Comment by adamomada
9 months ago
I never really understood why the onus is on any person to prove they didn’t do something. Shouldn’t the shaggy defence be sufficient?
e.g. You get hauled into court for a lawsuit demanding the loan repayment, for a loan someone else used your name to get?
- It wasn’t me.
The reason the Shaggy defense doesn't work is the default assumption of the courts is that you're a deadbeat trying to game the system. This assumption comes about because in the majority of cases it is the truth. The system would be a lot nicer if there weren't people trying to scam it every hour of every day of the week.
> The reason the Shaggy defense doesn't work is the default assumption of the courts is that you're a deadbeat trying to game the system
Isn't that the opposite of innocent until proven guilty?
When I was in the Boy Scouts, a local judge came to speak with us about the legal system. I asked a similar question and he admonished me that innocent people never wind up in court. He explained that every person who is in a trial (criminal or civil) is guilty of something. A judge's job was merely to determine if the prosecution or plantiff was correct about what the defendant was guilty of. He was very annoyed that ignorant people, who had never been to law school, kept spreading this nonsense that some defendants were innocent.
> a deadbeat trying to game the system.
The problem with putting a value judgement on this is that it will precondition people to assume good faith or bad faith on the validity of the assessment based on how they interpret the fairness of the court system.
Instead, we could just say that the majority of the cases are people trying to get out of legitimate debts. If we wanted to go farther, we could say that's because some people just don't feel responsible for their own debts and some people make a choice that a last ditch effort to get out of a debt they know they should pay rather is the lesser of two evils when the alternative is to continue to fail to provide adequately for their family given their circumstances, and how different people may draw that line at different points.
That's harder to articulate and a larger discussion that may be a tangent people aren't interested in discussing though, so it's probably just simpler to keep the value judgements out of it if the intent is to keep the discussion productive.
Instead, we could just say that the majority of the cases are people trying to get out of legitimate debts.
There's another discussion which could be had about just how legitimate even "legitimate debts" actually are in some cases but that's even more in the woods.
> This assumption comes about because in the majority of cases it is the truth.
Are we saying that if you can show you have enough income / assets, it'll be that much more likely that you'll be fine in those cases?
Doesn't that violate innocent until proven guilty?
Welcome to the legal system in the real world. Pro tip: for the best outcomes for you be sure to be rich before engaging.
When someone named adamomada comes to the bank for a loan, the presumption is that adamomada will repay the loan.
If they knew it wasn't you, they wouldn't have written the loan in the first place. They're asking you to repay it because they really do think it was you.
If "it wasn't me" was all anyone had to do to get out of paying a loan, many people would do it.
It's much more subtle, fraud is accepted and part of the business. Even if you are not 100% certain of the identity of the person, what matters is how likely you are going to get paid back.
For example, when you purchase online, some merchants do not check who is the owner of the card, or the address. It's done on purpose, because some people borrow the card of the others, some people don't want to use their card, etc. And overall it's all about risk management, but if the holder is really the one in front of you is just one factor among others.
It’s not “accepted” as much as it is just simply impossible to completely avoid at any kind of scale.
Even if online payments were eliminated, and you had to show up in person with a birth certificate and passport to perform a transaction, fraud would be non-zero.
To have a functioning business, people need to be able to use the system.
Is that even a Shaggy defense? The whole point of the Shaggy defense was that it's saying it wasn't you despite overwhelming evidence ("She even caught me on camera - it wasn't me")
But in this scenario, there is basically zero evidence it was you
I thought it was, they would have to have some sort of evidence of your name, dob, ssn, blood type, etc. But in the end it was just your information used fraudulently; you the person did not authorize the loan and therefore it really isn’t your loan.
"Identity Fraud" is institutionalized victim blaming. The claim is that the person who's identity was stolen was defrauded (and they should protect themselves or fight back), but in reality it was the creditor that got defrauded.
And in turn libeled the person who they thought had borrowed from them.