[showmexyz]

Still what she did was fraud. From the article - "Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying “they have a lot to blame themselves” for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was “punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan’s stupidity.” "

[mothballed]

Not to justify it, but why isn't the founder of UPS (edit: Fedex) in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino.

If you turn a profit no one cares (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works), if you lose it's fraud.

When all the winners are doing it, hard to compete otherwise... not that it makes it right.

[curiousObject]

why isn't the founder of UPS in prison? I don't think it was legal to go and literally spend their money at the casino

That was FedEx’s founder, Fred Smith. It wasn’t UPS

He only had $5,000 of funds remaining, which he gambled playing blackjack, so the potential loss to investors was small. He’d already lost almost all their investments through operating FeDex

[FireBeyond]

The investors?

At that point he had been stiffing his pilots on wages for weeks or months, and with many also paying fuel bills on their personal credit cards/checks, since many fuelers had canceled FedEx's accounts.

Yeah, $5K isn't a whole lot, but if I'm a pilot struggling to put food on my family's table, and the CEO takes company money to Vegas, I'm not thinking "Oh, but the investors" or "Sure, it's not that much money anyway".

I don't see why people (not saying you, in particular) see this as some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.

[curiousObject]

some heroic founder "risking it all". He wasn't. He was risking the company's "all", after asking the employees to suck up his mismanagement.

I agree. He was asking employees not to cash their paychecks sometimes. $5000 is inconsequential compared to that forced investment from employees and business partners

[privatelypublic]

What are you thinking the crime would be? He bet his company on a literal toss of the dice instead of the routine figurative ones.

Outside of Bribery and ?SarBox? (Whichever regulation handles kickbacks, etc), I can't think of anything.

[mothballed]

If you spend investor money at a literal casino while advertising a non-casino related business, and pay the investors back, probably people will view you as not committing a crime.

If you get investor money or get a loan on the basis of funding logistics investments, bet it on roulette red, and go bankrupt, I would expect you'd be looking at hard jail time for fraud.

So I'm thinking the crime would be nothing, because he was a winner, and the optics totally changed, and fraud relies on very subjective opinions of a jury.

[bryanlarsen]

There are lots of examples of people going to jail despite investors getting their money back, like SBF and Shkreli. Even Madoff investors got 94% of their investments back.

[mothballed]

Shkreli is the only one of those 3 that fully paid back his investors, and it took him pissing off virtually every politician and a bunch of wealthy insurance executives/administrators to get enough resources mobilized to get a conviction (and being one of the most uncharismatic people on earth, which didn't help him at trial).

I think you are definitely in a much worse place for a fraud conviction if you lose money.

[bryanlarsen]

News stories said SBF investors were going to get 118% of their money back. Did that not happen?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/08/ftx-crypto-fraud-victims-t...

[IncreasePosts]

There's no knowledge as to whether he used company money, or personal cash/line of credit. In fact, there's no knowledge of the story is even true, apart from what one dead man wrote!

[potato3732842]

> (unless you're Shkreli, don't think his investors lost money, but he pissed off some politicians because he said the quiet parts out loud about how the pharma industry works)

What's the TL;DR? His wikipedia page doesn't make it obvious.

[mothballed]

Shkreli's schtick was to buy out or control pharma companies that had a monopoly and jack the everliving fuck out of the prices. He had some programs for uninsured people, but he would milk the insurance companies absolutely dry, which gave him some wild profits.

This made a bunch of powerful people absolutely enraged, as he was basically publicly bragging about jacking the ever living fuck out of the prices. Pharma companies do this but Shkreli would publicly say it and tell the truth that basically the other companies were doing it while pretending to be good people, and he was only being honest about it. Poor people were pissed because they were told they couldn't get their drugs (I'm unaware if the program that allowed uninsured people to get them for cheap was real or not), and the rich insurance people pissed because he was basically he was bilking them.

So they went back and discovered one or some of his other early enterprises weren't profitable, but that he had used money he made off his later pharma enterprises to pay back his earlier investors.

