Reminds me of the time I worked for one company and prior to going public, we called in some Sarbanes-Oxley consultants to vet us. After a thorough SOX compliance effort (which was ridiculous - one recommendation was "print out all source code and file it"), I showed up one day and an accountant in the corner had disappeared.
Seems that he had a gambling problem, but was allowed to both cut checks and sign them (fall into the GAAP). He embezzled, IIRC, close to one million dollars and was only found due to the SOX compliance effort.
> After a thorough SOX compliance effort (which was ridiculous - one recommendation was "print out all source code and file it"),
If they found that rogue accountant it wasn't all that ridiculous after all. That one requirement was (probably, I don't know the context) ridiculous but the compliance effort apparently wasn't.
On another note, I have had a customer a while ago that would have been extremely happy if they had had a printed, filed copy of all their source code.
I think they like filing because it's immutable storage. An engineer can't write code to change the filed-away code as easily as they can the on-disk source code.
I don't know much about SOX, but based on how I've seen it implemented at various places it seems to be a law that says "it is illegal to write computer programs, so don't let anyone do it! have a good day and have fun running a business!"
I remember being perplexed looking at the intrade exchange pricing during the last presidential election. I wasn't the only one. Nate Silver and Paul Graham wondered about it too
The bets on Obama not being re-elected seemed way too high. I convinced myself at the time that this must have been due to either personal bias or perhaps a strong republican leaning userbase on Intrade. But now it's starting to seem like it may have been part of some scam.
I assumed this was because a pool of funds had been set up to prop up Romney's odds to make him appear more viable -- or at least to stave off a story that Intrade users were betting heavily against him. Intrade was a small enough market that this could have been done with a comparatively small investment compared to media buys, and without any technological or financial chicanery. It's not illegal to pay too much for something that could have been had for less.
It would be elegant and pleasing if we could resolve both mysteries with one stone, but I don't see how it's supposed to work. How does a Romney anomaly lead to $700k embezzled and Intrade suing 2 different parties for $3m+?
Anyone have a copy of the proposed forbearance agreement for large account holders? It seems pretty brazen to ask people to give the company some slack on repaying deposits when they haven't really come clean on what went wrong. "For legal reasons we are not yet at liberty to document them" isn't good enough explanation; an announcement of specific arrests or civil lawsuits might be.
Typo on my part. My comment was in reference to this:
"It seems pretty brazen to ask people to give the company some slack on repaying deposits when they haven't really come clean on what went wrong."
Which is exactly what Cyprus is doing with its banks right now. They've frozen most of the assets of their depositors and are taking a percentage of the existing accounts.
And still no one wants to actually analyze the problem to see what's wrong.. the answer is simply "throw more money at it."
Sounds like the writings been on the wall for a while now. They were fined by the CFTC in late 2012 and had to withdraw from the US market for not being a licensed exchange [1].
Most of their customers were in the US so this was a major blow to their business.
I wonder if there's an opportunity here for a Bitcoin based predictions market?
It looks like their demise was due to fraud/embezzlement. Not sure how bitcoin would help here.
Also, users of such an exchange would be heavily exposed to the volatility of BTC/$major_currency when making long-term bets. Unless one doesn't care about currency risk, but it's not easy to ignore it unless as long as one's future expenses are still pegged to $major_currency.
The Bitcoin protocol has built into it a sophisticated scripting component which would make it possible to make multiparty contracts (like those on a predictions market) that could not be broken by any means, other than an attack on the underlying Bitcoin protocol. It hasn't yet been fully implemented in any client, but it's there to be used whenever the devs feel comfortable putting it in. This feature has the potential to make Bitcoin fraud/embezzlement much more difficult than it is now.
When I put the URL in the URL field it forwarded me to a post a few months ago about Intrade ceasing trading. The latest announcement and that announcement a few months ago were both put on the Intrade homepage so I guess the forum thought I was reposting something.
Sometimes users get hellbanned for no good reason. I was hellbanned for a few days and only noticed because I knew what to look for. I emailed info@ycombinator.com and they said it was an accident, and reinstated me.
I agree with anthonyb though, you should probably make sure they're not actually trolls before pointing it out.
This is why bans should start with a warning - hellbanning may be efficient from an administration perspective, but among other issues, without the possibility of appeal it's fundamentally unfair and prone to mistakes. (The ability of users to appeal after noticing something you're explicitly trying to hide from them isn't really adequate.)
hellbanning has the fringe benefit that those who have been hellbanned aren't necessarily aware of it, which means they are less likely to register for another account.
Seems that he had a gambling problem, but was allowed to both cut checks and sign them (fall into the GAAP). He embezzled, IIRC, close to one million dollars and was only found due to the SOX compliance effort.