Paul Ceglia Arrested and Charged With Fraud Over Facebook Ownership Claims 109
whoever57 writes "The man who claimed ownership of 50% of Facebook has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with his claims. The United States attorney in Manhattan said, 'Ceglia's alleged conduct not only constitutes a massive fraud attempt, but also an attempted corruption of our legal system through the manufacture of false evidence.' 'Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution.'"
thumbs up (Score:5, Funny)
Mark Zuckerberg liked this.
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Yeah, I really like it too.
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Why is there no "dislike"?
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Because Zucker hates you and everything about you with a passion that knows no bounds.
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It's right next to the "oops!" button
hawk
Unfortunately. (Score:2, Insightful)
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"The Social Network" perspective which has been thoroughly refuted.
[citation needed]
In fact, the movie was thoroughly vetted by lawyers from Columbia Pictures, so I seriously doubt this would ever be the case in any substantive way.
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Further to that, since /. doesn't have an edit button:
From IMDB:
Much of the film is based on testimony given at a number of depositions related to the lawsuits brought by Eduardo Saverin, the Winklevoss twins, and Divya Narendra. To this extent, the film might be considered very accurate. However, as the character Mark points out in the film, people do lie in depositions. [However if those lies are proven you could be charged with perjury]
Both Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins claim the film is very accurate while Zuckerberg and Parker maintain that it is a work of fiction.
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It's called preview, use it.
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Typical *nix f**ktard. The software is flawed and rather than fixing it blame the user.
I guess Edit functionality is just too advanced for you.
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Oh, I'm sure they vetted it to be sure that nothing could come back on them ... but I suspect there's a lot of rainbows and kittens in there they let slide by which don't quite match up to reality .
Making sure they can't get sued for libel or defamation in no way ensures that it's entirely factual. I don't doubt that a few things got tarted up or made to look b
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Oh, I'm sure they vetted it to be sure that nothing could come back on them ...
Correct, which is why the movie goes to great pains to emphasize that the story is as told in depositions. They are not claiming that's what happened, they are claiming that is what was said in the depositions, which is entirely factual.
but I suspect there's a lot of rainbows and kittens in there they let slide by which don't quite match up to reality .
To the contrary, given that they are dealing with people with ample access to
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There were details that were certainly wrong, but in general it got the larger details right, or reasonably so. And anyone familiar with Facebook's history knows Ceglia was a lying nobody trying to extort money by being such a big pain in the ass that he would just be handed a big check to shut the fuck up. Now, it appears, he's about to find out what happens when you commit fraud.
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Moral (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, I thought Ron Paul was against TARP. The whole time. Almost everyone else involved was pushing for massive government theft, and giving it to the loo^H^H^Hreserve bankers who began the whole thing and executed it.
O rly? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution"
Then please explain patent trolls to me?
Re:O rly? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, but it is fraud when there is a claim that it is innovation when in fact it is not. The court system just looks the other way.
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No, that would be the USPTO looking the other way. Different branch of the gov't entirely.
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Is it unethical? Sure!
Calling a corporation unethical makes as much sense as deliberately injecting ebola virus, and then calling the virus unethical. It is the entire corporatist system which is unethical. every legal market niche where there is money to be made will be occupied by some corporation. The patent system is simply being used for exactly what it was set up to do - enrich patent owners.
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"Dressing up a fraud as a lawsuit does not immunize you from prosecution"
Then please explain patent trolls to me?
Well, Manhattan isn't in a certain part of Texas...
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In that situation the government is participating in the fraud, by granting the patent in the first place, which means it's ok. :) I say this tongue in cheek, and also, this problem might end with the patent office/court, but begins with wealthy "inventors" who have sought to bribe legislators into creating the system of "intellectual"*
"property"** that we have today.
* last time I checked rounded corners don't require much intellect
** using property as a metaphor for ideas is intellectually dishonest
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Then please explain patent trolls to me?
Patent trolling isn't fraud. Unless the troll really doesn't own the rights to the patents . . . oops, what about SCO . . . ?
