Am I being fooled by highly noticeable anecdotes, or does it seem that an inordinately large number of fraudulent-schemers use their money to buy a whole bunch of showy fancy cars?
If it were me, I think I'd want to be a little less conspicuous. I'm just sayin'.
From the Strib:Two federal judges in Minnesota have unsealed 47 documents outlining what federal investigators describe as "a large-scale, multi-year, multimillion-dollar online bid-rigging scheme" that the Coles allegedly used to exploit a flaw in Best Buy's system for buying computer parts.
Among the items seized were $2.9 million in cars... Robert Bossany, a former Best Buy vendor-relations employee, told federal investigators that Cole referred to his $2 million custom home with its multicar garage as "the house that Best Buy built."
The federal investigators described it as an "online bid-rigging scheme" but it might be better described as "exploiting a programming flaw in the bidding system to raise the invoice price that was to be paid for a part." Sort of hacking.
An interesting story, I thought. I wonder how people like that feel when they're driving their cars around town.
Many of the wrong things people do today -- some of them a good deal worse than stealing money -- you can quite reasonably argue "They didn't know it was wrong." Sometimes it's willful blindness, but other times it's poor catechesis, poor whole-society catechesis, stuff that tells people in strong terms that they have a right to try to get what they want (even if you have to leave your family, you've gotta be true to yourself) or that the legal norm is the moral norm (hey, we're both consenting adults here) or that what they did doesn't actually hurt anybody (it's just a blob of tissue). I'm trying to give sinners a break here. A lot of people really, truly, "do not know what they do."
But then you look at "stole millions of dollars through many individually chosen acts of deceit" and that's a real head-scratcher. What on earth could make a couple think this was ... something they ought to do? Or, if they didn't think that, if they never managed to fool themselves into justifying themselves, how? I don't mean, how can you sleep at night, I mean... how can you do it again and again and again? How is it that nothing inside stopped you?
Many other acts are more objectively evil than theft or fraud, even of a large amount of money like this. I alluded to three of them above. But we hold and teach that full knowledge and consent (and even in some cases, absence of force of habit!) is necessary to name the perpetrators "guilty of serious sin." Has it always been so that so many of the evils that surround us, we are so painfully aware that the perpetrator wasn't taught, or has consciously rejected and no longer believes, that there's anything wrong at all? Has it always been so that pity rather than anger is what we should feel towards most people who do others wrong?
That's the case so often, it's almost (I know, I should NOT feel this way) refreshing when somebody comes along and does something so obviously immoral that you are pretty sure there aren't going to be any mitigating circumstances, although the lawyers for the defense, that being their job, will probably try to produce some.
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