13 ms·

In China, the rich and powerful can hire body doubles to do their prison time

197 points by muratmutlu 14y ago

crafter 14y ago
A good story for Marginal Revolution's "Markets in Everything"... which reminds me I should give it a visit.
- spindritf 14y ago
  The story was linked on Marginal Revolution http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/assorted-links-527.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/ass...
known 14y ago
It's common in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world
- dhbanes 14y ago
  According to the linked article, China is not part of the third world.
ck2 14y ago
In the USA they just buy the way out of the system - I mean look at all the people in prison for the default swaps and banking scandals. Oh wait, there aren't any.
- jhuckestein 14y ago
  They would be if they killed someone though. I agree the American system isn't exactly fair either, but the problems are different from China's
  - kooshball 14y ago
    eh, not always http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-levin-hit-and-run-2-20110603_1_house-arrest-work-with-florida-authorities-craig-elford http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-le...
- Jd 14y ago
  There are various tiers in the intelligence of criminals. Tier 1: Get caught. Go to jail. Tier 2: Get caught. "Fix" the legal progress in your favor. Don't go to jail. Tier 3: Bribe the people doing the enforcement. Don't get caught, because there is no one to catch you. Tier 4: Bribe the people doing the law writing. Don't get caught, because you aren't doing anything "wrong" (technically speaking). Tier 5: Buy out the mass media, so that no one thinks there is anything wrong about what you are doing any more. The clueless voter who lives from the juices of the media mogul is the tier 5 criminal's best friend. IMO, most of the global financial system is somewhere between tier 4 and 5, with a bit of 3 (recruiting away the SEC regulators to big iBanks). Thankfully we still have a relatively free press in the US, so even if there is some lockdown there is a lot of ability to get alternative information.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    The problem of course occurs when the press is affiliated with companies involved in Tier 5.
    - Jd 14y ago
      We have a weird situation in the US right now in that lots of information is available via the alternative press, etc., but none of it seems to matter during election time, in which the major parties and major media vehicles seem to be the only important aspects in pushing past the 50% mark, which is the defining feature of our democracy. Thankfully we have the ability to operate presses fairly freely, but these little presses don't seem to matter all that much when it comes to fending off the thieves. I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves a large number of people working together to build a system that is better than the current one.
- Sam_Odio 14y ago
  That's a pretty loaded statement. Your implication is that the credit default swap industry is rife with fraud but it'd be helpful to be more specific about what that fraud is, who committed it, and why they're not receiving an appropriate punishment.
- rprasad 14y ago
  That is because prison is not the punishment for most of those offenses. Before you say shit about the U.S. judicial system, you should learn something about it. SEC and FTC violations are civil offenses. The punishment for civil offenses are fines. Plenty of firms and higher-ups have paid fines. Jail time only applies in cases where deliberate fraud is proven to have occurred. We all know that the finance guys were too reckless in their pursuit of profits. But recklessness is not a crime (and indeed, the only crime in the U.S. system for which "recklessness" is relevant is manslaughter/murder).
  - anonymoushn 14y ago
    Wells Fargo admits to 55,000 counts of perjury: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-usa-foreclosures-wellsfargo-idUSTRE69Q5OE20101028 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-usa-foreclosure...
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      The word perjury does not appear on that page.
      - beagle3 14y ago