Patent trolling is more like a Mafia style shakedown. So it should be prosecuted using RICO laws, in my opinion.
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The short version is that patent trolls to something that's amoral and harmful to business and consumers....but it's legal. That's the difference. You can't prosecute someone for doing something legal, but morally repugnant. You can refuse to patronize their business, of course, but being patent trolls they don't actually make anything or have any customers. They have only victims.
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well since TSCOG is dead and buried at this point there does not need to be any further action.
wanna bet that Harvard Law Professors use Groklaw as a resource in the courses it would apply to??
Hint when you are on the opposite side from lawyers nicknamed MOFO and Nazgul be very very careful with what you are doing.
The main? (Score:1)
The main who claimed ownership of 50%...
How did nobody notice that doesn't say man?
First clue (Score:2)
Where is the header information in these so-called emails?
Without that information (which is verifiable once you have it), I could write any crap and say it's an email from the Pope and you would absolutely have to treat it with the same evidential weight as you would this.
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What's non-trivial is forging a message UID* and matching it to a known existing message UID* on the server and making sure the message is identical. Because *that* *will* still exist on the server (you think "deleting" a message from the server scrubs it from existence??)
*It's called a *U*ID for a reason - the string is *unique*, never to be used again once issued. If that UID doesn't appear on the database attached to a message then it wasn't issued.
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This is the kind of free speech limitation that prevents you from yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater.
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More like yelling fire in a crowded court room
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:5, Funny)
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If he'd stopped at saying: "I own 50% of Facebook" it'd probably be protected speech. Crazy, pitied, ridiculous speech, but free and protected nonetheless.
Once opinion becomes action (like the lawsuit) you're damaging someone. The harm those actions commit should never be considered free speech because even damage on paper has a real effect on someone's life.
-Matt
(Billionaire's problems, I know, but the biggest downside of democracy is you spend most of your time defending scoundrels)
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:5, Insightful)
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" It means you get to say whatever you want on your own property."
no, it doesn't. Freedom of Speech implies you are talking to someone. If that speech poses an immediate threat to others, or libelous, then you don't have a right to that.
"owners can simply add conditions..."
Really, you want owners to put the rule for every social contract on a ticket? Robber Baron and company stores, that where it goes. We have seen it in history many times.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we see more libertarian stances ar
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Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we see more libertarian stances are unthinking bullshit.
Why don't you take you head out of Rand's ass long enough to actually think about what you spew out of you pie hole?
No, he's just some drunk who overheard a word he didn't understand and made a half-hearted weak attempt at satire. He's no more libertarian than the owners of the basement he occupies.
You can't even pretend very well (Score:2)
A true libertarian response is ... nothing. Actions have consequences, and using forged documents to back up a lawsuit is nothing any libertarian would defend. No libertarian would say that every individual property owner would list all manner of restrictions like you suggest.
The real puzzle is why you would come up with such a pale imitation of either a real libertarian or a statist imitation thereof. It's really piss poor. I dunno. Maybe you heard someone bashing libertarians, looked the word up in a
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing this to freedom of speech is a bit facetious.
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Yeah it seems to me that using fake evidence to sue a someone is fraud no matter who the actors are. So assuming that the evidence was fake a crime was committed.
But using fabricated evidence to imprison people is what Police and District Attorneys do across these United States every day. So, it only matters whether or not you are part of the power structure. So, basically, it's cool to lie to a judge as long as you're doing it for "good".
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No, it's not. And those who slip up while doing it eventually get found out and get in plenty of trouble -- usually beyond the "relocated after a paid vacation" type of penalty (but not always, if what they did was in "good faith").
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"Police and District Attorneys do across these United States every day."
no they don't. It happens, and it usually end bad in the few cases it does happen
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You are making a strong assumption. You are assuming that you know about the times when it happened, and they weren't caught. But that is not what one should expect.
