[Drip33]

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927197

> Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.

As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion in forfeiture.

[sailingparrot]

If the most you could lose is whatever margin you made, that wouldn't be much of an incentive to not do that in the first place and it would be quite a broken system.

[Drip33]

What I wrote about is forfeiture which doesn't include criminal penalties. Most of the American (which I am not) federal press releases I read about have a maximum $250,000 fine per count.

Here is a random press release from justice.gov https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-additional-individuals-in...

>The Sherman Act offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by victims if either amount is greater than $1 million. The false statements offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. The obstruction of justice offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

These fines are on top of the forfeiture so if the person in this article earned $1 million gross, $100k net they would have to repay on a guilty finding $1 million + say $500k in fines = $1.5m when they only "earned" $100k.

[sailingparrot]

That makes sense, thanks for educating me :)

[rwmurrayVT]

Correct. :-(