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Comment by a_random_canuck | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why these ads aren’t considered criminal fraud, why Google and its directors aren’t held criminally responsible for said fraud, and why all the income derived from such fraud is considered proceeds of crime and seized.

Oh, wait, I do understand. It’s because criminal law is only really meant for the little people who sold some marijuana and not the corporations facilitating massive worldwide fraud.

If I help personally defraud one person? Straight to jail. But Google helps defraud millions of people? Here please take some more taxpayer cash.

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A portion of this fraudulent money gets directed straight towards the election of the people responsible for creating and enforcing these laws.

This is very literally true; in particular, there seems to be an intersection between scam supplements and rightwing marketing. Famous talking heads advertising "brain force" pills and so on.

While I agree that the force of the justice system heavily targets the non-rich, I did see a former U.S. president on trial for fraud yesterday.

The rich are only held accountable when they screw over other rich people/other larger entities (like banks). Occasionally when a company engages in exceptionally egregious conduct against average people they can get a larger slap on the wrist via a class action suit, but it seems like those are becoming more rare, especially since anti-class action clauses are standard practice in contracts.

I'd consider that an exception that proves the rule

You shouldn't consider it the exception.

The rich are usually not so narcissistic they will only let sycophants work for them, so they dot their i's and cross their t's correctly. There's a lot of room for being sneaky in ways most of us disapprove of before it crosses into criminal.

However, we've also had Bernie Madoff and… wow, this is a long list of American politicians convicted of fraud:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_politicians_...

I've only noticed four overlap on the subcategory of mail and wire fraud, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Politicians_convicted...

And at the time of writing, this list is disjoint also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Politicians_convicted...

(Though looking at the details, that isn't what I would've expected from the description "American politicians convicted of" as a Canadian is included; technically yes, and I won't speak either way as to if I think you should count that).

How many rich people went to jail for Enron, how many for the savings and loan crisis? How can anyone go to jail for drugs when none of the Sacklers have?

Enron is a terrible example given they did have a trial and even multiple convictions, just that some were undone on technicalities — including in one case "dying of a heart attack before exhausting all appeals".

Totally agree and I have nothing meaningful to say aside from how confusing is the word defraud for me as a non english speaker, I always think it means to cancel the fraud, and not commit it

On behalf of the creators of the English language, I extend my apologies for most of it; it seems to be half made of technical debt. The one that really gets me is "inflammable" - it just means flammable.

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