Why so many shoddy online presences? [Is it the obvious reason: that as one shoddy online store acquires a bad reputation, they just open another?]
How do any of these numerous shoddy online presences make money? [I get the drop-ship concept, selling someone else’s product at a markup. But are they legit? Do they make prompt refunds on returns, or is part of the sham that they try to keep the purchase money.]
How do the shoddy brick-and-mortar presence make money, especially since the costs are so much higher?
EDIT:
If this is a front for laundering money, where would this stolen money be coming from? Aren’t all the founders Olivet Church members (and not, say, Russian “businessmen”)? Is he laundering money he himself has stolen or is his business laundering third-party stolen funds? (Obviously all rhetorical questions)
Also, when you do create front businesses A through ZZZ isn’t that sending up a flare for investigators? If they see 5 or 10 businesses, they might be distracted, but when they see 50 to 100, all so haphazardly and arbitrarily named, they know the reasons underlying this attempt at obscurity can only be illegitimate and so they will dig deeper. Aren’t so many front businesses self-defeating in the end?
Much more! An dirty, unlaundered dollar is worth about $0.40 to $0.50 (and you’re lucky to get that).
Source: My thug life, Goodfellas, Breaking Bad, and Narcos.
Get $0.80 on the dollar? That would be my Tio Salamanca Ding-Ding-Ding-Deal of the Day.
Not necessarily the religious aspect, but we all owe a thank you to Bill Janklow and South Dakota for having the moral courage to give the credit card industry a free hand to let the magic of the free market work its wonders and provide more people with access to 29% APR credit.
They are obvious (to me) as shenanigans of money laudering enterprises that use stolen credit-card information. These international crime corporations account for billions in profit. That’s how all that expensive real estate and company name/location changes are affordable. Fiction such as “Mr. Robot” and “Rubicon” are actually just representations of Reality in a media that people accepts and understands.
Yes but no, I think. Interest is considered wrong, but Islamic finance works around this by considering interest earned to be profit sharing from a business you’ve invested in - but of course that’s what interest is in the first place.
That’s a pretty un-nuanced view of something I know little about but am quite interested in. For the moment I’ll settle for “humans are very good at getting around rules that they themselves have thought up”.
Crap sold through a front at a ridiculous markup (e.g. an ordinary ballpoint pen priced at $500) is one way to launder money. All in all it’s not so much that they’re making money as that they’re playing shell games with money.
Still appreciate thoughts on it, as i am also aware of how uneducated i am on these particular matters when it comes to religions. But yeah, 100% people do and will find ways around rules unfortunately. I guess its appropriate to say in this case that the devil is in the details.
The on-line and brick-and-mortar presences are just somewhat legit looking fronts for the money laundering. They’re shoddy because they’re putting in the minimum effort required in case someone starts checking into things (that’s also why they’re using all those corporate entities and phony-baloney “founders” like the bookstore guy).
Their main customers are themselves, probably working through cut-outs at both ends of the transaction. The money eventually ends up at the “school”, layered and cleaned and ready to be invested in what seem to be the main businesses of real estate and media outlets (as well as covering overhead for the laundry businesses and the school).
Conversations about “God says moneylending is bad!” have a sort of Godwin factor where eventually somebody will call it out as dogwhistling about Jewish bankers and then the conversation is over.
Not that that’s a bad thing. If you want to regulate the financial industry, looking in the Bible for tips is probably not the best course of action.
@petzl: for a simple version, let’s say you have a bunch of dirty money to get clean up. You have business A (which you own) buy a bunch of pens from business B. Then you return those pens (which were ridiculously marked up), and have a bunch of money you can show a revenue source for. Obviously it usually takes a more complicated route than that, which is why forensic accounting is a thing. Business B is never meant to make money. As for them showing up to random people, some of that is a by-product of making business B look legitimate, giving it a separate address from businesses K through ZZZ, so it’s harder to tell that they’re all based out of a single warehouse. When you try ti make your business look legitimate, you sometimes end up with legitimate customers (who help disguise the revenue streams). A portion of those will also return products. You also want to hide as much of yourself as you can from investigators.
Keep in mind, too, that 4 million in clean money is worth more than 5 million in dirty money. So if the fake businesses lose money, the main players are still walking away as winners. Throw in how easy it is to create a business these days… Let’s just say that if you really want to crash an economy? Successfully eliminate money laundering from it. Right now, the entire world runs on suspiciously grey-coloured cash.
