Comment by ang_cire
6 hours ago
It's not actually fraud if there is some ostensible service they're performing. Business units within businesses 'pay' each other for 'services' all the time. Ditto for subsidiaries. Whether something is fraud might come down to intent alone.
The line between legal and illegal business transactions can be murky as hell.
For it to not be fraud you'd have to actually exchange services proportional to the line items. That isn't what was described. Falsifying line items to juice your numbers is fraud plain and simple.
No, there is no proportionality aspect to the law. Once you’re in the support and software subscription realm, quite vast amount of “value” can be charged for with nothing being done.
Only if you ignore the concept of fair market value. There are going rates for these things. If what you said is true you could trivially launder money by selling a single copy of an arbitrarily expensive piece of software that did nothing more than print "hello world". In practice that's not how the law works. Regulators and judges aren't drooling idiots.
Sure, you could inflate your numbers a bit and likely get away with it. But it's still fraud (getting away with it doesn't make it not a crime) and you will likely be caught if you overdo it.
Yet we see it happening all the time with various AI deals.
I thought in that case nvidia was (approximately) purchasing stock in exchange for hardware? Which AFAIK is the entire point of stock - selling it to raise needed capital.
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