from (u/from) - Readit News

from commented on How the Feds bounced Binance programmablemutter.com/p/... · Posted by u/haskellandchill

from · 2 years ago

Except Binance didn't make out too bad in the end anyways. CZ still has billions of dollars and is looking at a pretty good sentence given the allegations. Monitorship does not entail unlimited government access to records, it mostly means a bunch of adult hall-monitors reading off compliance checklists, making sure they are being followed, then writing to the government every quarter about the remaining items on the checklists.

Yes, there's the SAR lookback, but no one reads those anyways and probably won't give the government much because criminals routinely use accounts registered with fake or stolen IDs. Binance still accepts customers from countries like Venezuela, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc that "respected" financial institutions wouldn't touch with a 39.5 foot pole. There are still people making $50,000 USDT -> cash transactions every day with Binance P2P.

from commented on Egyptian banks suspend debit card use in foreign currency reuters.com/markets/curre... · Posted by u/elashri

gruez · 2 years ago

Who's going to be your counterparty and why would they give you the "official" rate? The whole reason why there's an "official" rate and a "black market" rate is that the government has mandated one rate, but the broader market disagrees and has agreed on a different rate. The two never converge because the government requires you to jump through hoops to get the official rate, so people can't arbitrage the difference.

from · 2 years ago

Banks I assume? You would get the market rate, not the official rate.

Edit: yes, exactly

from commented on Egyptian banks suspend debit card use in foreign currency reuters.com/markets/curre... · Posted by u/elashri

gruez · 2 years ago

>Broadly though, a brokerage that supports FOREX will let you short currencies and potentially buy call or put options on the given currency pair.

That might work if you're trading euros or japanese yen, but can you do it for egyptian pounds? For instance, IBKR does a bunch of currencies but not EGP

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/products-spot-...

Wise will let you convert from USD to EGP, but not the other way around.

>Don’t be so quick to be dismissive. It’s something for curious local Egyptians to evaluate and consider.

Why do you think the "black market rate" exists in the first place then? If you can really walk in a bank and get $1 USD for 31 egyptian pounds no questions asked, why would there even be a black market where people are asking for 40 egyptian pounds for the same dollar?

from · 2 years ago

You can speculate on nonconvertible currencies with non-deliverable forwards. This is not offered by most retail brokerages.

from commented on Egyptian banks suspend debit card use in foreign currency reuters.com/markets/curre... · Posted by u/elashri

Scoundreller · 2 years ago

> Debit card transactions are charged at the official rate of about 31 pounds to the dollar whereas on the black market a dollar sells for around 40 or 41 pounds. Egypt has kept its currency fixed against the dollar since March despite a widening gap with the black market rate.

Doesn't sound so fixed

from · 2 years ago

It is if you have friends in the central bank. In Venezuela the official rate was like 10x the black market rate at one point so if you had the connections you could go say 60000 bolivars -> (official rate) 10000 USD -> (black market rate) 600000 bolivars -> (official rate) 100000 USD.

The massive profitability of this scam resulted in a number of Miami condo sales.

Reading the article:

> A substantial number of debit card holders had been using cards to make bulk purchases, often in the United Arab Emirates, of gold, mobile telephones and other products to take advantage of the Egyptian pound's low official exchange rate.

Looks like a similar arbitrage was going on here. I predict they will introduce more capital controls to stop bleeding forex reserves, which won't work and then they will eventually be forced to float the currency, resulting in massive inflation that will stabilize in a year or two. Or they'll just continue on like Argentina and let their economy languish because they refuse to recognize economic reality.

from commented on MGM expects $100M hit from hack that led to data breach reuters.com/business/mgm-... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

nradov · 2 years ago

It's tougher to get US business executives to sign off on paying with cash in bags due to the higher risk of criminal prosecution. That might have worked back when the casinos were mafia run but now most of them are publicly traded corporations subject to strict oversight.

from · 2 years ago

There is generally no criminal prosecution for paying ransoms. There might be if the ransomware group is sanctioned but that would true regardless of payment method. If a public company paid a ransom via cash or by buying a bunch of bitcoin through an exchange they would still have to make the same 8-K filings and accounting changes etc.

from commented on MGM expects $100M hit from hack that led to data breach reuters.com/business/mgm-... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

kube-system · 2 years ago

BEC is also not done with gift cards. Google definitely does not pay their invoices with gift cards.

from · 2 years ago

Yes, I am aware. I just think people here overestimate the reversibility and traceability of the traditional system. If you're a business and you're defrauded/hacked and don't realize within a week (usually even less time), five will get you ten that money's never coming back. It went to a mule who withdrew it as cash or wired it overseas. And there's no Reg E for businesses so your bank isn't going to help either.

from commented on MGM expects $100M hit from hack that led to data breach reuters.com/business/mgm-... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

alephnerd · 2 years ago

That doesn't scale to the $100k-1M+ ransoms such as the MGM example.

from · 2 years ago

There's something called "business email compromise" with annual losses about 10x that of ransomware. It relies on tricking companies into paying invoices to an attacker controlled bank account instead of their actual vendors' bank account. Google lost over a hundred million dollars to some Latvian guy who was able to pull this off by pretending to be Quanta Computer. There's also just bank fraud in the Zeus style where they transfer $200000 out of your account to some company in China or Bulgaria.

These scams are all still incredibly profitable despite relying entirely on the regular financial system. There is no reason to think ransomware would stop in the absence of cryptocurrency given that extensive infrastructure has existed and currently exists to "cashout" proceeds of fraud. And in the ransomware case it's even easier because the victim is willingly making the payment, and the attacker can just not give the decryption key if the victim trys to stop the payment in any way.

And yes, this scales. If you ever looked at the promoted stories on Snapchat a few years ago, you may have seen a user with the name "The Billionaire Gucci Master" living a very opulent lifestyle. That was all paid for with business email compromise money.

from commented on White House warns of ‘unprecedented’ Serbian troop buildup on Kosovo border theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/perihelions

nezirus · 2 years ago

Yeah, lets treat all "sides" equally, since they are all bad (sarcasm ends)

Go to https://www.icty.org/, read about cases, verdicts and pleas:

https://www.icty.org/en/cases/key-figures-cases care to search for the GENOCIDE word in there?

Serbia did bad the things in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and was going to do the same in Kosovo until NATO bombarded them. (Kosovo was already critical in 80ies)

That doesn't absolve any party of the commited (war) crimes, but it is perfectly clear who was/is the regional bully and who commited aggression against neighbours.

I also don't buy tipical lines "they all hate each other", or this is the revenge for what " they" did to "us" in WW2, WW1, during Ottoman times, during Roman times ... Historical crimes are not excuse for new ones, vicious circle must stop somewhere.

from · 2 years ago

You are aware that Milošević and Tuđman both agreed to carve up Bosnia, right? And there was Varivode, "Operation Storm" where the Krajina Serbs who didn't flee quick enough were raped and pillaged, and a whole bunch of other cases. Milošević, the JNA, Srpska, or the Serb "volunteer guard" may have been the worst but there are plenty of contenders for second place. Not to mention the Bosnian mujahideen.

from commented on CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification github.com/CatalaLang/cat... · Posted by u/gorenb

post-it · 2 years ago

Whatever statute you're looking at likely defines "intangible right of honest services" and "defrauding."

from · 2 years ago

> For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.

That's it.