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Comment by SimianSci | Hacker News Reader

It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery.

Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.

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Yes a lot of scams basically are elaborate ways to get interest-free loans. The only way to discourage these types of scams is to require the claw-back to include high interest. Which probably feels very punitive, so we don't do it. Generally we award the damages and then that's it. But like... damages 2 years ago don't equal damages now, that's not how money works. I guess our courts don't know that.

> Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the time the grift comes due, your "investment" will have grown to a magnitude where even if you are forced to pay it back, you will have made a tidy profit.

There's never been a time where that would work. A damages theory can't make you cough up your stock market gains, but unjust enrichment will do it.

Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.

In practice how often does that actually happen to well-heeled, well-connected fraudsters?

> Put into an example, it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000. If I'm less lucky than that and turn it into $50, I owe you all $1,000.

Instead of ending this sentence in a period, I would have ended it:

, if I get caught.

> it's always been black-letter law that if I misappropriate $1,000 from you, put it on red 27, and turn it into $36,000, I owe you all $36,000.

Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught. If you asked $1,000 for an "investment" with the intention of putting it on red 27, then win, you can repay your investors and they'd be none the wiser.

>> I owe you all $36,000

> Only if you "stole", and only if you get caught

Are you sure? I'd have guessed that the debt is created when they generate the $36 000. Getting caught would just make it easier for the victim to collect.

> been black-letter law

Only civil, though, right? IIRC criminal law seeks restitution, which would be the original $1000. Civil law is where unjust enrichment would come into play, to my understanding.

Some people have argued that Sam Bankman Fried just had unlucky timing. If his Anthropic investment had an opportunity to mature everyone would have been happy.

I don’t subscribe, but I have seen the argument a few times.

It used to be fraud was the problem of the perpetrator, and not the victim.

Welcome to the grift economy.

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