While this doesn't look great, it doesn't really seem up to the standards of past Hindenburg reports. Block's main product is credit card processing and point-of-sales, for retailers, and they have a reputation for being the easiest to use and deal with.
I could easily believe that they are not doing their KYC work and that the feds will soon make them do so, but it doesn't really seem to add up to the company being a "fraud".
Which, to be fair, the Hindenburg headline doesn't say, it's "Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion". Facilitating fraud (by not doing enough KYC, etc.) rather than the company being a fraud.
Very interesting, thanks for pointing me to that document. It does show Square with +29% growth in net revenue (+30% profit growth), whereas Cash App shows 14$ decline in revenue. They managed to still get profit growth in Cash App by cutting cost of revenue even faster than their revenue dropped, but that does not seem to bode well for Cash App being able to sustain greater KYC due diligence, etc. I think they may have a better future in the Square-related business than in the Cash App part, especially if fed pressure on them to do more KYC in Cash App grows (which I would guess it will).
I'm a former block employee who has seen first hand the documents that proves these allegations. Marketing intentionally preyed on poor communities to promote cash app. They would refer to cash app as "payments for poor people". What's worse is Jack uses a large part of the companies budget to fund his personal Bitcoin projects.
If you voiced any concerned you were silenced and eventually terminated.
> What's worse is Jack uses a large part of the companies budget to fund his personal Bitcoin projects.
I also worked at Block until earlier this year and AFAIK, the % of Block's overall operating costs spent on Bitcoin side projects is very low. Maybe 1% or something like that.
FYI if anyone is interested I can prove it -- Cash App is engaged in a massive stock trading fraud.
I noticed one day that my books were off (down) by 1 penny. When I dug into it, I figured out that Cash App is providing their customers with conflicting reports for their stock sales.
In the app, the sales report rounds pennies up, in the actual sale, whose records are only available through more complex data export process, the penny in the sale is rounded down, and they are keeping the difference.
I found the rule in the legal terms which states that the calculation in the app presented to users is the correct one, and the penny is illegally missing.
This is for every trade for every one of their users. The aggregate amount of money is huge.
Edit: I just looked back at my analysis and now remember in some cases the missing money is more than one penny. If anyone would like to contact me one on one I can provide more proof.
This is at the core of Superman III. Richard Priors' character notices his paycheck gets rounded down, he writes an app to harvest up the rounded down tenths of pennies...
Company I write software for had a small subset of customers begin complaining about fractional cents when New Jersey implemented a sales tax of 6.625%. To be fair, company gains and loses on the half cents this caused were in equal measure. But I was commissioned to turn literally everything from UI to database to receipts and invoices and annual reports into thousandths instead of hundreds.
This is a fuckin dog boarding company I work for, not a bank. Because no, you can't screw your customers a half penny at a time... it's on you to fix the accounting and make it right.
The fact that this is upvoted to the top of the page goes to show how little techies know about banks and trading and the financial system in general. No Block isn't running some elaborate Office Space style scam. If you open Vanguard or Fidelity or whatever else you will have the same experience. Trades are executed and settled by clearing houses and in-house accounting and audit departments, not iOS engineers. There is a lot of complexity behind the scenes that the app is hiding from you. Getting the estimate off by a few cents (say because the front end used the wrong floating point standard and/or only considered 5 decimal points instead of 6 in their calculations) is perfectly normal.
> There is no legitimate scenario where they would be reporting the Net Amount for the same sale in two places with different numbers.
The net amount reported in the app isn't an estimate, nor is it ever updated.
If you do the math, the amount listed in the app, according to their own report, is the correct amount. The final asset price X the final asset amount, as frozen in their long-term reports, is the amount listed in the app.
There is no hand-waving financial explanation for this discrepancy.
> Block isn't running some elaborate Office Space style scam
I have black and white evidence that they are. Stealing isn't necessarily elaborate. I'm surprised you find this hard to believe when TFA is a report about other types of fraud by the same company.
> how little techies know about banks and trading and the financial system ... There is a lot of complexity behind the scenes
Your comment is a little condescending, I don't think it's a big secret that trades get settled.
can almost gaurantee you this is not fraud its an odd lot exception. If you dont do trades in round lots brokers are allowed to bunch your orders together and not give you best execution.
I am hesitant to call it fraud yet, but the situation you are describing isn't what the parent comment is talking about.
