Comment by nitwit005
4 months ago
It does seem a bit baffling. This method just adds a second potential crime, in the form of fraudulent payments.
4 months ago
It does seem a bit baffling. This method just adds a second potential crime, in the form of fraudulent payments.
Why would it be fraudulent in this case? I assume that these would be paid as refunds accounted for as a discount to a particular customer - aren't these generally discretionary? Also, I would assume that it would be the Israeli government getting services from the Israeli subsidiary of that company, so it's not clear whether even if it were a crime, which jurisdiction would have an issue with it.
You could argue that it's against something like the OECD Anti‑Bribery Convention, but that would be a much more difficult case, given that this isn't a particular foreign official, but essentially a central body of the foreign government.
Just to clarify, not saying that it's ok, but just that accusing it of being a "crime" might be a category error.
Not speaking to the fraudulence of this specific case, but wire fraud is an umbrella term that covers pretty much every non tangible crime.
It's kind of like how everything can be securities fraud[0]
bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ixwRi
"Everything" here meaning "blatant lying" - and knowingly staying silent on something that obviously has a huge impact on a company is lying - which in corporate America is so normalized that some mistake it for being "everything". Securities fraud is incredibly easy to avoid if executives just stop lying. This soon becomes clear when clicking through the links in the article.
> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”
Blatant lying
> if you are a public company that suffers a massive data breach and exposes sensitive data about millions of customers without their consent, and that data is then used for nefarious purposes, and you find out about the breach, and then you wait for years to disclose it, and when you do disclose it your stock loses tens of billions of dollars of market value, then shareholders are going to sue you for not telling them earlier
Blatant lying
The fact that most of this lying (see Exxon) is done under some kind of "nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know what's really going in" doesn't stop it from knowingly lying.
That knowingly lying is securities fraud seems very logical, and nothing like "everything".
This is all moot anyway now that the US is no longer interested in upholding any laws against large companies whatsoever.
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In what sense would the payments be fraudulent? It would be real money paid out of Amazon's accounts as part of a contract they willingly signed with Israel.
It is two crimes:
1. Alerting a country to secret actions taken by a third party government (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
2. Passing money to commit a crime. See money laundering.
Honestly, the second crime seems aggravated and stupid. Just pass random digits in an API call if you want to tell Israel you did something.
Wouldn't just having 1000 canaries be a "legal" way to do the alerting?
A government can compel Amazon to avoid notifying a target (Israel in this case) that their information has been subpoenaed, but can't compel Amazon to lie and say it hasn't sent their info.
Or is the concept of a canary pretty much useless now?
I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, due to project Nimbus, so I'd be more than happy if their data could be accessed, and even happier to see Amazon and Google just cut ties with them altogether.
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> (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
US rules are, unfortunately, nortoriously and outlandishly broken whenever it comes to Israel: Foreign Agent Registration Act, the Leahy Law, and probably a bunch of others as well.
I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
33 replies →
The payments are an act of fraud as they deprive the company of resources for no tangible business purpose. No contract authorizes the use of payments to bypass communications controls and exfiltrate data.
The act of communicating privileged or sealed information on itself is at minimum contempt of court and perhaps theft of government property, wire fraud or other crimes. Typically accounts payable aren’t aware of evidence gathering or discovery, so the actor is also facing conspiracy or other felonies.
Lol are we still pretending laws are more than ink on a paper?
No laws require prosecution and enforcement. Western countries shield Israel from all of that.
Who is going to prosecute those crimes?