Comment by fc417fc802

6 hours ago

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.

The company I'm a director for licenses IP from my company. The company wouldn't exist without my IP (I'm one of the founders). Yet, I'm also a customer of the same. Dollars in/out, we're all kosher. This isn't fraud, it's just how companies work.

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.

  • How? "AI fincancing bad" is starting to seem like a new non sequitur meme. There's no imaginary thing being traded for indefensible valuations in AI dealings. Stock units at a certain valuation exchanged for an equivalant value in hardware is just a standard payment-in-kind transaction.

    If the valuation turns out to change in the future, that's the hardware seller's risk.

    It's not the same thing as buying a $20 million banana from a bahamian llc secretly owned by yourself, which is fraud.

  • 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.