The real answer is "We don't have any real idea how often it happens and isn't found out." We know that it happens, because it occasionally is found out. What we don't know is what fraction of the time is it found out. My guess would be a very small fraction. Probably considerably less than 1%. But I must acknowledge that a guess is all t
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I believe it's already called perjury though.
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:5, Insightful)
He lied in court papers, he prepared and filed fraudulent documents as part of evidentiary filings and then covered up their creation. Filing false statements to any court is a crime, and it's a very serious crime in federal court.
He can say whatever he wants in private or public, but he can't lie in court. Lieing to the courts has ALWAYS been illegal. Filing false documents in court has ALWAYS been illegal. The justice system can't work if people are allowed to lie and fake documents in court without punishment.
He's going to be lucky if he doesn't get 40 years in PMITA Federal prison.
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, probably not.
If you were a cop, would you put as much effort into a case where it's very unlikely anyone would ever hear about it as you would into a case where it's likely the entire country is watching? Nobody wants to screw up when everyone's eyes are on you, but nobody outside of Littleplace, OH cares about Joe's Bike Shop. Do well, screw up, not a huge difference in rewards. But doing well or screwing up on the Facebook case can set the tone for the rest of your life.
I can understand not being happy that the "nobodies" of the world don't get the same special attention, but the fact is that it's not just the human nature of the people doing their jobs that you're railing against, it's the nature of all the people who hear about big and little stories that lead the people doing their jobs to treat those cases differently. No conspiracy necessary for celebrities to get more attention than you or I. The extra attention is what makes them celebrities.
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Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:5, Insightful)
Management which has as much or more (usually more) to gain or lose from high-profile cases than the beat cop, and so will understandably put their best people on it. It goes all the way up until you finally reach somebody with a position so high that they won't be significantly affected by the outcome, and as long as they're not hearing complaints from the public, they don't care.
Right and wrong are great, but they're a lot more fungible when it's you that it's affecting.
Say you're a low-level investigator, on the edge of losing his house, with a wife and kids. You can spend an hour or two here and there that should have been spent on Joe's Bike Shop on the Facebook case instead to do a really bang-up job where it's going to be noticed, and maybe turn it into a promotion, or at least ensuring that you're not someone picked for the next round of layoffs. Is that such a big deal? One little hour? For your kids?
And let's be honest, that one little hour isn't a big deal, especially if it's you that's taking that one little hour, and we probably wouldn't begrudge that one guy his chance to finally get out from under his debt even if we weren't imagining that we are that guy. But, that story plays out a thousand times, and it adds up, and people try harder on the important cases.
And then, finally, what the fuck are you doing for Joe's Bike Shop? Because whether you know it or not, you're contributing to the attention the Facebook case is getting just by posting in this thread, or even reading it. You're eyes are seeing ads, or if you've got adblock on, by commenting in the story you're at the very least adding content to a site that's selling ads, who gets money from Facebook, who gets money from countless advertisers, who gives that money to people all over, including politicians, wh... you get the idea. You, personally, are adding to the motivation to give Facebook better justice, and are not adding that same motivation to Joe's Bike Shop, and are therefore contributing to the imbalance. The only possible way out of that is to expect people to treat two people who have vastly different potential effects on their future the same, and that's just not rational to expect of an actual person, and not just the abstraction who's not doing his job that you're probably imagining.
Everybody acts in perfectly reasonable, understandable and if not perfectly moral, certainly not what most would call immoral ways, and aggregate effects end up shafting the little guy. That's not to say that sometimes there aren't more sinister activities and motivations, but usually, it's just emergent behavior from a whole lot of people acting the exact same way you would in their situation. High-profile people get more attention. That's not to say that we shouldn't do what we can to ensure that the little guy gets justice, we absolutely should do what we can to even things up. But there's no sense in getting all self-righteous about it. You might as well get mad that electrons orbit protons, it's just the way things are.
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I can only base my decisions on what I know and what I can control.
Personally, I think making myself aware of the issues is worth whatever chump change my eyeballs give slashdot to boot the way of their sponsors.
Thinking is not free.