I am reminded of Yoo Byung-Eun, another corrupt businessman-cum-cult leader, who in addition to running a church, owning a village in France, operating an organic farm in California, and controlling the shoddy maritime transport company behind the Sewol ferry disaster, set himself up under a pseudonym as an art photographer, produced his own corporate-sponsored gallery shows of said “art”, and had his own companies purchase his photographs for vastly inflated “art market” prices.
I’m not religious so that kind of narrative is lost on me, i just find it interesting to look at how bad financial practices shaped religions in the past and how they’ve changed over time.
The wikipedia entry on usury probably has everything you need.
During the medieval era, Jewish merchants became moneylenders to all of Europe because of the Christian prohibition against usury. This in a very large way contributed to the persecution of the Jewish people; it’s easy to foster anti-semitism among those who will profit monetarily. For example, when Philip the Fair couldn’t pay his debts, he simply rounded up all the Jews and expelled them from France, seizing their property and taking over the debts of Christians (but charging no interest, of course - that would be immoral). Any Jews caught trying to stay in the country or retain their wealth were burned to death on a small island outside Paris.
Well, Muslims are not allowed to benefit from lending money or receiving money as a loan; charging interest is absolutely forbidden. But post-WW2 Islamic banks have found a lot of ways to get around that prohibition while still profiting from helping businesses economically - the one I personally like best is when the bank buys a portion of your business, and if the business fails you owe the bank nothing, but if the business succeeds you pay an agreed-upon, proportionate share of the profits to the bank, and if you’re extremely successful you can use your own share of the profits to buy the bank’s portion of the business back.
Yeah, the history related above means that some of the oldest, richest banking families are (or were) Jewish. And given how easy it is to make banksters look bad these days (they practically do it themselves, eh?) anti-semites can still make gainful use of propaganda that equates banking, global economic control, and Judaism.
I can see how shuffling overpriced random claptrap around can be used for money-laundering, but doesn’t the random oddness, the half-assedness of it, become its own form of obviousness? Haven’t we all found some outrageously priced items on Amazon or Ebay, and figured no good was being gotten up to? I bet you could get AIs to flag minimum-effort catalogs like these, if you wanted to.
If you’re going to make web storefronts (and brick-and-mortar retail storefronts) that are so weird and obvious, why not at least go with something less consumer-visible? Why not sell exotic tractor parts or obsolete industrial fittings or something that wouldn’t attract so much attention? Why put the web storefronts on freaking Amazon?
Maybe it’s partly about getting devotees (who haven’t yet twigged to the shadiness) excited (e-commerce YAY!) to do the grunt work of building the sites, doing the data entry, and otherwise setting things up.
It’s not hard to see the oddly overpriced Essy Beauty peel-off mask or Asavea hair straightener as a kind of product version of clickbait. After all, what is the experience of clickbait other than realizing we have vastly overpaid, even if only with our attention?
I just love this. I think its a brilliant observation.
This isn’t some unknowable worldwide cult-based conspiracy.
This is a million tiny people trying to get ahead by drop-shipping from Chinese companies. There are so many bookstores because booksellers were the early adopters of Amazon’s Z-shops, and then Chinese companies started contacting them with other products they could also sell (beyond the books) with 0 investment. The whole thing moved on from there.
As an example, when I was in Vegas last year, my Uber driver told me about how he was selling jewelry on Amazon, drop-shipped from China. This is similar to a pyramid-scheme in its appeal to people feeling trapped by their circumstances, but different in that they usually keep it very secret. That’s because there is less than zero barrier to entry (less than 20 minutes since Leo Liu from Asian Bags Ltd emailed me, for instance), and these people recognize that other sellers are competitors, and competition to sell this garbage is already utterly cut throat.
There’s another other tier of drop shippers who list duplicates of items for sale on Amazon Prime, but at twice the price. They list thousands of these, and count on people being bad shoppers. When they get an order from some chump, they just flip that order to a Prime seller, often with an email asking us not to include a receipt with the shipment.
A lot of these people are based in the US, and a lot are based in other countries. To sell on Amazon in the US, you have to offer a US return address. As far as I know, that’s the only barrier, which explains why someone above receive random returns.
