# Why People Commit White Collar Fraud (Ozy linkpost)

I have been seriously involved in the rationalist community since 2014. Many people I know have, in my considered opinion, committed financial crimes. Some were prosecuted others were not. Almost all of them thought they weren't doing anything wrong. Or at least the discrepancies weren't a big deal. This is a good review about fraud and why people do it.

Soltes suggests a simple plan for avoiding committing fraud:

1.  Regularly explain your work life to someone—your spouse, your best friend, your mom—whom you trust, who has good judgment, and who doesn’t work at the same company as you.
2.  If the person says “what the fuck? what are you doing? that’s fraud!”, believe them.

That’s what happened in the only case Soltes found of someone _stopping_ their fraud before it all collapsed around them. You need an outside voice: someone who isn’t as delusionally optimistic as you are and who isn’t socialized into your company’s dysfunctional norms. Most fraud is—at least in broad strokes—obviously bad to someone you’re explaining it to. The complicated part is all the justifications that what you’re doing is secretly all right.

## New Comment

### AprilSR (7d)

looks like the first paragraph was accidentally put in the quote block, but isn't from ozy



### 3 votes

### Moderation Log


### More from 

#### Tail SP 500 Call Options


- **Author**: 
- **Date**: 2mo
- **Comments**: 28

#### Gender Exploration


- **Author**: 
- **Date**: 1y
- **Comments**: 26

#### Best in Class Life Improvement


- **Author**: 
- **Date**: 1y
- **Comments**: 20



### Curated and popular this week

#### Eliezer's Lost Alignment Articles / The Arbital Sequence


- **Authors**: , 
- **Date**: 14h
- **Comments**: 9

#### Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs


- **Authors**: , 
- **Date**: 4d
- **Comments**: 80

#### OpenAI: Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models


- **Author**: 
- **Date**: 4d
- **Comments**: 25
```