Topic: Scammer Tags- Pirate Pass Through operators ? - page 3. (Read 6867 times)

I say give them all (PPTs) scammer tags.

They profited off of this bullshit.

By this argument, Pirate wasn't doing anything wrong. Everyone knew he was running a Ponzi. Everyone knows Ponzis must eventually default. All that's unknown is the time of the default. And it's quite possible Pirate didn't even know that much before anyone else. Sure Pirate lied, but nobody believed him, so no harm done.

And Pirate knew nothing they didn't know. So it was all just honest fun. Pirate's scammer tag should be removed. Right?

Then start arguing that Pirate doesn't deserve a scammer tag. In all likelihood, his primary business model was operating a pass through to Zeek. (And market manipulations which largely lost money but he said he was going to do that.)

For only running a PPT, I would agree. For lying about having inside knowledge of Pirate's identity and business, thereby increasing confidence in Pirate and thus making more money on the PPT, a scammer tag is warranted.

The reason I said that is because you said it was very obvious that it was a ponzi.  So, if what you say is true, nobody knew more than anybody else (except for pirate, obviously).  If the investors knowingly invested in something that was likely a scam, and they knew it was likely a scam, they knew nothing more than PPT's. 

Now, I'm not saying it was ethical to run a PPT, I'm just saying that it doesn't really justify a scammer tag.

I'm sorry but I don't buy into the argument that no operators could be deluded. I also don't think this forum should label the same way proven/obvious scammers and people running dubious operations, for some arguable concept of dubious. There could be a label named "has defaulted" or something of the sort, but ultimately you cannot defend people from being reckless and not doing their due diligence.

Which is obviously the case here since fraudulent transfers were the only possible business model known. (Other than obviously ridiculous things such as someone who gives away money for no logical reason and happens to choose people who would invest in something that looks precisely like a Ponzi scheme as the beneficiaries of his generosity.)

As you can tell throughout some of my posts before the BCST bust, I was always trying to determine which category the various PPT operators fell into:

A) Stupid, young and/or naive, totally believing Pirate's bullshit:  I agree again with something Joel Katz said:  give them 1 time pass in this scenario.  I believe PPT operator Goat falls into this category. 

B) Suspects foul play, but continues to help scammer make large money while making small money:  Now we cross into "criminally negligent" --> there must be accountability for Payb.tc as I believe he falls in this category.  He was instrumental in helping Pirate steal ~$1.5M in BTC.  he did so continuously for months and months.  Hard to believe he didn't suspect scammery and continued to promote his product so he could make a small % each week while sending the bulk to Pirate, likely knowing he was helping the scam get much bigger.

C) Totally knows what's going on, fucks over everyone to make small money while knowingly shipping huge monies to a scammer:  Under this scenario the passthrough operator is a high level scumbag.  I believe BurtW falls into this category.  Constantly shilling for Pirate, putting in his signature "Pirate is not a Ponzi" making these horribly transparent shill-threads ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--97094 ) --> Dox him at the stake.

what part of reality does this statement stem from? in fact i would be very happy to accept less than 'all', as i'm sure would most people at this point.

Only if you have any way to know these transfers are fraudulent. That's like labeling me a scammer because I got interest in my account in Barclays and they made money from fraudulent operations. I have absolutely nothing to do with that and cannot reasonably be held accountable.


I mean that they were very public to everybody, both clients and not. Transparency is a factor here, it's not like PPT ops ran secret rackets where they positioned themselves better in the pyramid. This simply did not happen at any level AFAIK.


It's a derivative and I've seen much worse IRL.

I will continue defending these practices as perfectly legitimate (talking about PT securities in general) and put the limit at the personal responsibility of people knowingly entering into opaque investments directly or indirectly. The scammer here is Pirate and knowing collaborators only, no matter how hard others may try to have a go at anyone who actually invested and lost money to Pirate (or got lucky and didn't). Other scammers would be those who knowingly participated and benefitted from the scam. To pretend someone who lost a massive amount and who's going to pursue Pirate IRL had inside knowledge seems absurd to me.

