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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think the real question is why a robber that stole $500 from a bank teller drawer and anyone that helped them gets thrown in prison without any meaningful consideration of their circumstances while these besuited lowlifes get to go home to their families every night while they decide amongst themselves whether they can figure out who is responsible for destroying thousands of people’s lives.

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I don't want to go out of my way to defend their incompetence, but you have to prove what happened. It's not fair to send a CEO to prison because a different insider independently embezzled funds and they lost the records.

Seems like a rather large moral hazard if we don't?

At some point the courts should be able to say "ok fine you were the directors responsible for the company you're going to prison n years, sorry."

Bet we'd see a lot more documentation suddenly appear.

I'd bet 95% of fintech startups are just walking moral hazards to begin with.

> Seems like a rather large moral hazard if we don't

Based on what? The catastrophic failure rate is low. And if you’re sensitive to that risk, don’t bank with a firm that’s selling you on sticking it to the man or whatever.

But think of the innovation we'd lose out on by jailing executives doing this. A bank that gives sub-market interest and "invests" part of the difference in a scratcher game that they run. Oh, and for complex legal reasons, they're not a bank, but they do offer bank accounts at a different bank.

I think you're absolutely on-point. There's literally no end to the amount of money they could innovate for themselves if we'd just let them do whatever the hell they want and then claim it's too confusing to figure out what happened when they steal it all. Won't someone think of the innovators?!

Command responsibility applies here. CEOs get multiple times their average employee's pay because of their responsibility, which should include responsibility to know when stuff goes wrong.

You have to prove the bank robber did it too? Why is it that we wiretap phones, subpoena companies, search homes and detain people for the lowest of drug crimes but everyone throws their hands up here?

Like, how did you expect to make a case if you don't do anything?

It depends. SOX compliance, if they were, actually literally does say the CFO and other officers who signed off on their accounting are liable. That’s the point of SOX. Synapse itself likely wasn’t unless it was preparing for IPO but their banking partners might be.

Their primary partner Evolve bank is not, but it is held to legal standards by the FDIC and other banking regulators and their lack of controls is probably where you might see executive management facing criminal challenges.

However everyone involved could face civil penalties.

If history had been different it’s likely this event would have turned up regulatory scrutiny on fintech precisely for these reasons - a privately held fintech can basically just fuck around and pretend to be a bank leveraging a poorly managed licensed partner holding the risk and abscond through incompetence with everyone’s money and no one suffer a consequence other than the customers. Sadly I don’t expect this to change in the next four years and there’s every reason to believe accountability will get worse as existing regulations and enforcement are potentially gutted. So caveat emptor is likely the law of the land until something so huge happens it can’t be ignored.

If you're a CEO running a business that sells what they call 'savings accounts' worth hundreds of millions of dollars and even have a system in place where it's even possible to make "'very large bulk transfers' of funds without identification of who owned the money" then you should be responsible for that. There's a good reason this doesn't happen at banks-- it can't. They have redundant business processes in place that prevent it from happening in the first place, and are constantly redundantly reconciling their transactions so if it does happen, it gets caught and corrected immediately. Not only did it happen, it happened without being able to figure out where the money even went.

Let's say I ran a company that made a product that I acknowledged is extremely dangerous without this one safety mechanism. Instead of creating multiple redundant systems to ensure that safety mechanism is in place, I just trust that some guy takes care of it without being absolutely certain-- it's expensive, annoying time consuming, blah blah blah. When a bunch of people get hurt because that guy pocketed the cash that was supposed to go towards that safety feature, hell yes I should be criminally responsible. It's negligence.

> Personally I think the real question is why a robber that stole $500 from a bank teller drawer and anyone that helped them gets thrown in prison without any meaningful consideration of their circumstances

Because if you allow it, you'll have hundreds of these everyday. The law is there to "scare" others from doing it not punish the perpetrator. On the other hand, you don't have hundreds of fintech startups raising millions every day.

It makes no sense to throw someone in prison in this case unless they are a flight risk until their sentencing is complete.

For $96 million, I would be a flight risk.

>Because if you allow it, you'll have hundreds of these everyday. The law is there to "scare" others from doing it not punish the perpetrator. On the other hand, you don't have hundreds of fintech startups raising millions >every day.

Surely the scale of harm caused is the metric here, and not the frequency of potential crimes individually committed

Sentencing? Who’s been charged? The article implied that regulatory bodies haven’t even raised an eyebrow— the parties are in mediation and synapse said they don’t even have enough money to audit their books, and are just sort of shrugging their shoulders about it. And doesn’t white collar crime need to be discouraged too? Probably even more so considering the scale of the impact? Hundreds of millions of dollars, uninsured. Maybe if the cops went around major metropolitan business districts frisking every middle aged person in upscale business casual attire with an expensive haircut to search for wire transfer receipts because they ‘met the description’ then extremely consequential white collar crime would be less frequent than it is.

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