Who committed fraud, specifically? This always comes up and, while I agree that maybe things possibly weren't investigated enough, I don't think there are any clear examples of people who committed fraud and got away with it.
A lot of people being stupid does not equal fraud.
The downside of throwing millions of dollars at someone is losing those millions, which they did. You are basically suggesting that a fraud victim should be punished more than the money they lost because they were too stupid to see the fraud.
There is a lot of fraud that goes unpunished because the victims feel hopeless and embarrassed. As a result, it's a lot more attractive to defraud people.
A dumb investment might be dumb, it might be likely to be fraud. But if it turns out to actually be fraud, the victims should still be able to seek restitution or otherwise you are giving a free pass to commit fraud and creating a huge economic advantage for people willing to do it over people who aren't.
That's my point. Individuals committing fraud, few or not people hurt and they throw the book at you and take all your stuff. Whereas these big corporate wrong doings that have very negatively impacted people's lives pretty much get a yawn.
Practically every fraudster or white collar criminal has gotten away with a pretty large sum of money right up until they haven't.
Every single one that caught is an idiot - they misunderstood the system they were trying to rip off, they misunderstood and/or didn't think through what checks and balances exist in the system to catch things after they happen. They are idiots.
By this same logic, fraud shouldn't be a crime. People will always find a way to profit by misleading people, and the most careful ones will reap the rewards and get away with it.
The whole point was someone claiming that we should see large fraud as equivalent to violence. I don't think anyone's denying that a large fraud is worse than a small fraud, but that's not the point in dispute.
Yeah it’s a callous point of view because it assumes everyone has the same point of view and level of information. You used a heuristic that works sometimes and fails sometimes and the real blame should fall on the person committing fraud and the agencies that failed to stop the fraud. Even if you could have avoided the situation other people would have still been victims.
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