        It does not, but in order to foreclose you state, under risk of perjury, that the details are right. I've been following foreclosure stories for a while. The DAs are willfully asleep - hundreds of thousands of perjuries have been committed and documented, tens of thousands have been confirmed by the perjuring entity (as in this case), but the legal system is not interested in pursuing justice. Read Deninger's "The Market Ticker" or ZeroHedge for (almost daily) specific details.
        intended 14y ago
        Afai can recall, only a few DAs are fighting - the DA of NY being one of them. Usually the DA's office goes tooth and nail after offenders, so there must be a reason, I presume.
- joering2 14y ago
  My favorite of all-times bad-guy is Mr. Kenneth Lay, founder of Enron, supposedly RIP. Supposedly because the story of his death is crazier than most A. Christie's books. You can read more here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/did_ken_lay_fake_his_death/ http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/did_ken_...
  - ryanwaggoner 14y ago
    So there's literally not a shred of evidence of anything being weird about his death except for the fact that it was good timing? Maybe, just maybe, watching your life crumble and dealing with the guilt and shame of a conviction was a huge source of stress and caused a heart attack? Nah, you're right, he's probably drinking Mojitos on a beach in South America and chuckling over all the suckers he fooled.
    - tsotha 14y ago
      Yeah. Old guy dies of heart attack. News at eleven.
- ryanwaggoner 14y ago
  I saw this story on Reddit yesterday. Really disappointed to see it here today, and even more disappointed to see such a cynical, shallow comment at the top of the page here, just as on Reddit.
  - maximveksler 14y ago
    Leaving the type of response this submit is getting, which is subjective to your POV. Are you disappointed simply because this was posted to HN ?
    - stfu 14y ago
      Most likely the top comment that tries to impose as a fact that the US and Chinese legal system are equally unfair. Stating these kind of absolute, unproven, personal statements as absolute facts is (was?) frowned upon around here.
      - jonathanyc 14y ago
        The top comment is to the US as the article is to China. No one is saying the systems are equally unfair. Calm down.
BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
Sounds like a great opportunity for a startup!
kooshball 14y ago
I wonder how that business would work. Do you have a list of "candidates" that are willing to go to jail for a certain price? Or would you get a client first, then try to find someone who looks like them, and then offer the person some amount of money to go to jail? Both seems tricky, the 2nd one if the body double is not reliable they can go to the cops and everything falls apart.
- tsotha 14y ago
  The thing is, in China being rich and powerful usually means being connected to the upper echelons of the government and military. It's not as risky if you can tell the second guy "...either way, keep your mouth shut or all your organs will be in different people by the end of the week."
toddh 14y ago
Recall that wealthy conscripts could buy their way out of serving in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
- gwern 14y ago
  Yeah, but there it was justified as a way to raise funds for ruinously expensive wars at a time where most alternative methods of fundraising like issuing debt or debasing currency (Continentals, greenbacks) had already been tapped to the hilt. And buying your way out was expensive - IIRC, the Civil War fee was like $300, and I don't even know what that'd be equivalent to today ($30,000?). These body doubles have no such justifications.
alan_cx 14y ago
So, where is this special country where the rich do no use their wealth to manipulate justice, what ever justice actually is? The rich always have done, do so now, and always will. China is nothing special.
swah 14y ago
There is something similar in Breaking Bad.
thdn 14y ago
I've couldn't stop laughing when I've saw the headline ROLF
kaptain 14y ago