The issue isn't that it was executed at a higher price than expected or that it was "rounded up" in general. The issue is that for a single completed transaction, in one place (general app UI) it is reported to have executed at one price, and in another place (the data export process) it is reported at a different price.
That's the problem, when you cash out, you don't get the net amount listed in the app. You get a penny or sometimes even more than 1 penny less. The amount you get corresponds with the real net amount number that they've applied different rules to which is only available in your account export, only available through their website.
Trivia: The title of the movie “Swordfish” is named after an old Marx Brothers routine from the movie “Horse Feathers, “ which revolves around an illegal speakeasy’s password to get in.
This is bad for Block. I hope. It's incredible that since 2008 it actually seemed immensely easier to skirt regulations and laws (under the banner of 'innovation'), and not just in finance. Just about all of silicon valley seems to have run the longest and broadest grift we've seen.
> Just about all of silicon valley seems to have run the longest and broadest grift we've seen.
I would say nearly all of Silicon Valley tech startups. Around 90% them are a complete SaaS grift and are also eternally unprofitable and are very good at losing money.
Hence why they are solely dependent on begging for VC money every month to pump the pyramid scheme that recently collapsed a week a ago. We saw which startups were affected and would have instantly been bankrupt had it not been for them beggeing to the government for a totally-not-a-pseudo-bailout scheme to 'save' them.
To see who was caught in the fallout, we needed catalyst events such as the start of the market crash in November 2021, the collapse of crypto in 2022 and now in 2023, a large tech bank (SVB) becoming insolvent and failing.
> It's incredible that since 2008 it actually seemed immensely easier to skirt regulations and laws (under the banner of 'innovation'), and not just in finance.
Now the grift has continued to spread into the AI hype squad with everyone and their bots spinning their own ChatGPT SaaS startup. Don't be surprised to see them falling like dominoes since the real winner in this AI hype is OpenAI. Not the startups built around it.
Indeed, VC's loaded with 'free' money pumping whatever idea could bring in the consumers enough to keep a narrative spinning.
I haven't seen any particularly strong profitability case for ChatGPT and the like yet, unless you call ad dollars from promoting "ChatXX does this amazing trick!" as proof.
People barely even questioned the ludicrous wages being thrown around in silicon valley, supported by 'funding rounds' and silly valuations of future growth.
But, it all sucks because the people that will lose are the last-in-chain investors and the to-be-unemployed. Not the VC crybabies currently out there complaining about their need for protection by the establishment they protest.
More like 1998. But yeah, the model of tech-washing has increased in popularity since then. The example that most readily comes to mind is Uber, and they started in 2009.
I used to hate on Uber on principle (and what I read). But Uber definitely added something positive to society. A city with Uber experiences a reduction in DWI incidents. Transportation on demand is not some crypto fluffware. Let's remember that the very premise of tech utopia was [addressing] regulatory capture by ineffective parties. That also is a legitimate concern.
So the question (if we suspend judgement of these initial tech waves) is: if ignoring and bypassing regulations to introduce new approaches is also broken, what is the solution to the original problem? As an illustration, examine a hypothetical of when or if civic centers would themselves modernize transporation for hire regulations, mechanisms, etc.
Silicon Valley creates companies with unsustainable business models that have to rely on tax/labor/regulatory loopholes. They pretend that profitability is due to actual technological innovation while negatively affecting actually functioning companies who don't have the same access to capital (bcs real companies can't pretend like they're capable of infinite growth). What most Silicon Valley companies wind up being are financial instruments that function exclusively as exit strategies. The Silicon Valley business is to essentially create innovation narratives they can sell without facing the consequences of poor business practices.
Wouldnt know what the OP refers to but silicon valley has been skirting regulations and running as close to a ponzi scheme as humanly possible, the likes of uber with blitzscaling, esentially growing their userbase with venture capital only to increase the amount of venture capital they can get to 'eventually' make a profit. Or SVB wanting to not be regulated because they hold less than 250B only to fail with terrible consequences. Then theres the numerous crypto startups that promise return on stake funded by new depositors to pay the old depositors. Money was cheap but in an economic downturn any weakness will result in investors leaving, cash drying up. So whoever cannot show profits will quickly wither and cause chain reactions in similar weak companies. I'm sure you can find an amazing list on hindenburg and you'll see most of them are tech companies because thats where the biggest venture capital pie was between 2008 and now.