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Absolutely true, expecting individuals to act in the best interest of millions of strangers is just unrealistic. Of course, it doesn't make you any less a part of the problem. But hey, we're all part of a whole lot of problems. The tragedy of the commons isn't caused by "everyone but me", it's caused by everyone. The only real solution is to make it individually unprofitable to be a part of that tragedy, without making the cost of implementing the solution outweigh the savings gained from the solution's eff
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It is obvious you have never worked in an investigative agency or really understand the politics involved.
First, this is a case that is being brought by the federal government. A high profile case. This means that the political stakes are very high, which can play a huge role in the prosecution of this case. So let's put things in order, shall we?
As a federal case in the Western District of New York, this falls under the prosecutorial purview of the United States Attorney's Office. Currently, that would
You Can't Really Say What You Want (Score:2)
* IANAL but I've seen every episode of "Ally MacBeal." Twice.
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Wouldn't he then be getting charged with perjury?
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He can say whatever he wants in private or public, but he can't lie in court. Lieing to the courts has ALWAYS been illegal. Filing false documents in court has ALWAYS been illegal. The justice system can't work if people are allowed to lie and fake documents in court without punishment.
What I find curious is that Ceglia was represented by a number of different lawyers, including major lawfirms who made public statements about how the evidence was NOT fraudulent.
From TFA:
In his original complaint, filed in 2010, Mr. Ceglia was represented by Paul Argentieri, a sole practitioner in upstate New York. An amended lawsuit was filed in April 2011 by Robert W. Brownlie of DLA Piper, the world's largest law firm, and Dennis C. Vacco, a former New York attorney general now in private practice at Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman in Buffalo.
In 2011, Mr. Brownlie of DLA Piper declined a request by The New York Times to produce the original documents backing his client's legal claims. "That will come out during the course of litigation," Mr. Brownlie said. "Anyone who claims this case is fraudulent and brought by a scam artist will come to regret those claims."
Yet court records indicate that another law firm, Kasowitz Benson Friedman & Torres, had been hired by Mr. Ceglia before DLA Piper and Lippes Mathias becoming involved. Kasowitz Benson withdrew from the case and put DLA Piper and Lippes Mathias on notice that it had determined that the purported contract was a fraud.
Mr. Brownlie and Mr. Vacco later withdrew from the case. They did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.
When are we going to see these lawyers charged with something? (If not intentional, at a minimum, they should be sanctioned for incompetence and misrepresentation.)
And, if they withdrew from the case after they found out about the fraud, and they didn't immediately report it... that is even worse. Frankly, no one wou
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And, if they withdrew from the case after they found out about the fraud, and they didn't immediately report it... that is even worse. Frankly, no one would have paid attention to Ceglia in the first place if it weren't for the fact that he had attorneys with good reputations backing him up. If they knew about any of this or even had a hint of it, they deserve a severe punishment as well.
Not sure how this works with lawyer/client privilege.
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We like free speech when it is the truth.
Re:Respect the First Amendment! (Score:4, Informative)
Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.
The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512×512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders.
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1987 - 1973 > 20 ???
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effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders.
Everybody's got their kinks, but who ever heard of "shoulder porn?"
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That is very cool. I will start looking for something more factual to use a a signature.
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Thank you for demonstrating what a waste of space AC posts are. Past time we did away with them.
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Wow, this has really gone too far! Our freedom of speech has been completely revoked! What is so wrong with saying that I own half of Facebook?
Nothing really. Except when you fabricate evidence, and then sue someone over it. And then of course, there is lieing under oath...
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What is so wrong with saying that I own half of Facebook? Whatever happened to a right to free speech?!
The same thing that's wrong with me using photoshopped pictures of you and that three year old child as evidence in a court case.
Oh wait, that is exactly what you are arguing should be allowed isn't it?
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What exactly does Zuckerberg's cultural heritage have to do with the blindingly obvious fact that this individual has tried (and failed) to defraud him out of ten Billion Dollars!?
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wonder where that leaves me, then? Half my family are Roman Catholic, half are Jewish. I subscribe to neither.