
I Worked for a Criminal Organization - bsdpunk
https://openmonstervision.github.io/blog/posts/that-time-i-worked-for-criminals/
======
hackermailman
Not uncommon in some cities in Canada to find out you're working for a
criminal outfit if writing point of sale/restaurant software where they want
you to produce one receipt for the customer and a different one for the
restaurant or salon or shady car mechanic that then pockets the unreported tax
aka a 'zapper'. Profitek was busted once, InfoSpec Systems, zappers are in
high demand

~~~
PappaPatat
My first sale of my selfwritten software (about 35 years ago) was for a car
driving instructor. The initial sales conversations where difficult. I thought
they did not see the advantages of having their planning & bookkeeping in a
computer...

How wrong I was. It was their "creative bookkeeping" that worried them. When I
offered to make that all possible ('zapping' as it is called now), they loved
it. Based on their referrals I sold it many times over.

Come next customer / market: bookshops. Guess what the most important selling
argument was, besides easy cataloging, inventory, searching, website
publishing and reporting? Right: zapping.

Thought me an important rule: do not underestimate what your customer is NOT
telling you.

~~~
jackcodes
I know that taxes ultimately don’t result in lost schools and hospitals, as
it’s never that 1:1, but do you ever think you could have cost your country a
hospital, a new road, or a new warhead or whatever?

~~~
Kaiyou
Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint, so I imagine nobody losing sleep over
dealing with it in an appropriate way.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint,

It's odd how the people that think this are generally the same ones _most_
likely to argue that “positive rights” that impose a cost on others are an
incoherent concept, and positive entitlement can at most be a limited
privilege granted by others based on available resources and expected utility
of the grant. But they fail to recognize that the “right” to wall off goods
from the commons and exclude others by force—i.e., property—is very much a
positive right that has a cost for others.

~~~
nybble41
Property is not a positive right. Property ownership is derived from the self-
ownership of the person who created the property by combining their own labor
with unowned land. The exclusive right to decide how the property is consumed
is a _negative_ right; others have no obligation to provide anything _to_ the
property owner, only to leave the owner ( _including_ their property) alone.
Homesteading imposes no cost on others for the simple reason that these others
have no claim to the unowned land being homesteaded.

Your error is starting from the assumption that land is owned in common by
everyone, rather than unowned. If land were actually owned in common then you
would need to obtain permission from every single person on the planet before
using any of it. You would starve to death long before you obtained even a
small fraction of the necessary consent. And no, the government cannot grant
that consent on behalf of others who never deliberately and voluntarily agreed
to permit the government to represent them. You would need the consent of each
and every individual.

------
walrus01
Man, screwing with ARIN seems like a really dumb idea. They're located in
northern VA and their leadership team has direct contacts at places like the
US district attorney's office, and FBI. Some of the internet grey beards who
know the ARIN leadership are well connected in the parts of the US government
responsible for "cybersecurity".

People at ARIN also have 20+ years of experience identifying shell games.

------
CKN23-ARIN
Court documents from the ARIN case:
[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15619663/oppobox-
llc-v-...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15619663/oppobox-llc-v-
american-registry-for-internet-numbers-ltd/)

From the criminal wire fraud case:
[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15619660/united-
states-...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15619660/united-states-v-
golestan/)

------
preinheimer
So Micfo was one of our suppliers, they remain the only one to have mailed us
chocolate at Christmas.

The chocolate wasn't great, but it's more than any of our other providers have
mailed us :).

------
fxtentacle
You have an interesting writing style, describing your experience as if you're
watching the weather drift by.

~~~
theawesomekhan
True, he writes blissfully

------
nyolfen
wsj writeup: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-
sh...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-shines-light-
on-webs-dark-corners-11581944400)

------
dang
This is related to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22354357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22354357).

------
Koremat6666
May be I missed it but can someone tell me what was the crime the company was
committing ? Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as
stalling LEOs and Warrants in whatever way they can. A lot of this is not
really "crime" as in kidnapping people or shooting people dead in some alley.

Is having shell companies a crime ? I know a ton of bay area "startups" than
engage in these sort of tricks to maximize the brand damage. Ask.com and other
toolbar companies are great examples where they will just rebrand the same
toolbar as X and sell it to 10 companies which were owned by same entity. Half
the companies with "explosive" growth were using mass mailing techniques than
involved spamming. Many used foreign companies to skirt US law related to
spamming.

I think author is overthinking.

~~~
normalnorm
Am I the only one getting depressed with all the excuses and rationalizations
in this thread? It's the same with "adtech" and the like... "Hey, I'm not
killing anyone, what's the harm?"

Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions
and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-
sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the
paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans.

A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a
dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-
style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A
search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human
record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic
regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market!

Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human
suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your
door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it.
But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something.

Fuck all this.

~~~
nkrisc
The issue is when people try to stack-rank the "badness" of crimes. "Is
bankrupting a thousand people through fraud worse than killing someone?" The
answer is: it doesn't matter which is worse. Both destroy lives in different
ways.

Fraud and spam are crimes that ruin lives in their own ways.

