Man Convicted For Helping Thousands Steal Internet Access 378
angry tapir writes "An Oregon man has been convicted of seven courts of wire fraud for helping thousands of people steal Internet service. Ryan Harris, 26, of Redmond, Oregon, was convicted by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He faces a prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the seven counts."
Re:hrm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bad design (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hrm (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, the bits that you copy from me don't disappear from my hard disk by your copying, for information is being a virtual world entity.
Re:And what about the people on the end? (Score:5, Informative)
The loan reps aren't exactly blameless either.
When I bought my places ($100k-$150k range), the first loan place I went to, the guy I talked to tried to convince me to get a more expensive house (you are approved for up to $350k! You should look at something nicer!)
I would *not* be able to pay the mortgage on such a house, let alone cover food and utilities. He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.
Glad I went with another company. That was obnoxious.
Re:And what about the people on the end? (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.
You nicely summarized the root cause of the collapse of housing markets across the US. The banks thought that, by chopping up mortgages and combining them with other securities, the resulting CDOs had less risk because it was spread around and since the cost of each tranche was proportional to the risk, and therefore the yield, everyone understood the risks involved. Of course that created a profit motive to create as many mortgages as possible--and the riskier the better because the risk magically disappeared once sliced up and repackaged. Opportunists climbed into cheap suits and starting fly-by-night mortgage brokerages, assembling teams of sleazy salespeople to push bad loans. By the time the mortgages went sour, everyone involved in the transaction had taken their profit but, thanks to deregulated banking, those profits were basically paid out of the savings accounts of the very same people getting the bad mortgages. And since all the banks merged into giant mega-banks that snatched up bad debt with your money, they were "too big to fail." But don't worry, they bought "insurance" against it in the form of credit default swaps so that the government wouldn't have to bail them out. Except that the "insurance companies" were also banks and didn't have nearly enough cash to pay out, so the government bailed them out, including the third parties that were buying credit default swaps on CDOs that they didn't even own.
So everyone made money--from the mortgage bundlers all the way up to the CEOs of the giant banks--no matter if they succeeded, failed, or wrecked the global economy in the process. And to get the economy going again, the Fed started loaning out money at %0.01 interest so the banks could turn around and lend it back to Treasury at 3% (and pay back the bailout after dumping their bad assets); it's socialism for banks, and "free markets" and personal responsibility for the rest of us. Now we have a mountain of government debt and a generation of college-educated young people entering a stagnated economy with student loans accrued during the boom-times. I guess that is what happens when you create a system in which you can flip someone's livelihood for a profit without taking on any risk or responsibility.
...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Informative)
prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to US$250,000
...the real criminals in the banking and mortgage industry got away scoff free even after they caused damages in the trillions. Is the law blind?
Re:he got rich from fraud (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And what about the people on the end? (Score:3, Informative)
He later told me that the French law forbids banks to give you any loan which will make you get into a situation of paying more than 33% of your salary for loans+rent. So if you earn 3000â a month and pay 500â rent you will only get a loan which has a maximum repayment of 500â per month.
This was back in 2005. Now we can understand why France hasn't suffered the same real estate crisis as the greatest part of the rest of the world.