor its peers do it again seems like the appropriate recourse.

FredPret 2y ago

What a shithole company. Also, how in the world is "civil asset forfeiture" (aka pure government theft) legal in the US of all places?

Waterluvian 2y ago
I can’t imagine ever working for a company like that and being capable of falling asleep at night.
HideousKojima 2y ago
Civil asset forfeiture originated from (and kinda made sense in the context of) dealing with smuggling. Its expansion to all sorts of other situations (such as this one) are abominable perversions of justice though.
curtis3389 2y ago
Civil asset forfeiture is wild shit. John Oliver had a great episode on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks They make criminal accusations against your property and not against you, and because of that, you have no rights or recourse. This is just blatant nonsense under the US legal system, but that's kind of irrelevant. Civil forfeiture was introduced to take houses and cars from drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs, which was really started as war on minorities and hippies. The government wants to take stuff from drug dealers, so it gets to do it (see legal realism: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_realism https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_realism).

gist 2y ago

First this type of information should be on a web page or blog post. Not a hard to read twitter thread. Second saying that Jeff Bezos wrote (and further that he tried to imprison her husband) it makes the OP loose credibility (especially as an attorney) for her argument (regardless of the outcome). While it's possible Jeff did write it (in the sense that a plant in the garden couldn't have written it because plants can't write) it's not credible to imply that fact to prove your point. Also a law degree is not 'helpful no matter what route you take' from my many many years of business experience and interactions it can actually hold you back. Because you might tend to look at edge cases (such as this one) and make judgements based on things you know. Not to mention it takes years of study which detracts from other things you might learn that might be more helpful.

janice1999 2y ago
> Second saying that Jeff Bezos wrote ... it Do you sincerely believe she meant that literally? She's clearly being sarcastic and using it to name drop Bezos via his twitter handle.
- smsm42 2y ago
  All praise to the wife fighting for her husband, but it doesn't exactly make her claims more trustworthy, rather the contrary, it makes one wonder what other claims there we must consider to be "sarcastic" or performative exaggeration instead of literal truth?
  - thoroughburro 2y ago
    It doesn’t make “one” wonder that, no. You, I guess, weirdly struggle to understand fellow humans.
    - smsm42 2y ago
      Well, it should. Of course, the existing twitter "outrage first, thinking never" culture doesn't really allow for that, but there's a better way.

PessimalDecimal 2y ago

I wouldn't touch employment at Amazon with a 30 foot pole.

xyst 2y ago
Yet your 401K (or whatever investment portfolio you own) probably holds some AMZN; you buy products from Amazon; or use AWS products directly or indirectly. Boycotts don’t work against a multibillion dollar company. We need government to break up big tech like they did to the railroads
- PessimalDecimal 2y ago
  I'd also like to see AMZN get investigated for antitrust violations. But my statement was less about performing a boycott, and more about quality of life, personal ethics, and avoiding situations like in the linked thread.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Not buying causes the stock to drop and your 401K to sell/not buy.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

amatecha 2y ago

Stories like this are why I reduce my usage of Amazon (which is basically becoming "American AliExpress") further and further.

FredPret 2y ago
AliExpress has all the same cheap crap as Amazon, except cheaper. It's a great pity Audible is under the Amazon umbrella because I'm hooked on that.
- amatecha 2y ago
  That's what I mean! These days you browse Amazon and it's just a bunch of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress, but with a massive markup.
- layer8 2y ago
  There are alternatives to Audible. I have been using AudiobookStore.com. There’s also Libby and others.
- brunoarueira 2y ago
  Yeah, buy from AliExpress is good if you search right! Many things from there are crap, indeed, but many others are pretty good!
- smsm42 2y ago
  Makes sense. We despise Amazon for their abusing people, so instead we choose to buy from... The Chinese Communist Party!
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Amazon’s products are sourced from there anyway. Next time you buy something on Amazon, search it on AliExpress. You’ll likely find the same thing for 0.1x the price, but with a long lead time and minimum order quantity.
    - 2y ago

smsm42 2y ago

Hard to understand the details from that description, but it certainly looks like Carl Nelson (the husband) took money ("referral fees"?) from RE developers who were doing business with Amazon, while also being employed by Amazon. Now I am not a lawyer and don't play one on TV, but I sat through enough corporate ethics training to recognize this is exactly the case where they want you to at least get an official approval from Legal before getting any money, because this has "conflict of interest" written all over it. Again I don't know what the contract Amazon had allowed and disallowed and what the lawyers can or can't prove in court, but it certainly - at least from the quick reading of it - does not seem like the case of "Amazon prosecuting innocent person out of the blue" but seems a lot like "Amazon employee did something which looks a lot like your standard kickback scheme". And their argument "but the deals I brought were awesome" does not really sound impressive - they may be awesome, but if you work for company A and bring an awesome deal with company B, you expect a bonus from the company A, not a kickback from the company B. If you do the latter, you're in a hot water regardless of how awesome the deal is. Do I miss something substantial in this story?

michaelmrose 2y ago
You missed the entire point. Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime which the government itself finally admitted in court after they spent millions of your tax dollars and several years destroying these people's lives and extorting guilty please from 4 men for what was manifestly and on its face not a crime. Even after they recognized that the government was entirely full of shit they took 7 months to recognize that you can't plead guilty to helping someone commit something that was not itself a crime and at time of writing seemingly haven't returned the money the government illegally robbed victim of. The start of the prosecution was a material misrepresentation by Amazon. Amazon would have been correct to fire him. They deliberately misrepresented the nature of the law and conduct to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense.
- smsm42 2y ago
  > Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime I have no idea. US Criminal code is literally thousands of pages long, and I have no idea whether any of the specifics of what Nelson did fits any of those pages. What I do know is that every corporate training I ever had drilled not to do exactly what Nelson had done, repeatedly, at length, with the test at the end which asked "can you do what Nelson had done?" and would not let you pass until you answered "no, never ever!". And Nelson must have known it. There's no way a person at his position wouldn't be aware of what's going on. This is pure George Constanza defense. So if Nelsons claim "we may be scammers but you can't prove it" - sure, maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. That's for the lawyers that get paid my monthly salary every time they open their mouth to argue out. Fortunately both sides can afford them. I an not nearly qualified to predict the outcome of their argument. What am I not missing here is that the story is not "Bezos attacks my innocent husband for nothing". On the contrary - if I am getting the story correctly and not miss a substantial fact here - the story is "My husband and his friends tried to scam Bezos using what they thought is a legal loophole and turned out it's not as easy as they thought". Maybe they will get away with it, maybe not - that really doesn't matter that much to me. But if they expect me to be all outraged "how dares Bezos to go after people who scam his company" - sorry, I'm out of that one. Unless somebody can explain to me how it wasn't a scam, "may not technically be criminal because we have good lawyers" does not do much for me. > to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense I'm all for law enforcement to not be an attack dog of rich and powerful people. I dream about the day where it would be true. But this is not a good showcase for that, to be honest - Amazon and the government may have screwed up the prosecution on this one (not a rare occurrence for the government - I mean, they still have trouble to properly prosecute 9/11 attackers, what do you expect on less obvious cases?) but the defendants aren't exactly the sympathetic innocents, I'd say they as close to deserving all of it as I can think of.

cpach 2y ago

Related links from The Seattle Times – easier to skim than the very long Twitter thread: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles-amy-nelson-still-fighting-amazon-and-doj/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles... (https://archive.ph/R6xfZ https://archive.ph/R6xfZ) https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/doj-withdraws-guilty-pleas-in-alleged-amazon-real-estate-fraud-scheme/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/doj-withdraws-g... (https://archive.ph/BGGe8 https://archive.ph/BGGe8) Related HN thread from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184540

kasey_junk 2y ago

I don’t have any knowledge about this case or opinions about it (other than this side of the story which is damning). But the thread itself is internally inconsistent. One post claims that we’d never hear about this because the mainstream media is in Amazon’s pocket (with an explicit appeal that they aren’t for some reason in Musks). But then she links to a Wapo article about the case. The post is famously owned by Jeff Bezos.

dangsux 2y ago

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xyst 2y ago

If you ever needed a reason why it’s a bad idea to hold all assets in a single fiat currency. This is exactly the reason. Gov PR, media, tv, film tells you it only does this to “bad” people. While that _may_ be true, it also impacts a small amount of innocent individuals caught between the crosshairs of a multibillion dollar company, their army of retained lawyers, and politics.

Spivak 2y ago
Is there any real defense you can have? Cash? No they raided their house. Other accounts? Those will be frozen too. Crypto? They'll lock you out of exchanges. What can't be seized? It seems like the only real thing you can do is have a support network.
azemetre 2y ago
All this thread tells me is that Amazon (along with Google, Meta, and Apple) need to rightfully be sliced and diced to never again hold as much power as they do now.

coolspot 2y ago

For context, her husband was in charge of buying land for Amazon data-centers. Somehow, Amazon would decide to buy exact parcel that his real estate friend just acquired couple weeks before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > On July 30, 2019, Ramstetter and Camenson, working without Watson’s knowledge, bought the land and then sold it to Amazon for $116.4 million, turning a $17.7 million profit on land they owned for less than a day. Attorneys for Amazon contend Casey Kirschner supported the price internally at Amazon in exchange for a $5 million kickback, which he then allegedly split with Nelson. https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-managers-accused-taking-millions-kickbacks-challenge-amazons-motives-amid-fbi-investigation/ https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-manager...

