Edward Snowden ousts a scammer during live stream [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Including this gem:
"After Snowden’s abrupt exit from the interview, Tulsiani paused the meeting for several minutes, during which a hot mic led to an exclamation of a “wasted fucking day” and someone ordering a medium iced coffee over an intercom. "
Blowing the whistle is not effective when you simply publish a blog post somewhere. It requires theatrics to establish credibility, interest, and to reach the right audience in a way that can't be ignored.
The first time he did it, well it was not effective.
It's not like people were not informed enough about war crimes. The Abu Grahib dossier had come out 3-4 years earlier.
People perceive this sort of stuff as far away, don't want to look at it or just simply block out the information because they want to believe whatever they want to believe.
Whistleblowing is ineffective to change the way a system operates. It solely make the system cover up better, and achieves the goal of having some heads roll (more often than not the responsible people for security and info compartmentization)
Your last paragraph didn’t happen for any recent major leak - Wikileaks war crimes, Snowden. Hell did it even happen with the Panama leak? There was no large change towards transparency. The little I’ve heard, the same usual tax shelters and money hiding continued.
Some people just don't get that presenting factual information showing the unsavory history of some person is not criticism nor is it illegal.
The play is obvious here. For anyone on the fence after hearing Snowden, hearing someone even just suggest that what Snowden said was false to the point of illegality may re-convince them enough to be scammed.
The people who fall for these scams hold cold hard facts as similar worth to baseless claims.
Here are guest speakers they have featured/will be featuring: https://privateinvestmentclub.com/speakers/
> Grant Cardone, Edward Snowden, Kevin Hart, Sunil Tulsiani, Gerry Dee, Michele Romanow, Kevin Harrington, Brian Tracy, Robert G Allen, Jack Canfield, Cora Cristobal, Robert Kiyosaki
Private Investment Club calls these people "Team Members".
When you’re not greedy nor desperate and have no reason to get rich quickly, it’s very easy to see these scams for what they are. When you need or want to get rich quickly, you want to believe it’s real.
Kevin preaching do-for-self: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2563837/kevin-hart-has-a-me...
There are a lot of people that would instantly improve their online productions if they only went to a music store instead of a computer store to buy their audio gear.
At least here in Canada, pretty much everybody who's ever heard of Sunil know he's a scammer. Even on sight. I guess he's preying on those who don't remember or are too young to remember.
Real estate in the US is too profitable to be anything but a grifters' game, and everyone else is well advised to keep their interactions to a minimum.
Well, “simultaneously” usually doesn’t apply to events that take place nearly four years apart, but otherwise, true.
It's actually the American middle class that has the largest fraction of its assets in real estate. The myth that real estate delineates the haves and have notes is, in my opinion, the reason these get-rich-quick schemes work. It's the irrational factor that lets a grifter gloss over the asset's intrinsically sub-par returns, gargantuan fees and unnecessary complexity.
Speaking anecdotally, the very rich ($100+ million) I know tend to be lightly invested or uninvested in real estate. To the degree they own it, it's mortgaged to finance a better-returning asset. They have real estate exposure, but that's more commonly through the lending channel versus asset side. (Or through an operating business, e.g. a hotel.)
Median net worth in the US is $121K. Median home price is $301K. The middle class doesn't own most of the real estate in the US. Lenders do, which was kind of my point.
He might not really be against anonymous digital money, but he does have a reputation to protect. So maybe he has to draw the line somewhere.
Or maybe he doesn't want to draw attention to Monero because he wants to protect it's utility.
Zcash focuses on anonymity too.
Something along these lines
just asking so I can forward this to the Russian mafia to give to Putin. Putin will want his half of all of Snowden's cryptocurrency holdings. Thus, all who donated to Snowden likely donated to Putin.
It sucks when you post something and someone else post it again and get more traction, but it's difficult to avoid. The alternative is to block the post forever, that is also bad. The mods are trying to do something about it, but I guess it will not be soon, you probably have to wait a few years ...
(It seams easy, but it's a hard problem. The easy checks probably have very bad corner cases, and in these cases they make the changes slowly, very slowly. Don't hold your breath.)
- The article Snowden linked is public. Presumably people already know about it?
- I don’t know about the details of the case, but the host wasn’t found guilty. That seems relevant.
- Snowden joined the conference just to call this guy out? Seems like a strange thing to do. Why not just not join the conference?
Why did Snowden do this?
I don’t know why people are attending this conference, but could anyone actually be getting value out of it?
If so, then it just depends whether you find this conference ethically defensible, or not. Seems like people could differ on that.
The host was really pressuring people to pay to join, even when his prospective customers didn't have the money:
>Before Snowden joined, Tulsiani was trying to sell $47 tickets to a "VIP" session of the conference. While pitching the VIP session, Tulsiani repeatedly said, “If there was a gun to your head saying you have to find [the money]...you’ll find it,” included as a response to an audience member who said in the group chat that she couldn’t afford the entry fee.
That's not necessarily a scam, but it sure is a massively unethical business model.
He's a scammer. If you had actually watched the video and listened to the explanations by Snowden and looked up the court case that you're saying the scammer was not guilty in but WAS FOUND GUILTY then you would either delete your comments or edit them to say you're wrong.
Many times these things aren't black and white. This is one case where it is. Please don't defend obvious scams. Don't give any gap for them to somehow convince people that they're on the up and up because those victim will be hurt.
Snowden is using his name and appearance to out this guy and I'm very ok with that.
I would edit the comment, but it doesn't look like I can now.
Of course, the scammers running this are absolutely getting value out of it.
Think of it as the difference between a group of people with a formal contract and meetings for investment splitting in a conference room vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU
It's extremely obvious which category this article's meeting falls into once you know about those two categories. I've had a bunch of friends fall into the MLM world (which will keep telling you it's not a pyramid scheme), and every single presentation or meeting they've ever seen, talked about, or been to has either been mindnumbingly cringe and unprofessionally fraudulent slides with false income numbers (upline-held ones) or cult-like scam screaming and money worship (corporate ones).
Information being public doesn't mean the people in the call know about it
> Snowden joined the conference just to call this guy out? Seems like a strange thing to do. Why not just not join the conference?
Because some people have a strong aversion against scammers and use anything in their means to oust them, including using any fame they may have.
That seems to be the case in general, but I have to say in this case it doesn’t really require that to decide to take the opportunity to slam dunk on someone when you discover you’ve been scammed into agreeing to be a speaker for their scam. A fairly normal degree of personal desire for retaliation would suffice.
Maybe I’m more impressed by his hands-on approach to calling someone out.
Either way, color me impressed.
Seems like hollywood has for ages turned a blind eye to a lot of these issues.
I think it takes more than a fairly average predisposition to honesty, to go out out there, and yell fraud when you see fraud.
Take this event as an example. If it was so easy to call people out, then you would hear it far more often. Here is a single case, and made it to the top of HN.
I think the people recruiting Hollywood figures into these tr things are probably just better at identifying people that don’t really care if its the thing that it says on the tin as long as they get a paycheck; which is why they tend to target past-their-prime figures with money (at least relative to lifestyle) issues.
Compare his claim (https://youtu.be/h1-Y3IzVqdw) to the program actually described in his documents (https://theweek.com/articles/463395/nsa-prism-leak-much-less...). In that video, he also makes the pants on fire claim that he, as a Sharepoint admin, had the authority to wiretap anybody in America without a court order.
To be fair to Snowden, I have no doubt that he actually believed it. He read some documents on the Sharepoint server he administered that he didn't understand and jumped to wild nightmarish conclusions; however, he has stopped making any claims about PRISM (and only ever brings up phone metadata now), so he appears to know that what he claimed was wrong, but I have yet to see him issue a mea culpa.
That’s not what I see:
> On June 7, 2017, Mr. Tulsiani pled guilty to unregistered trading and breaching an OSC cease trade order in connection with an investment scheme involving the Private Investment Club, which targeted Ontario investors. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/osc-investor-alert-sunil-tuls...
> Why did Snowden do this?
Did you watch the video? He explains exactly why.
I was going off the article Snowden put up saying the guy was “named”, so I assumed he wasn’t actually found guilty, just accused.