> will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work?
Imagine how awful that would be.
> ~2000 charges of ~20 years
And that makes me wonder. Maybe that would be too harsh a sentence then. Do we want to basically "end" someone's life at an insane cost to the tax payer for something with no impact on others other than financial? I have no answer, it just feels somewhat suboptimal to me.
If you steal a billion dollars from a whole bunch of middle class folks, you are, in aggregate "ending" a whole lot of life in small amounts distributed across many people.
A problem with money is that it abstracts away harm so that a person stops thinking like it's so bad to take money away from people because it's just money, when in fact you're actually taking away the things people can do with that money.
Did zero people end up homeless as a result of this fraud? Did zero people lose a job? Did zero people turn to crime to get by? Did zero people get pushed over the edge to suicide? How many years of life were lost due to stress or more difficult life situations? To depression? To hunger?
I doubt any of those numbers are zero. The stories are just hidden behind the abstraction of money.
Crypto companies preying on gullible people more vulnerable to the loss of large sums of money and then losing their money due to management incompetence and fraud are indeed responsible for a lot of real world harm.
That's a good point. I hope the punishment was in fact based on actual real world impacts (of having stolen that money) that you described and not simply based on some monetary amount multiplied by number of occurrences.
It's just what prosecutors are accusing and the sentence attached in their proposal. A new charge for each of the people affected, which was a couple thousand apparently. One doesn't have to read all that much into the wishlist of prosecutors. Throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks is a pretty standard practice.
But what we have here is essentially somebody leading a bank taking all the money left after losing a bunch of it to hacks and running away with it. Whatever it was, it was an enormous amount of money and not the kind of thing anyone needs to be particularly forgiving about.
Life in prison for stealing between $20MM and $125MM from customers isn't out of the question. (on top of the fraud that lost them the rest of their money)
Imagine how awful that would be.
> ~2000 charges of ~20 years
And that makes me wonder. Maybe that would be too harsh a sentence then. Do we want to basically "end" someone's life at an insane cost to the tax payer for something with no impact on others other than financial? I have no answer, it just feels somewhat suboptimal to me.