The “innovations” of many (but not all) post-2008 unicorns are more about creating a legal grey area to bypass regulation than they are actual technological advances. Uber and Airbnb are prime examples. If Uber was forced to used licensed cab drivers or Airbnb forced to use licensed hotels, you would see the breadth of what these companies actually bring to the table, which isn’t nearly as much as their valuations would indicate. That’s before we get into the adverse externalities these services can create (looking directly at Airbnb here)
"CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly touted how Cash App is mentioned in hundreds of hip hop songs as evidence of its mainstream appeal. A review of those songs show that the artists are not generally rapping about Cash App’s smooth user interface—many describe using it to scam, traffic drugs or even pay for murder."
A scam here in Baltimore that keeps occurring is that the squeege kids will run up on someone unsuspecting and start cleaning their windshield.
They will pressure the driver for a tip, and the driver will say they don’t have cash of course.
They will say that’s cool, you can send me a tip. They ask the driver for their phone so they can look up their cashapp for them, and bam the driver got scammed.
What’s happening is that the squeege kid is looking up his account on your phone, and then sending himself like $2,000.
People have complained that cashapp won’t help, and their bank isn’t letting them dispute the charge.
In my opinion, this is clearly an anti pattern on Cashapps end, and I would imagine at least one engineer would have spotted this vulnerability by now. I would think that Cashapp would build in a simple pin confirmation before a stranger could wire themselves a couple thousand dollars. This has bugged me for the last 2 years lol
I mean, it's also an anti-pattern with wallets if you hand them your wallet full of cash and tell them to take a tip. A PIN is not a bad idea though.
I think this might be an actual generational difference; I feel weird letting someone else use my phone or using someone else's phone now. I can remember a time when phones were much more communal - the family shared a phone, and public phones existed, and I wonder if older folks are a bit more locked into that way of thinking. Obviously a phone is much more than a phone now however.
Been seeing some tiktoks on this exact scam being run in bars, too - a man/lady will chat the victim up, ask for their phone to put in their number, and then go to cashapp and send themselves money, and disappear into the night. And yes, no recourse for the victim at all.
In India, apps like Google Pay (which runs on UPI platform) require you to first unlock the app using your screen lock method and then also require entry of a pin to confirm any kind of money transfer.
CashApp -> Settings -> Privacy & Security. Top option is to turn on PIN or biometrics to open the app, or to move money. This has been there for many, many years.
This is the 12th reply to your post and first one to point this out. I think this report is trying to ride well-off people's lack of awareness of CashApp. Kinda what they're accusing Block of doing, which is funny.
A "time delay safe" function in the app could accomplish the same thing. I'd certainly want to take 30 minutes to think about it (or login and unlock large transfers 30 minutes ahead of time) if I was going to spend more than a couple hundred dollars.
Right now, muggers can't take $1000 out of my wallet because I don't have $1000 in my wallet. They cannot force me to use an ATM to empty my bank account because my ATM daily limits are set to $500/day.
But, in theory, they could empty it if I was on Cashapp.
Cashapp, like so many tech startups rushing to replace incumbent taxi and hotel and other services with phone apps, has missed Chesterton's fence on this state of affairs in its hurry to become the key part of "providing everyone with access to important financial services so they can fully participate in the economy."
I feel like there should be two levels of unlocked phones 1 which is full unlocked (access key apps, photos, settings, etc.) and like a guest mode (phone, web browser, weather app, calculator, etc)
I found this to be one of the weaker points in the research, as far as making a short case goes. If anything, the fact that it's so popular in hip hop would expose it to a much larger legitimate audience. Regardless, it's also just somewhat non-unique, Zelle is also name dropped in 22gz's Suburban, and a few Von and Durk songs, limiting ourselves only to drill rappers. Probably Venmo as well though I can't say I've heard it any songs.
The fraudulent activity is obviously a problem, but I'm not sure how to separate this association from, say, bragging about buying Gucci with drug money, street racing in a Dodge Hellcat, or performing drive-bys in a Revel.
Funny, it seemed like one of the strongest points.
1. It's visual and memorable.
2. It leaves you wondering what the hell Dorsey and "Cash App Studios" were thinking when they promoted these guys.
3. It strongly bolsters their case that Block were asleep at the wheel with respect to criminal activity, probably intentionally.
We all know that Silicon Valley firms are obsessed with not being racist but didn't anyone there wonder what the guys were rapping about for even a second? Or why they'd name an entire song after the app? That isn't in any way normal behavior for rappers. Surely someone watched it and realized that, um, this isn't actually good PR, these guys are saying they use Cash App to pay for all sorts of criminal activity. Why? If it's once to make a rhyme then it's an artistic choice, if it's >1000 times that can't be a coincidence.
To be so blind to activity so obvious that you're literally boasting about it on stage in front of a bunch of bankers implies a massive breakdown of AML obligations. And that would indeed be short-worthy.
These report put together all possible allegations and the kitchen sink. It was same for Adani reports. Hindenburg isn't a legal authority which is seeking to prosecute companies. They are activist investors. So for them it make sense to add emotional arguments, aggregate already public information and present all data/scenarios that will cause the stock to fall.
If CashApp numbers are inflated by illegal activities that will go away if the law cracks down on them, that is a matter of concern for CashApp investors.
I hadn't had a credit card swiped in years, but it happened to me a month or two ago.
Whoever had my card used it for CashApp transactions (I didn't even know this was possible?), ultimately creating ~15 transactions of varying sizes, all less than $100. It took a while to unwind, and in the end my case was actually denied (!) for 1 of them.
I bet I counted as a new user, with $100+ in transaction volume. :)
Just because of this interaction, my disposition towards Cash App has tilted into the negative, and I literally didn't have an opinion on it before. Regardless of any number-juicing they may have indulged in, their fraud-detection tech has to be better, it's not doing them any long-term favors.
Oh, you're not taking these depictions of drug payments and assassination payments literally are you? This is all artistic display for a persona and a set of practices that only exists as a performance.
I have to say, this feels more like a clueless white rich guy trying to seem cool by mentioning hip hop songs he never actually listened to (or understood if he did hear them), that one of his underlings told him about, rather than evidence of "fraud".
On the one hand it's obvious that the Hindenburg people are right on this when they say that Block's app is used for criminal activities and money laundering. On the other hand that's what we get for trying to push cash itself more and more outside the boundaries of modern society. That video in a way made me root for the bad guys, a no-cash society where petty crime doesn't happen because the powers that be control it all is a not a society I personally want to be part of.
And then there is also the racial-related aspect of it all, not sure the Hindenburg analysts were aware of it. As in there is no white rapper in that video of theirs.
in USA politics, this approach to outrage among literate people is related to "Willy Horton" ads, which portray an obviously stereotypical, middle-aged black man with a long history of crime, being released into society and then in the same breath blaming the authorities politically. This famously backfired.
The intended outrage here is "ghetto males" doing illegal things with money, using the cell phone, and bragging about it. The parent post here points to major just-under-the-surface problems with this kind of personal, borderline racist attack at the societal scale. Definitely concur here that a perfectly-enforced police state is not desirable, mostly because it is not possible, and the more force that is used in the remaining edge cases, makes things much worse overall, at too high a cost.
> One former customer service employee estimated that 60%-70% of the accounts they reviewed during a typical shift would have more than a dozen linked accounts. Another two former employees estimated 40% and 75%, respectively.
I don't think this necessarily means that 40%-75% of the accounts on Block's books were fake (as I took it to first mean from the summary). Could it just mean that the accounts that were set up for review based on high risk activity were predominantly fraudulent (as they should be)?
Skimmed through the report, and all of the allegations will at most amount to a token fine. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the company. Every bank and money transfer app out there facilitates criminals in some way. Every tech (especially fintech) company is overvalued.
The market is overreacting because of Hindenburg’s past successes, but the stock price has already recovered by 10+ points since this morning and is rising. I predict all of it will amount to nothing in the end.
When IBM was hit by anti trust and entered a consent degree or when Microsoft got hit for its Explorer bundling practices it spelled the end of growth. This is not only a question of fraud and size of fines. The real question is are the current multiples in its stock valuation justified?
> “I Paid Them Hitters Through Cash App”: Block Paid To Promote A Video For A Song Called “Cash App”, Which Described Paying Contract Killers Through The App.
> The Artist, “22Gz”, Was Later Arrested for Attempted Murder
It astonishes me how many rappers do this. It’s one thing to be a criminal, and it’s another to rap about your crimes and do the job of the investigators…they probably think it makes them tough or something.
I believe it is part of their marketing strategy -- being seen as a "cold blooded murderer" may add to the "cool factor" of the artist, which may appeal to the fans, even when it's artificially cultivated.
Readit News
I could easily believe that they are not doing their KYC work and that the feds will soon make them do so, but it doesn't really seem to add up to the company being a "fraud".
Which, to be fair, the Hindenburg headline doesn't say, it's "Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion". Facilitating fraud (by not doing enough KYC, etc.) rather than the company being a fraud.
https://s29.q4cdn.com/628966176/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...
page 74 of their 2022 Q4 10-K shows a per segment (between Square and Cash App) breakdown of revenue
The allegations in this report add up to wilfulness. That could result in the company’s money transmission licenses being revoked.
If you voiced any concerned you were silenced and eventually terminated.
I also worked at Block until earlier this year and AFAIK, the % of Block's overall operating costs spent on Bitcoin side projects is very low. Maybe 1% or something like that.
I noticed one day that my books were off (down) by 1 penny. When I dug into it, I figured out that Cash App is providing their customers with conflicting reports for their stock sales.
In the app, the sales report rounds pennies up, in the actual sale, whose records are only available through more complex data export process, the penny in the sale is rounded down, and they are keeping the difference.
I found the rule in the legal terms which states that the calculation in the app presented to users is the correct one, and the penny is illegally missing.
This is for every trade for every one of their users. The aggregate amount of money is huge.
Edit: I just looked back at my analysis and now remember in some cases the missing money is more than one penny. If anyone would like to contact me one on one I can provide more proof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo
This is a fuckin dog boarding company I work for, not a bank. Because no, you can't screw your customers a half penny at a time... it's on you to fix the accounting and make it right.
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> There is no legitimate scenario where they would be reporting the Net Amount for the same sale in two places with different numbers.
The net amount reported in the app isn't an estimate, nor is it ever updated.
If you do the math, the amount listed in the app, according to their own report, is the correct amount. The final asset price X the final asset amount, as frozen in their long-term reports, is the amount listed in the app.
There is no hand-waving financial explanation for this discrepancy.
> Block isn't running some elaborate Office Space style scam
I have black and white evidence that they are. Stealing isn't necessarily elaborate. I'm surprised you find this hard to believe when TFA is a report about other types of fraud by the same company.
> how little techies know about banks and trading and the financial system ... There is a lot of complexity behind the scenes
Your comment is a little condescending, I don't think it's a big secret that trades get settled.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
The issue isn't that it was executed at a higher price than expected or that it was "rounded up" in general. The issue is that for a single completed transaction, in one place (general app UI) it is reported to have executed at one price, and in another place (the data export process) it is reported at a different price.
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Which is, of course, “swordfish.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySqec8WrEQQ
This year's gonna get real interesting.
I would say nearly all of Silicon Valley tech startups. Around 90% them are a complete SaaS grift and are also eternally unprofitable and are very good at losing money.
Hence why they are solely dependent on begging for VC money every month to pump the pyramid scheme that recently collapsed a week a ago. We saw which startups were affected and would have instantly been bankrupt had it not been for them beggeing to the government for a totally-not-a-pseudo-bailout scheme to 'save' them.
To see who was caught in the fallout, we needed catalyst events such as the start of the market crash in November 2021, the collapse of crypto in 2022 and now in 2023, a large tech bank (SVB) becoming insolvent and failing.
> It's incredible that since 2008 it actually seemed immensely easier to skirt regulations and laws (under the banner of 'innovation'), and not just in finance.
Now the grift has continued to spread into the AI hype squad with everyone and their bots spinning their own ChatGPT SaaS startup. Don't be surprised to see them falling like dominoes since the real winner in this AI hype is OpenAI. Not the startups built around it.
I haven't seen any particularly strong profitability case for ChatGPT and the like yet, unless you call ad dollars from promoting "ChatXX does this amazing trick!" as proof.
People barely even questioned the ludicrous wages being thrown around in silicon valley, supported by 'funding rounds' and silly valuations of future growth.
But, it all sucks because the people that will lose are the last-in-chain investors and the to-be-unemployed. Not the VC crybabies currently out there complaining about their need for protection by the establishment they protest.
So the question (if we suspend judgement of these initial tech waves) is: if ignoring and bypassing regulations to introduce new approaches is also broken, what is the solution to the original problem? As an illustration, examine a hypothetical of when or if civic centers would themselves modernize transporation for hire regulations, mechanisms, etc.
What do you mean by this
Hindenburg made a music video compiling the references that is...uh...worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StjWk3Mj-M4
A scam here in Baltimore that keeps occurring is that the squeege kids will run up on someone unsuspecting and start cleaning their windshield.
They will pressure the driver for a tip, and the driver will say they don’t have cash of course.
They will say that’s cool, you can send me a tip. They ask the driver for their phone so they can look up their cashapp for them, and bam the driver got scammed.
What’s happening is that the squeege kid is looking up his account on your phone, and then sending himself like $2,000.
People have complained that cashapp won’t help, and their bank isn’t letting them dispute the charge.
In my opinion, this is clearly an anti pattern on Cashapps end, and I would imagine at least one engineer would have spotted this vulnerability by now. I would think that Cashapp would build in a simple pin confirmation before a stranger could wire themselves a couple thousand dollars. This has bugged me for the last 2 years lol
https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/brazil/nubank-wil...
I think this might be an actual generational difference; I feel weird letting someone else use my phone or using someone else's phone now. I can remember a time when phones were much more communal - the family shared a phone, and public phones existed, and I wonder if older folks are a bit more locked into that way of thinking. Obviously a phone is much more than a phone now however.
This is the 12th reply to your post and first one to point this out. I think this report is trying to ride well-off people's lack of awareness of CashApp. Kinda what they're accusing Block of doing, which is funny.
Right now, muggers can't take $1000 out of my wallet because I don't have $1000 in my wallet. They cannot force me to use an ATM to empty my bank account because my ATM daily limits are set to $500/day.
But, in theory, they could empty it if I was on Cashapp.
Cashapp, like so many tech startups rushing to replace incumbent taxi and hotel and other services with phone apps, has missed Chesterton's fence on this state of affairs in its hurry to become the key part of "providing everyone with access to important financial services so they can fully participate in the economy."
So, just avoid CashApp and Zelle.
And another euphemism.
The fraudulent activity is obviously a problem, but I'm not sure how to separate this association from, say, bragging about buying Gucci with drug money, street racing in a Dodge Hellcat, or performing drive-bys in a Revel.
1. It's visual and memorable.
2. It leaves you wondering what the hell Dorsey and "Cash App Studios" were thinking when they promoted these guys.
3. It strongly bolsters their case that Block were asleep at the wheel with respect to criminal activity, probably intentionally.
We all know that Silicon Valley firms are obsessed with not being racist but didn't anyone there wonder what the guys were rapping about for even a second? Or why they'd name an entire song after the app? That isn't in any way normal behavior for rappers. Surely someone watched it and realized that, um, this isn't actually good PR, these guys are saying they use Cash App to pay for all sorts of criminal activity. Why? If it's once to make a rhyme then it's an artistic choice, if it's >1000 times that can't be a coincidence.
To be so blind to activity so obvious that you're literally boasting about it on stage in front of a bunch of bankers implies a massive breakdown of AML obligations. And that would indeed be short-worthy.
Whoever had my card used it for CashApp transactions (I didn't even know this was possible?), ultimately creating ~15 transactions of varying sizes, all less than $100. It took a while to unwind, and in the end my case was actually denied (!) for 1 of them.
I bet I counted as a new user, with $100+ in transaction volume. :)
Just because of this interaction, my disposition towards Cash App has tilted into the negative, and I literally didn't have an opinion on it before. Regardless of any number-juicing they may have indulged in, their fraud-detection tech has to be better, it's not doing them any long-term favors.
</s>
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And then there is also the racial-related aspect of it all, not sure the Hindenburg analysts were aware of it. As in there is no white rapper in that video of theirs.
Indeed, white rap artists are very underrepresented in mainstream popular music. There is a case for it being discrimination based on skin colour.
The intended outrage here is "ghetto males" doing illegal things with money, using the cell phone, and bragging about it. The parent post here points to major just-under-the-surface problems with this kind of personal, borderline racist attack at the societal scale. Definitely concur here that a perfectly-enforced police state is not desirable, mostly because it is not possible, and the more force that is used in the remaining edge cases, makes things much worse overall, at too high a cost.
I don't think this necessarily means that 40%-75% of the accounts on Block's books were fake (as I took it to first mean from the summary). Could it just mean that the accounts that were set up for review based on high risk activity were predominantly fraudulent (as they should be)?
The market is overreacting because of Hindenburg’s past successes, but the stock price has already recovered by 10+ points since this morning and is rising. I predict all of it will amount to nothing in the end.
> The Artist, “22Gz”, Was Later Arrested for Attempted Murder
It astonishes me how many rappers do this. It’s one thing to be a criminal, and it’s another to rap about your crimes and do the job of the investigators…they probably think it makes them tough or something.