This long-term fraud is one of the better cases for which there are likely to be thousands of individuals who should be held criminally and financially responsible. It is clear that many financial institutions will be held responsible.
If the thousands or even perhaps tens of thousands of individuals involved are forced to pay restitution damages in addition to punitive damages, would this further the cause of justice? I am of the mindset that it will. Do the world's prosecutors and politicians have the balls and/or resources to do it?
So they can just return money to all the wronged people now? Or did they already? How about people outside of US?
I mean there would have to be some criteria for deciding who to return money to, but I'm sure they can come up with something less arbitrary than the original decision making that's hinted at in the article.
I think there's something to be said that investors who recouped funds should have a portion allocated to the whistleblower program if that's how investors got their money back.
Honestly, I think we should just burn (the value of) the assets seized (after trial, appeal, &c, of course).
Yes, it would mean stepping up and funding things currently funded with proceeds from seizures, but it would remove significant incentive to overreach.
Seriously I feel like we could resolve a lot of this if the orgs that seized assets, etc had to pay back everything, including legal fees, losses incurred due to seizure, and paid with interest charged at the same rate as late taxes and fines payments.
I suppose this was a good start. My heavy handed preference would be they use eminent domain after 3 strikes and liquidate the business to augment pay for the agencies that deal with fraud.
And for ICOs, fraud is fraud. If someone promises one thing and instead runs off with your money, the gov't will prosecute that.
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