You are advocating a scammer tag policy based on insufficient grounds. I think this is a matter to approach on a case-by-case basis. A passing-through operator can be a scammer, or not.

I'm making the arguments that I'm making because I believe that they are true and because I believe that getting the community to accept them will reduce the number of times the community needs to learn this painful lesson. Passing the buck doesn't cut it with me.

Again, Joel, why are you targeting the PPT operators themselves if that is the case?  It sounds as though EVERYONE who received funds from the ponzi more than they invested should be labeled as a scammer, based on what you are saying.  And everyone who received less funds from the ponzi than they invested should be labeled a victim.  True?

Knowingly paying someone else to make you the recipient of fraudulent transfers makes you a scammer.

Again, nobody is arguing they scammed their own depositors. You can stop beating to death the argument that nobody is making.

The problem is that they shoot other people in the foot, not just themselves. When someone invested in Pirate, they were paying Pirate to take someone else's money -- someone who was told their money would be legitimately invested -- and give it to them. Clearly, that is not an actual investment in any sense of the word.

I don't see how you can make this argument work unless you want to argue that Pirate also did nothing wrong because everyone who invested with him knew what they were doing and he didn't do anything he promised he wouldn't do. The scam is not that Pirate couldn't make payouts. The scam is that the transfers were fraudulent because there was no actual investment activity.

Yes. But again, I'm willing to give people who can even remotely plausibly claim that they didn't know it was a Ponzi scheme a free pass this one time. But hopefully now everyone understands that when something is obviously a Ponzi, it is in fact a Ponzi (or related scam).

These two items are a smokescreen and make zero difference.  All of your other points stand. 

That's what I'm making out.

I'm trying hard here to understand how a late entrant in a PPT is in any better position than a late entrant directly in Pirate's Ponzi, other than the fact that the PPT operator may suck up a bigger part of the butthurt when it finally collapses. This makes the operator a scammer? makes no sense whatsoever. If they were indeed having a better rate then he'd have a point.

In any case, by this argument all securitization should be banned, which I think it's ridiculous. The PPT themselves weren't opaque and were very public about their exact conditions. I believe this is perfectly legitimate.

People who invest in non-audited securities directly or indirectly do so at their own risk and they should be able to shoot themselves in the foot. GLBSE will start offering some surface proof of operation for those who want some standarised book-keeping of ventures. And in any case you should be wary of anything you cannot very closely verify.

One question remains though Joel... if the PPT's deserve a scammer tag for aiding people in participating in the ponzi, wouldn't everyone who participated in the ponzi also deserve the scammer tag, since they "stole" funds "illegitimately" from other investors?

Ok, this is the first time I have heard you say that you don't consider the PPT's to be scamming their depositors.  This was the argument I was trying to dispel the whole time, so I am glad we agree.

Did PPT customers get any sort of special treatment? Better rates? earlier payment? Honest question, I wasn't following that closely as I totally disregarded Pirate's obvious Ponzi while it was actually running.

Again, you're responding to the argument nobody's making. We're not saying PPT operators scammed *their* *depositors*. We're saying they scammed *other* *pirate* *depositors*, just like Pirate did.

Again, we're not saying PPT operators scammed their own depositors.

For the fiftieth time, like seriously -- you're missing that they paid Pirate to make their customers the recipients of fraudulent transfers of other people's money where they knew that other people were told that money would actually be invested and where they knew that paying that money to their customers didn't constitute a legitimate investment of any kind. PPT operators paid Pirate to cut their customers in on his Ponzi scheme.

In these cases where they advertised clearly what they were exactly reselling, I see no scam.

I have only followed, and not too closely, Goat's PPT. He insured Pirate's bond partly, and horoured his contract. No scam there whatsoever.

These people didn't claim to respond for Pirate's solvency and there very existence proves there was a suspicion something might go wrong. Am I missing something important?