OK. Which one of you was this?

Since we will never know, I will happily go on the record and say > 86.8%.

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But enough about the last election, I want to know about the next one! :smiley:

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Munchkin said up front they weren’t going to verify anything…

And they also fought to hide the details of the awarded loans.

But I’m sure it’s somehow “Biden’s money printer” (of all the money spent in the previous administration) to blame, just like for “Biden’s” inflation.

Did I say anything remotely close to that? I’m talking about things like the large franchises that got money per location, being criticized for taking the money despite the specific language stating that large franchises were eligible per location. That isn’t fraud, but I suspect it’s included in that $100 billion.

Same with PUA unemployment recipients who may not have been intended recipients, but answered all the questions accurately and qualified anyways. I seem to recall hearing at least one state has sent a huge number of UI recipients a “Oops, we made a mistake and now you need to repay this money unless you can prove otherwise” letters - that isn’t fraud, that’s their own incompetence. And again I suspect it’s included in that 100B.

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“I identify as retired”

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Hopefully none of you. The 5 year old Bitfinex hack.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-09/business-rapper-was-bad-at-bitcoin-laundering

Bitfinex is the exchange affiliated with the world’s biggest stablecoin, Tether. At the time of the hack, the digital currency haul was estimated at about $71 million, the Justice Department said. The department said the total value of stolen Bitcoin is now worth about $4.5 billion. …

Lichtenstein, 34, and Morgan, 31, also funneled the money through AlphaBay Marketplace, which was shut down in 2017, to hide their transactions. Some of the money was cashed out through Bitcoin ATMs. Some was used to buy NFTs and gold. They even used the money to buy a Walmart gift card.

What a cover story. I am certainly not telling you to steal $4.5 billion of Bitcoin from a crypto exchange and launder it through the financial system. That is frowned upon, it is not nice to the people whose crypto was stolen, and you will probably go to prison. It’s not good . It is, however … look I am sorry it is cool . Like if I met the person who did that I would be impressed , by the boldness, and by the fact that she has $4.5 billion. And when I think about the person who did that, the words that do not come to mind are “Forbes rapper.”

These people are charged with money-laundering conspiracy, but their real tragedy is that they allegedly did a lot of conspiring without a whole lot of laundering . They were allegedly billionaires in ill-gotten Bitcoin, and they couldn’t spend it.[3]

You might think that a federal criminal indictment for $4.5 billion of Bitcoin money laundering would be vindication of the “Bitcoin is for money launderers” side, but I want to tell you: No it is not! What allegedly happened here is that hackers stole $4.5 billion of Bitcoin from a crypto exchange (and stealing from exchanges absolutely is a major function of crypto), and then they had a horrible time laundering it. They managed to extract only a relatively small portion of the money for actual spending, and each time they got money out the feds were able to trace it from the hack all the way to legitimate accounts with their names on it. The laundering efforts were small-scale, and they are also how they got caught .

They also scammed the PPP covid relief fund for $11k. Next time I find myself with $5B in crypto, I’m not going to think too hard about 5 figure additional criminal frauds… that’s part of why they got caught, and also why I don’t have a private island somewhere bought with well laundered crypto billions.

Never commit small frauds :wink:

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$250k in Amex points for churning seems to have been one of the smaller shady endeavors by this guy.

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bump

Don’t spend it all in one place

https://www.ebay.com/itm/384762251759

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That’s some expensive money laundering… :joy:

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No bid yet:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/154898818188

(1) Philadelphia Nickel.

Odd … when I think of northern, urban areas, I don’t think of nickel. I think of lead, as in 9mm, or brick, as in through the windshield, or hubcap, as in missing. :smile:

I love a happy ending. Enron high flier gets a well timed divorce.

When you put it all together, Lou Pai is one of the luckiest people on the planet. By getting his stripper girlfriend pregnant, he was forced to sell off every single share of Enron he ever owned. He walked away just below the peak of Enron’s stock price with an $280 million*. His only real consequence came in 2008 when he agreed in an out of court settlement to pay $31.5 million in civil fines and restitution to Enron’s investors

Lou’s ex wife Lanna L. Pai, with whom he had two children, was paid an undisclosed lump sum that is believed to be in the tens of millions. She also was granted the right to the couple’s Houston mansion, a Houston condo and a $3 million house in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, Lou married his stripper girlfriend, now known as Melanie Miller Pai. Together, with their newborn child, the couple moved to Colorado where Lou became the second largest land holder in the entire state after purchasing a 120 square mile ranch in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.

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:rofl:

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Life insurance, the Indian scammer edition. “if you’re not committing fraud, you’re not getting your money’s worth.”

https://archive.ph/KtsfQ

In 2000 the government opened the system to private insurers, who crowded in and began to cut corners. Lacking even the most basic of checks and balances, the industry lost an estimated $28 billion to scams in the seven years through 2012, according to Deloitte.

few if any residents have birth certificates, and other basic documents have become easy to forge. Husbands told insurers that their living wives were dead. Wives said their long-dead husbands had recently died anew. Siblings made up extra siblings who could fake-die as painlessly as they were fake-born. And in many cases, the scams were perpetrated by people who had no relation to the allegedly deceased at all.

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Let’s try that again …
And in many cases, the scams were perpetrated by Nigerian Princes who have been completely honest and above-board since the 1990’s.

And on a tangentially related note (since it’s pick on East Indians day) …
https://www.yahoo.com/now/youtuber-gets-scam-ring-india-222806606.html

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More than a member of the overemployed community, Charles, the FAANG alumni, considers himself part of the FIRE movement—short for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” Not yet 30, he is already making $500,000 working two jobs and worth around $3 million, claims he backed up to Motherboard with documentation. But he hopes to increase his compensation to $800,000 by tacking on a third position, and reach a net worth of $10 million by 35.

Even though he is already using ChatGPT to work multiple jobs, Charles still is trying to figure out ways to make his dream even easier to obtain. When we spoke he said he’s already been “able to outsource” coding tasks to a third party in the past, and that he has been hard at work trying to develop a way to have someone else mimic both his voice and image on a computer screen. Once he can do so, he said, he hopes to offshore his job to someone in India who can “do my job for me.”

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Do his employers check his work?

Chatgpt has wowed the world with the depth of its knowledge and the fluency of its responses, but one problem has hobbled its usefulness: It keeps hallucinating.

Yes, large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, a concept popularized by Google AIresearchers in 2018. Hallucination in this context refers to mistakes in the generated text that are semantically or syntactically plausible but are in fact incorrect or nonsensical. In short, you can’t trust what the machine is telling you.

That’s why, while OpenAI’s Codex or Github’s Copilot can write code, an experienced programmer still needs to review the output—approving, correcting, or rejecting it before allowing it to slip into a code base where it might wreak havoc.

High school teachers are learning the same. A ChatGPT-written book report or historical essay may be a breeze to read but could easily contain erroneous “facts” that the student was too lazy to root out.

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Which is why I objected to Vanguard wanting to “voice print” my wife and I for “security” purposes.

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Or too uneducated to root out. :frowning: