Hacker News Reader

Yes, it’s easy for a criminal to do that. However, then they escalate from simple marketplace fraud (which is very hard to prosecute) to committing wire-fraud which is not just a federal felony but also carries stringent punishment and is much easier to prosecute.

For evidence, see the trial of Elizabeth Holmes and SBF.

View on HN

That’s not criminal at all.

During different parts of my life, I’ve done real estate on the side, group fitness as an independent contractor and software development as an independent contractor (C2C) each time I went to nolo.com and registered an LLC that was recognized both by the state and federal government.

As I said in another post, I’ve set up a virtual mailbox for other reasons where all of my mail goes to. But they also sell business use cases. None of this is illegal. I had an EIN and reported taxes through it.

The GP's point is that if you do these things in conjunction with a scam, you're now ticking off more crime boxes that could increase the severity of a punishment. There are a lot of perfectly legal things that when done to commit a crime lead to someone breaking additional laws.

(See also: never mess with the postal service police.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com