A typical response I see on HN (and on other forums) in response to failings in other countries (e.g. acts of terrorism, corruption, failure of government support, etc) is to find some sarcastic analogy to compare it to in the US. The Chinese government has gotten on the bandwagon with its own publication of the US's human rights violations (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_131611391.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_1316113...). I found this humorous. It would be naïve to think that the USA (I'm picking on the USA because I am an American citizen) is the perfect country. I haven't lived in other countries long enough to be able to compare, but I /can/ compare the experience between China and the US and it makes me grateful to be a US citizen. The truth is, there is no real comparison between China and the US: I get questions about corruption in the US all the time and I always answer that there /is/ corruption in the US but not in the endemic/pervasive way that we see it in China. The media is more open than in China, the government process is more transparent. My business partner and I are in the middle of doing a training/internship (simple LAMP application development) for students at a local university. This isn't a top tier university: it's a third-tier university in the capital of one of the poorest regions in the country. There's a lot of potential here but when we asked people if they had any aspirations to entrepreneurship, we mostly get a 'no'. The lack of mobility for the common person is evident here. No matter what the US's failures are what it has that the Chinese system (note that I didn't say government, because some of the issues here are cultural) doesn't have is "opportunity". There's a lot of unrealistic optimism here amongst college-age students (i.e. "I can do it if I try.") but there is a dark understanding that this is severely limited by what is available to them after they graduate. It's actually really sad: people here are in love with pieces of paper that 'qualify' you for a job. But with an overabundance of college graduates (in a system where cheating is normal), the value of a college degree is lessened. So you have a huge population of mid-20's that paid large sums of money for degrees that are largely worthless (i.e. the degrees didn't fulfill the better life that they promised). China has aspirations to be the world's best, but it won't be until it can find a way to empower its own people.
- kwanbis 14y ago
  Kinda off topic, but if you are from USA, you are a United States citizen, american is anybody who is born on the continental america (north, central and south).
sodelate 14y ago
WTF
epynonymous 14y ago
sad. i have a theory that this happens for entrance examinations and things like SATs. i sometimes see these morons getting into good schools like harvard from china. take for instance bo xi lai's son.
edwinyzh 14y ago
I'm a Chinese and I'm sure that such things are very much possible in China. It's even worst in smaller cities since the media there is even more "unopened". Thanks to the fast growing of Internet usage in China(the only trustworthy media in China), things are getting a little better in the past ten years or so.
mulation 14y ago
If all the rich and powerful can hire body doubles to do their prison time, why would they lose their lawsuit?
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  Because the people demand a win in the court against the rich and powerful. Once the verdict is out, the people are happy. Give a few months to a year give or take, the people will forget what happen (temper goes down), the rich is out but not necessary in plain sight everyday (semi-hiding), and the body double is in the prison.
  - mulation 14y ago
    As a Chinese whom know a lot of real dark side of this country, I must say this report is just a joke. There may be 10 or 20 cases in the whole China for a decade, but exaggerating to that level is just a joke. Maybe people want to see this kind of story.
m0skit0 14y ago
Title looks wrong for me. The right title should be "In China too, ..."
ramblerman 14y ago
Growing up in Dubai I witnessed a similar practice called 'blood money'. Simply put, In the case of a car accident, The family of the victim can demand a fee, which would void any prosecution against the perp. It's not ideal, but seems better than the chinese system. At least the victim's family gets something out of it.

