Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Scott Tucker. Huge Asshole. https://jalopnik.com/convicted-payday-loan-mogul-scott-tucke...

Keep in mind that Scott Tucker was convicted of mail fraud and making false statements to a bank long before starting his payday loan business. His brother Joel has also been charged (not sure if convicted) with a few felonies. The other brother Blaine committed suicide when the payday loan business where he was partners with Scott and worked with their mother started being investigated. Seems like the entire family was just a bunch of assholes and the tribal business was just a way to enable that.

Related to the article, if a company was a legit tribal company and not just fictionally owned/run by the tribe, would this ruling still make sense? Or does it only hold if a non-tribal company is trying to use the tribe to skirt laws?

My understanding from watching the Netflix episode about him is that it was primary due to the blatant nature of the abuse of sovereign status. That being said, when you see what else they had going on the Indian reservation thing becomes simply one bullet points in the depth of the scam.

I haven't seen that episode but there were two things that really got the trouble started. First was funneling money from the payday loan company to fund his racing team. The other was his brother Joel selling fake debt to collectors claiming it came from Scott or one of the AMG portfolio companies. A whole lot of people that never had a loan suddenly started getting calls from debt collectors. Not to mention those debt collectors were pissed when they found out it was fake and/or sold to multiple other collectors.

If it was legally owned by the tribe it would still run into issues with violating local state laws for any loans issues outside of tribal territories.

That part I'm aware of. My question was not in reference to payday loans or the Tuckers. If a legit tribal company filed this patent, would the ruling be the same? Or does it matter that the patent was "tribal" only in an attempt to get around the review?

The latter. If they legitimately owned the patent (whether they filed it themselves or acquired it by purchase), then this case could have proceeded on its merits.

Yes but they have sovereign immunity so only the feds can come knocking. So it has to be a big enough enterprise or really devious to get in trouble with the feds.

I can recommend the whole "Dirty Money" series that the article refers to. The episode about Scott Tucker was really interesting (and to me, an European), I had no idea that the Indian tribes were immune for certain prosecutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com