Comment by sebzim4500
4 months ago
I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
4 months ago
I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
Fraud is intentional deception + criminal intent. The deception comes from using payments as a code instead of say an encrypted channel.
No, fraud is intentional deception to deprive a victim of a legal right or to gain from a victim unlawfully or unfairly.
Who exactly here is the victim that gets it legal rights deprived or what is the gain at the expense of the victim?
The shareholders of Microsoft or Amazon are deprived of their value.
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In this scheme, the government would be deprived of its legal right to obtain information about a business's customer without the consent or knowledge of said customer.
In many/most? cases, a customer can be notified and can attempt to block such information gathering, but there are also many where it's not permitted.
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IE criminal intent vs criminal activity, critically the criminal activity only needs to be intended not actually occur for it to be fraud. Specifying which criminal intent is applicable is reasonable but nothing I said was incorrect.
The victims are the people being deprived of their legal protections.
Not everyone agrees which information should be protected but sending information can be a form of harm. If I break into your bank, find all your financial transactions, and post it on Facebook, I have harmed you.
Courts imposing gag orders over criminal or civil matters is a critical protection, and attempting to violate those gag orders is harm. The specific victims aren’t known, but they intend for there to be victims.
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IANAL, but all criminal definitions of fraud that I am aware of require an intention to harm to a victim. It's kind of hard to argue that sending money fulfills this criteria.
The harm is not to the recipient of the funds in this case, but to the investigating authorities, who have had the secrecy of their subpoena compromised.
There is wide latitude in the criminal code to charge financial crimes. This reminds me a bit of Trump's hush money conviction. IIRC, a central issue was how the payment was categorized in his books. In this case, there would be a record of this payment to Israel in the books, but the true nature of the payment would be concealed. IANAL, but I believe that is legally problematic.
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Americans get legal protections for their private health data because the disclosure of such information is considered harmful.
Other countries provide legal protections for other bits of information because disclosure of that information is considered harmful to the individual, it’s that protection they are trying to breach which thus harms the person.
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But this is a signaling system, not a meaningful transfer of money.
The signal based on private information is what’s causing the harm not the movement of money. They could cause the same harm by encoding a signal in the timing of a money transfer, or hell using carrier pidgins.
I could send your username and password using similar methods, the medium doesn’t matter here but the signal and their attempt to hide it does.