197 points by muratmutlu 14y ago

crafter 14y ago

A good story for Marginal Revolution's "Markets in Everything"... which reminds me I should give it a visit.

spindritf 14y ago
The story was linked on Marginal Revolution http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/assorted-links-527.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/ass...

known 14y ago

It's common in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world

dhbanes 14y ago
According to the linked article, China is not part of the third world.

ck2 14y ago

In the USA they just buy the way out of the system - I mean look at all the people in prison for the default swaps and banking scandals. Oh wait, there aren't any.

jhuckestein 14y ago
They would be if they killed someone though. I agree the American system isn't exactly fair either, but the problems are different from China's
- kooshball 14y ago
  eh, not always http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-levin-hit-and-run-2-20110603_1_house-arrest-work-with-florida-authorities-craig-elford http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/news/ct-met-le...
Jd 14y ago
There are various tiers in the intelligence of criminals. Tier 1: Get caught. Go to jail. Tier 2: Get caught. "Fix" the legal progress in your favor. Don't go to jail. Tier 3: Bribe the people doing the enforcement. Don't get caught, because there is no one to catch you. Tier 4: Bribe the people doing the law writing. Don't get caught, because you aren't doing anything "wrong" (technically speaking). Tier 5: Buy out the mass media, so that no one thinks there is anything wrong about what you are doing any more. The clueless voter who lives from the juices of the media mogul is the tier 5 criminal's best friend. IMO, most of the global financial system is somewhere between tier 4 and 5, with a bit of 3 (recruiting away the SEC regulators to big iBanks). Thankfully we still have a relatively free press in the US, so even if there is some lockdown there is a lot of ability to get alternative information.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  The problem of course occurs when the press is affiliated with companies involved in Tier 5.
  - Jd 14y ago
    We have a weird situation in the US right now in that lots of information is available via the alternative press, etc., but none of it seems to matter during election time, in which the major parties and major media vehicles seem to be the only important aspects in pushing past the 50% mark, which is the defining feature of our democracy. Thankfully we have the ability to operate presses fairly freely, but these little presses don't seem to matter all that much when it comes to fending off the thieves. I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but I suspect it involves a large number of people working together to build a system that is better than the current one.
Sam_Odio 14y ago
That's a pretty loaded statement. Your implication is that the credit default swap industry is rife with fraud but it'd be helpful to be more specific about what that fraud is, who committed it, and why they're not receiving an appropriate punishment.
rprasad 14y ago
That is because prison is not the punishment for most of those offenses. Before you say shit about the U.S. judicial system, you should learn something about it. SEC and FTC violations are civil offenses. The punishment for civil offenses are fines. Plenty of firms and higher-ups have paid fines. Jail time only applies in cases where deliberate fraud is proven to have occurred. We all know that the finance guys were too reckless in their pursuit of profits. But recklessness is not a crime (and indeed, the only crime in the U.S. system for which "recklessness" is relevant is manslaughter/murder).
- anonymoushn 14y ago
  Wells Fargo admits to 55,000 counts of perjury: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-usa-foreclosures-wellsfargo-idUSTRE69Q5OE20101028 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-usa-foreclosure...
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    The word perjury does not appear on that page.
    - beagle3 14y ago
      It does not, but in order to foreclose you state, under risk of perjury, that the details are right. I've been following foreclosure stories for a while. The DAs are willfully asleep - hundreds of thousands of perjuries have been committed and documented, tens of thousands have been confirmed by the perjuring entity (as in this case), but the legal system is not interested in pursuing justice. Read Deninger's "The Market Ticker" or ZeroHedge for (almost daily) specific details.
      - intended 14y ago
        Afai can recall, only a few DAs are fighting - the DA of NY being one of them. Usually the DA's office goes tooth and nail after offenders, so there must be a reason, I presume.
joering2 14y ago
My favorite of all-times bad-guy is Mr. Kenneth Lay, founder of Enron, supposedly RIP. Supposedly because the story of his death is crazier than most A. Christie's books. You can read more here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/did_ken_lay_fake_his_death/ http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/did_ken_...
- ryanwaggoner 14y ago
  So there's literally not a shred of evidence of anything being weird about his death except for the fact that it was good timing? Maybe, just maybe, watching your life crumble and dealing with the guilt and shame of a conviction was a huge source of stress and caused a heart attack? Nah, you're right, he's probably drinking Mojitos on a beach in South America and chuckling over all the suckers he fooled.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    Yeah. Old guy dies of heart attack. News at eleven.
ryanwaggoner 14y ago
I saw this story on Reddit yesterday. Really disappointed to see it here today, and even more disappointed to see such a cynical, shallow comment at the top of the page here, just as on Reddit.
- maximveksler 14y ago
  Leaving the type of response this submit is getting, which is subjective to your POV. Are you disappointed simply because this was posted to HN ?
  - stfu 14y ago
    Most likely the top comment that tries to impose as a fact that the US and Chinese legal system are equally unfair. Stating these kind of absolute, unproven, personal statements as absolute facts is (was?) frowned upon around here.
    - jonathanyc 14y ago
      The top comment is to the US as the article is to China. No one is saying the systems are equally unfair. Calm down.

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago

Sounds like a great opportunity for a startup!

kooshball 14y ago

I wonder how that business would work. Do you have a list of "candidates" that are willing to go to jail for a certain price? Or would you get a client first, then try to find someone who looks like them, and then offer the person some amount of money to go to jail? Both seems tricky, the 2nd one if the body double is not reliable they can go to the cops and everything falls apart.

tsotha 14y ago
The thing is, in China being rich and powerful usually means being connected to the upper echelons of the government and military. It's not as risky if you can tell the second guy "...either way, keep your mouth shut or all your organs will be in different people by the end of the week."

