Something I just thought of: how much of this is also related to just how businesses are taught to conduct themselves. I think to some people when talking about these issues of fraud people think of bad people doing bad things intentionally. Their is plenty of that, sure. But I think some of the stuff business are taught to do “legitimately” are bad. A lot of how advertising is done is fraudulent, but I don’t know if that reaches levels of “significant, important, serious fraud” in many cases.
Here’s an example of where I think a company isn’t necessarily trying to be bad. From the Roblox article mentioned above:
- Interviews reveal Roblox effectively has two sets of books for counting users: one for internal business decisions, in which multiple accounts are ‘de-alted’, and one used by the finance team that reports higher metrics to investors.
Now the article does mention a lot of bad things about Roblox and its 100% possible they are doing this in a bad way, but when I read that point in the article it reminded of sayings I’ve seen in various forms of media. The sayings I’m referring to are when businessmen are told to lie in order to get a profit. I don’t know if thats the best way to put it. Mmm. I can’t easily find something to reference right now, but I remember this one court-room scene in a movie/tv-show where the lawyers were selecting jurors and the attorneys say something along the lines of, “Businessmen as jurors will buy into a story of nothing to something. Where you have to lie to investors to get the money you need.” The moral of that kind of thing being that you have to lie to investors to get the stuff you need. The way its said doesn’t seem to have the intention of lying to investors to fraudulently get money and keep doing that. The way its said seems to be more akin to a means justify the ends kind of thing. The world requires lying to investors, now we don’t want to keep doing that and be a bad businessman. That’s just the way the world works.