Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Little trick for finding a company’s legal jurisdiction: see who they are in their privacy policy or terms of services. The lack of these policies is a red flag. The forum where the CEO makes his statement raises this red flag [1].

The CEO’s LinkedIn Page says he is Greek. “Flight Sim Labs” produces no hits in the Athenian corporate registry [2]. I did find a Flight Sim Limited in the U.K., but registered to a different person [3]. This British Flight Sim Ltd was formed about a month ago.

TL; DR Consider whether you, or customers like you, have legal recourse before executing someone’s blob.

[1] https://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?/announcement/11-...

[2] http://www.acci.gr/acci/shared/index.jsp

[3] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11142081/officers

The privacy policy [4] does not appear to be linked from the homepage, but you can reach it through search. It's devoid of any meaningful content, though.

The company appears to be a shell registered in Cyprus [5]. The address on an older SSL certificate [6] matches the one in the registry.

[4] http://www.flightsimlabs.com/index.php/privacy-policy/

[5] https://efiling.drcor.mcit.gov.cy/DrcorPublic/SearchForm.asp... (search for "flight", 2nd page. Can't link to it directly, apparently)

[6] http://www.herdprotect.com/signer-flight-sim-labs-ltd-020d17... (link fixed, sorry)

As they accepted payments through paypal, it'll be easy for law enforcement to track down the owner. PayPal is very cooperative in these cases (as any bank). A shell company won't help them if someone knows where they have their office. The criminal offence isn't against the company anyway, it'll be against natural persons working for the company.

But the worst that can happen for them short term is that PayPal (and credit card vendors if they use them) block their account if they get too many charge backs as a result of that.

> The criminal offence isn't against the company anyway, it'll be against natural persons working for the company.

What makes you sure of this? Corporations can be criminally prosecuted, at least in the United States and the United Kingdom.

For fun, this exercise can also be applied to the latest crypto currency exchanges.

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