~~~
spottybanana
> The answer is: it doesn't matter which is worse. Both destroy lives in
> different ways.

Though it is very natural for people to think "how bad I am" or "how bad is
that company compared to the other companies" and so on. Also in the end the
justice system has to sentence these crimes and there has to be some kind of
"badness" metric that should be seen as fair by the general public. I don't
think this "they are all just crimes" approach works.

~~~
nkrisc
Sure, I understand why people want to. I just think it's a futile effort. In
order to determine whether bankrupting 1000 people is worse than killing 1
person you have to quantify all those variables, including the value of a
human life (an actuary will gladly do that for you). By some measures, say
economic impact, killing a single person may not matter at all, depending on
who they are. What people want is to quantify morality. Good luck.

However what we do see that correlates to some "badness" metric is the
punishment we mete out for crimes. Years of imprisonment is a simple, linear
measure that can be used to measure crimes against one another.

You see it all the time. So and so killed a person and got X years in prison,
but this other guy ran a Ponzi scheme and got Y years in prison. Whether X is
greater than Y, and your viewpoint, will determine if you think that's fair or
not. But my original point is I think it's a rather pointless determination to
begin with because it isn't really telling you anything. It doesn't answer the
question of whether one crime is worse than another because that's
fundamentally a philosophical question that I don't think can be measured.

------
ikeboy
> They insisted I never talk to any LEO

Nothing wrong with this ...

>PTR records, Enabling Spam

Doesn't say why that's illegal. At best it says they had customers that broke
the law.

>Often both the CEO and Vice President would talk openly about how one of our
clients was violating the TOS of several companies.

Not criminal even for the client, at least assuming the HiQ v Linkedin case is
upheld. And not illegal for the company. Maybe civil liability under tortious
interference? Pretty high bar there, though. And that's all assuming there's
an actual ToS - the one example given is of Google search results.
Manipulating your _own_ website in the hopes Google treats it favorably can't
be seen as violating any agreed ToS.

The stuff Micfo was accused of in court, and the stuff OP is claiming are
criminal acts, are disjoint.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
>At best it says they had customers that broke the law.

Did you see the part at the top where the CEO admitted to being all of those
"customers"? They were playing a shell game, and while this guy didn't do the
criminal activities he definitely was working for the "legitimate front end"
of a larger criminal organization.

~~~
busterarm
Even if you take the OP at face value, they're an unreliable narrator at best.

They have questionable character and moral standards by their own admission.
That's before even considering the effects of their mental illness.

I would never hire this "perpetually unemployed" person. Everything they say
points to something being off.

~~~
saber6
Flipside: This criminal enterprise spotted those same exact attributes, but
the mitigating factor was technical competence and submissiveness. And if it
came to be where they thought it would never end up (the situation today),
someone would discredit them as crazy, given their background.

~~~
busterarm
Absolutely they did. I'm not discounting OP's story, I'm basically suggesting
exactly what you're saying.

I've seen a similar scenario play out before with another spammer and the kind
of people he hired.

~~~
saber6
Gotcha. I misunderstood - I thought you were saying they were crazy and not to
believe them etc.

------
htfu
Interesting read! Sounds like however it turns out... they had it coming.

How common are setups like this, anyone know?

------
Causality1
The only substantial difference between this company and, say, Facebook, is
that Facebook generally knows how to budget properly. Facebook and other large
successful companies try to only commit crimes when they know the profit from
doing so exceeds the risk of being caught and punished.

~~~
speedplane
> Facebook and other large successful companies try to only commit crimes when
> they know the profit from doing so exceeds the risk of being caught and
> punished.

While this statement is often true (big companies make these cost-benefit
decisions), I don't think it really captures what is happening to Facebook.
Doing a cost-benefit analysis like this requires having data on potential
costs and benefits. In most cases, Facebook didn't have this data.

When an individual, company, or institution is faced with a decision, but
lacks data to properly evaluate it, they fallback on other decision making
tools, including instinct and principles.

Facebook almost certainly didn't know the consequences of the many decisions
they made, they didn't know the potential costs or benefits. But they did have
some underlying principles, namely: maximizing platform engagement, convincing
people to share more personal data on their platform, and exploiting user data
for better advertising.

With these foundational principles, you can end up making some really bad
decisions even without a proper cost-benefit analysis.

------
apache99
I also love Canadian Hip Hop. Especially from Torronto. Casper TNG is really
cool

------
Izmaki
Honestly I expected worse. But then again if it was, writing about it would
probably be a felony on its own.

------
blackrock
Geez. I wonder if working for a porn hosting company is better.

I’d rather not work for either, but if you’re not in a hot tech area, then
your choices are limited.

~~~
toyg
Sometimes I find myself thinking that working in porn could actually be pretty
interesting - what with massive caching needs, video encoding etc etc...
Unfortunately the few job ads I’ve seen were for super-boring stacks like PHP
or Perl, which I’d rather avoid.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Definitely, I'm convinced that a lot of people that made youtube and other
video hosting sites work in the early days actually came from the online porn
industry.

------
alexcnwy
Epic