rich_sasha 2y ago
Perhaps that's the real reason for the lawsuit? This sounds like fraud, CoC or not. Also IANAL, but I would imagine no breach of employment contract on its own constitutes a criminal offence.
letitgo12345 2y ago
Looks like her argument is that code of conduct is not legally enforceable and that Amazon itself has argued it cannot be used by employees to sue Amazon. Hard to feel sorry for Amazon here for me despite Amazon seemingly being morally in the right in this case
thoroughburro 2y ago
You contend that something illegal took place? Or just that you don’t like it?
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Something being against the law doesn't make it immoral or unethical, and conversely something not being against the law doesn't make it not immoral or not unethical. The treatment by Amazon and the feds in this case seems to be horrible (assuming the wife's account is accurate) but her husband's kickback scheme definitely wasn't ethical either.

bitzun 2y ago

Preface: Obviously everything done to the Nelsons by the FBI/Amazon is despicable. That said, it's not addressed here whether her husband actually did something unethical, just whether it was against the employee agreement or strictly illegal. I find this situation kind of interesting as it's incredibly rich real estate developers who did seem to be playing some kind of game vs the third richest person in the world who runs a vastly larger scummier enterprise. I don't really think either party is "regular people".

thoroughburro 2y ago
> That said, it's not addressed here whether her husband actually did something unethical Is there some reason you want to bring his ethics into it? I don’t want Amazon to jail people for what they take to be ethics.
- throw310822 2y ago
  Why? Do you find it unethical?

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A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

People who haven't dealt with the legal system in the USA don't understand -- and perhaps can't understand -- how bad it is. I've been involved in (commercial) civil cases in numerous countries. I can say from experience that the civil legal system in China, of all places, is ~50x cheaper, 4x faster, and in the end it attains better results -- in large part because it is cheaper and faster. In the US, even a totally uncomplicated Federal civil suit is going to cost you $200k-500k(+) and take a couple of years. Families who are forced to defend themselves usually end up broke, or get beaten up by teams of expensive attorneys when they are forced to argue their own cases in court pro se and in forma pauperis. It's surely far worse when criminal prosecution and asset forfeiture are involved, as was the case in the link at OP. Ultimately, it's like that old saying, "the punishment is the process." If you're exposed to the courts, you lose. (Even if you win, you can lose, because the US court system makes it very difficult to collect on judgments.) It's a shame that the courts have become a weapon that companies like Amazon use, as a blunt tool, to gain commercial advantage.

pstuart 2y ago
If you were in charge of reforming the legal system, what would you adopt from the Chinese system?
- noxs 2y ago
  1. Legal assistant (free) is mandatory for every single registered lawyer in China that they have to finish a certain quota every year. 2. Judges in China tend to ask plantiff to negotiate with defendant instead of going through a whole lawsuit process for civil cases.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >2. Judges in China tend to ask plantiff to negotiate with defendant instead of going through a whole lawsuit process for civil cases. That happens in the US as well. Judges can refer cases to mediation before trial. https://www.commerciallitigationupdate.com/what-to-do-when-your-case-gets-referred-to-mediation https://www.commerciallitigationupdate.com/what-to-do-when-y...

rabite 2y ago

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fxtentacle 2y ago

My summary: 1. Amazon told DOJ that there was a breach of contract. 2. DOJ did not verify and confiscated everything. 3. Turns out, there was no breach of contract. 4. DOJ did not NOT punish Amazon for providing the wrong information which triggered all this. And I think the author makes two very valid points: The DOJ should have been forced to actually read the contract in question and verify that there was a criminal breach BEFORE destroying someone's live. And the DOJ should have punished Amazon or its lawyers for misrepresenting what the contract contained. That said, what her husband did (buying land based on insider information) was certainly unethical. It just wasn't illegal.

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kcplate 2y ago
What is really sad is that civil forfeiture can happen without court adjudication. If you remove #2 from the mix, this would become a pretty routine business dispute.

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deschutes 2y ago

Author is untrustworthy and misrepresenting the actual details of the purported misdeeds if the sources cited in this thread are accurate. Whether or not there is some legal argument that he didn't violate his employment contract anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud. Seems like the feds or Amazon just bungled the case. This is funny to juxtapose with Neil Gorsuch giving accounts of honest people getting tied up in criminal cases or byzantine regulations for reasonable behavior. Hard to escape the conclusion the system is tuned to reward those with resources rather than find justice.

givemeethekeys 2y ago
> anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud Thankfully we have the law and contracts to save us from this kind of sentiment.

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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This is a good series of tweets to read and make up your own mind on. I found this one (https://x.com/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822329323715441128 https://x.com/Amy_K_Nelson/status/1822329323715441128) interesting: > Lying to the FBI is a federal crime. > But prosecutors selectively enforce the law. They choose winners & losers. > So forgive me if I think it's empty when AG Garland says DOJ enforces law "without fear or favor." This is true in most local jurisdictions as well. For example in LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle the city prosecutors regularly choose to not enforce the law against offenders, and simply release them back into the public without consequence. The same thing happens at all levels of the government. For example the DOJ doesn’t pursue cases against states like California that maliciously violate constitutional law or SCOTUS rulings. And so it is the same in this case too it seems.

NautilusWave 2y ago
"For example the DOJ doesn’t pursue cases against states like California that maliciously violate constitutional law or SCOTUS rulings." Do you have specific examples of this?