In trial, his investors testified they were happy with the situation, lost no money, and would invest with him again. But they still convicted him for fraud, even despite the 'victims' themselves did not believe they were defrauded. It didn't help that Shkreli is probably one of the most profoundly unlikeable people you can possible listen to, unless you're not bothered to hear a hyper-capitalist be honest about how they do business.

[FireBeyond]

This is a really weird spin on Shkreli's antics.

He would paint himself as a working man's hero, "I'm making insurers pay more so you can get your drugs cheaper", always avoiding the awkward questions of where the insurer's money came from and why premiums kept rising (note that I'm also not siding with insurers here, especially those who have implemented PBMs to leech money into their pockets). He basically treated the public as useful idiots who thought that insurance was paying more for their drugs out of ... charity? Goodwill? The money fairy?

Then there was also the fact that at least once (and to a slightly lesser extent, twice), he went to the FDA to block the approval of a new drug, arguing it shouldn't be on the market. Why?

Not because it was less effective than the market options - it had better results.

Not because it had more/worse side effects, complications and interactions - it had better results there too.

Not because it was prohibitive, or patenting or anything stifling to the market.

No, it was because Shkreli had recently purchased a manufacturer of one of those existing drugs and their portfolio, and had been in the process of ramping up his price gouging on that drug, i.e. "The FDA should block approval of this better drug because it limits my ability to profit from my 'worse' drug."

[mothballed]

Regardless on your take about his antics, it seems clear the fraud prosecution had a lot more to do with his pharma antics than the government actually caring that much about how he paid back investors at prior companies, especially since to my knowledge none of his investors were going to the government with complaints. No one gave a shit about the guy until his (seemingly legal) pharma 'gouging' practices pissed off a huge segment of influential people.

[FireBeyond]

I do unfortunately agree with that. But to this day I still see people who see him as some unsung hero, and the prosecution of him for one of many horrible acts was one that only doubled down on that vision.

[potato3732842]

Sounds like basically the big boy version of how all the other psychiatrists who run plausibly deniable pill mills will screech about the one running a flagrant pill mill until they lose their license.

[notmyjob]

Victims not wanting prosecution doesn’t absolve the perpetrator as wife beaters learn all the time. I also think Skhreli’s biggest mistake was threatening Hillary Clinton.

[mothballed]

If a wife says at trial she wasn't beat, it's extremely likely you're getting a conviction. I'm aware of a recent high profile case (Mike Glover) where the partner even had signs of broken bones and a beaten down door and the partner just later changed her story to those being due to a recreational accident outdoors and that pretty much terminated the case between that and her not providing a favorable testimony. But that's aside the point.

In this case the wife never called the cops, and then when the cops showed up she claimed she wasn't beat, and not only that she has no visible marks or bruises or anything.

And none of this is justifying any of it. Just showing how far outside of what we commonly see in fraud cases that actually get convicted.

[1123581321]

There is truth to this. She was exposed because JP Morgan ran a marketing campaign that converted extremely poorly. Better purchased data might've prevented significant forensics. The poor due diligence had already been signed off.

While she committed fraud, I feel sorry for her because of her naivety. It must've been a sick moment when they asked to examine the data during due diligence. If she'd known that would be used for marketing integration so quickly, maybe she would have backed out of the deal.

[miltonlost]

From the complaint: > In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data. > Engineer-1 was uncomfortable with the request and stated, in sum and substance, “I don’t want to do anything illegal.” JAVICE and CC-1 claimed to Engineer-1 that it was legal. JAVICE stated to Engineer-1, in sum and substance, “We don’t want to end up in orange jumpsuits.” Engineer-1 declined the request from JAVICE and CC-1.

She's not naive. She was told this was illegal and then did it still. She knew this was fraud.

[1123581321]

Yes, read the same. Naive in thinking she could get past that and they wouldn’t do anything particularly revealing with the data. A smarter fraudster would’ve backed out earlier with less damage.

[IncreasePosts]

She's so naive, she just hung around until someone found out the fraud.

It made me wonder what she was thinking when her $30M share landed in her bank account. "Whee, I got away with it", "it's their problem now"?

I don't think I would commit fraud, but if I did it for that amount, I would be on a flight to Malaysia or some other place with no extradition with the US!