toddh 14y ago

Recall that wealthy conscripts could buy their way out of serving in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

gwern 14y ago
Yeah, but there it was justified as a way to raise funds for ruinously expensive wars at a time where most alternative methods of fundraising like issuing debt or debasing currency (Continentals, greenbacks) had already been tapped to the hilt. And buying your way out was expensive - IIRC, the Civil War fee was like $300, and I don't even know what that'd be equivalent to today ($30,000?). These body doubles have no such justifications.

alan_cx 14y ago

So, where is this special country where the rich do no use their wealth to manipulate justice, what ever justice actually is? The rich always have done, do so now, and always will. China is nothing special.

swah 14y ago

There is something similar in Breaking Bad.

thdn 14y ago

I've couldn't stop laughing when I've saw the headline ROLF

kaptain 14y ago

A typical response I see on HN (and on other forums) in response to failings in other countries (e.g. acts of terrorism, corruption, failure of government support, etc) is to find some sarcastic analogy to compare it to in the US. The Chinese government has gotten on the bandwagon with its own publication of the US's human rights violations (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_131611391.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_1316113...). I found this humorous. It would be naïve to think that the USA (I'm picking on the USA because I am an American citizen) is the perfect country. I haven't lived in other countries long enough to be able to compare, but I /can/ compare the experience between China and the US and it makes me grateful to be a US citizen. The truth is, there is no real comparison between China and the US: I get questions about corruption in the US all the time and I always answer that there /is/ corruption in the US but not in the endemic/pervasive way that we see it in China. The media is more open than in China, the government process is more transparent. My business partner and I are in the middle of doing a training/internship (simple LAMP application development) for students at a local university. This isn't a top tier university: it's a third-tier university in the capital of one of the poorest regions in the country. There's a lot of potential here but when we asked people if they had any aspirations to entrepreneurship, we mostly get a 'no'. The lack of mobility for the common person is evident here. No matter what the US's failures are what it has that the Chinese system (note that I didn't say government, because some of the issues here are cultural) doesn't have is "opportunity". There's a lot of unrealistic optimism here amongst college-age students (i.e. "I can do it if I try.") but there is a dark understanding that this is severely limited by what is available to them after they graduate. It's actually really sad: people here are in love with pieces of paper that 'qualify' you for a job. But with an overabundance of college graduates (in a system where cheating is normal), the value of a college degree is lessened. So you have a huge population of mid-20's that paid large sums of money for degrees that are largely worthless (i.e. the degrees didn't fulfill the better life that they promised). China has aspirations to be the world's best, but it won't be until it can find a way to empower its own people.

kwanbis 14y ago
Kinda off topic, but if you are from USA, you are a United States citizen, american is anybody who is born on the continental america (north, central and south).

sodelate 14y ago

WTF

epynonymous 14y ago

sad. i have a theory that this happens for entrance examinations and things like SATs. i sometimes see these morons getting into good schools like harvard from china. take for instance bo xi lai's son.

edwinyzh 14y ago

I'm a Chinese and I'm sure that such things are very much possible in China. It's even worst in smaller cities since the media there is even more "unopened". Thanks to the fast growing of Internet usage in China(the only trustworthy media in China), things are getting a little better in the past ten years or so.

mulation 14y ago

If all the rich and powerful can hire body doubles to do their prison time, why would they lose their lawsuit?

edwinnathaniel 14y ago
Because the people demand a win in the court against the rich and powerful. Once the verdict is out, the people are happy. Give a few months to a year give or take, the people will forget what happen (temper goes down), the rich is out but not necessary in plain sight everyday (semi-hiding), and the body double is in the prison.
- mulation 14y ago
  As a Chinese whom know a lot of real dark side of this country, I must say this report is just a joke. There may be 10 or 20 cases in the whole China for a decade, but exaggerating to that level is just a joke. Maybe people want to see this kind of story.

m0skit0 14y ago

Title looks wrong for me. The right title should be "In China too, ..."

ramblerman 14y ago

Growing up in Dubai I witnessed a similar practice called 'blood money'. Simply put, In the case of a car accident, The family of the victim can demand a fee, which would void any prosecution against the perp. It's not ideal, but seems better than the chinese system. At least the victim's family gets something out of it.