HyperVerse hedge fund CEO may not exist — Investigation finds no record of identity after collapse causing an estimated $1.3 billion in customer losses::HyperVerse’s collapse caused an estimated $1.3 billion in customer losses.

    • @[email protected]
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      2911 months ago

      The real fun is trying to track down who actually OWNS these companies. They hide their names behind shell companies and redacted filings.

    • @[email protected]
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      911 months ago

      I think you misspelled “capitalist.”

      I don’t think being a capitalist requires being shady, nor that being some other economic system would stop some people being shady.

      Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.

      People also do sometimes use brands or other company identifiers when deciding who to purchase from.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          That might be your framing of capitalism, but I’d argue it’s one that takes into account the reality of greed and tries to harness it to run the system.

          Government actors - kind of what I think of as a common alternative to capitalism - also act shady and like to hide who they are for many reasons not related to money but instead to power. They have just as much incentive, driven by a potentially similar base human desire, that are orthogonal at best to capitalism if not it’s opposite. I suppose you can argue that non capitalist governments, or governments in non capitalist or capitalist societies do not have shady politicians, but that seems like a very difficult argument to make.

            • @[email protected]
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              -211 months ago

              Yes, capitalism is shitty. I will not say it’s a good system, just that it seems to be the least bad a large scale society has managed to implement. Large attempts to explicitly be anti-capitalist didn’t work out better than current day late stage capitalism by any metric I’m aware of.

              But all of that is irrelevant to the main point that saying there cannot be scammers because capitalism inherently makes all participants scammers is just incorrect.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 months ago

                Jesus, I hate these arguments so much.

                Look at how well this works

                The planet is dying, majority of people are hungry, and only the lucky few are living their own utopia, while the rest gets fucked.

                And no, the ‘current system’ didn’t help people out of poverty, instead it robbed every developing nations of their future. And everyone else, too.

                I get that you said ‘we got nothing better to happen’, but why? US won the second war and pushed everyone to suck its dick. So like yeah, capitalism for everyone?

                • @[email protected]
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                  111 months ago

                  You’re not engaging with my actual argument that I know plenty of Capitalists who I would not classify as “scammers”. The whole thing that started this was someone claiming that anyone who buys into capitalism is inherently a scammer. Clearly there’s a difference between a con-artist and a regular employee at a company. There’s an obvious difference between a scammer and a self employed person. Right there are 2 pretty hard to argue examples that people who buy into capitalism aren’t inherently scamming anyone.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    211 months ago

                    No, no no no.

                    Employees are not capitalist, they are the victims and prisoners, but not ‘proud capitalists’. They got 0 choice in the matter and can’t escape it for their lives.

                    Just no.

                    Self-employed is also a very icky subject specially in current gig economy boom. Ask anyone participating in Amazon, Uber, Wolt etc how great it is to be self-employed. You might also be surprised.

                    We (as a society) like to pretend everything is going great, but even the on-the-surface rich people are on the verge of bankrupcy. And these are the top 10%. The 90% is just done, they will never own anything.

                    So the west (your employees and self-employed people) got scammed hard, the rest got walked over, and robbed for everything. That’s capitalism.

                    Only the richest feel great, those who don’t have to work every day for the fear of losing their roof and meals. But everyone else got scammed. And even the rich will find out, that you can’t eat money.

      • Carighan Maconar
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        711 months ago

        Some potential solutions: Governments could decide corporations must have actual named people in charge, ID by say passports or drivers licenses validated in person at an office to be issued an LLC or whatever.

        I think the forced “this person is ultimately to be held accountable” would help a lot.

        They can break it up if they want, based on company size in that country. Have responsible persons for departments and so on. But only in addition to the one at the top, so now they are jointly held accountable, each 50%, basically.

        These people as you say need to be verified with ID and all, and on top of that need to have their finances registered as, like I said, they’re responsible. If the company fucked it up, they fucked it up.

        • @[email protected]
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          511 months ago

          This sounds like a good idea, but is basically getting rid of LLCs entirely and going back to partnerships or some other structure. That said, having LLCs kind of lets people just do bad stuff and no-one is responsible. I think the idea of LLCs was potentially OK (hard to get stockholders if every investor is personally liable for what the company does), the people making decisions on a daily basis need to not be shielded IMHO. And / Or we need to get more comfortable with a corporate death sentence where courts just regularly revoke the license / charter if the company is bad enough.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 months ago

            It’s not just stock holders. I wouldn’t even hire an employee if I was criminally liable for things they do.

            Say I run a restaurant and my wait staff are photographing credit cards and selling them… that’s not my fault, nothing really I can do to prevent it.

            LLCs are essential.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 months ago

              Yet people managed to run restaurant’s, and all manor of other businesses before 1977!
              (1977 is when the LLC classification was first created in Wyoming)

    • @[email protected]
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      611 months ago

      You don’t need AI to create a fake person. Scammers have been doing that for decades, or stealing people’s identity. Even a video can be made with an actor.