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Notes -
I want to briefly talk about the massive Somali fraud network in Minnesota. UPDATE adding a more reputable source. Apparently Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.
The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret? Independent journalists were reporting on it for a while, and nobody seemed to care.
I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss. I'm reminded of the Rotherham scandal in the U.K. as well. Where there has been a major scandal involving mostly minority/immigrant groups that was covered up or just not really discussed, due to the Problematic nature.
I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...
I don't see why it would. We haven't had a national conversation about fraud in the Orthodox Jewish community and there are still hebrew signs in the Hudson valley; or any conversation at all about fraud among Baptist churches.
Here's a bonus case with a pastor who stole someone's identity, defrauded the military through fake education funds, and then abused a minor girl at the church.
The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily.
In general, trusting your family is a pretty major hack against the American legal system. The entire system is built around not trusting your family. Being high trust enough to put income, properties, or businesses in the name of your family members can get you out of taxes, into subsidies, and boy does it make for a fun divorce to untangle. Immigrants of all kinds are notorious for this, as are small family businesses. Combine the two and there goes your week.
A Russian with a small business is a nightmare in a divorce case. The house is half in his name and half in his mother's, but the down payment was supposedly lent to him by his brother, but no one has any documentation of that money ever being transferred. The business is a partnership with an uncle, and no one knows where the money came from or where it goes.
A local family, our local feudal lords around here, when one of the sons got divorced, his wife was surprised to find out that while she was under the impression they'd been living a normal upper middle class life with a house and two cars, actually they had almost no assets, that the house and the cars belonged to his father and they had effectively no equity in anything.
Another local family filed tax returns for family members who never worked for the business, for income that the family members in question never actually received, in order to distribute income taxes around in some way or other.
Anyone who looks around will have similar stories. If you can trust each other enough to count on getting what's yours later, then the government has a lot of trouble pinning you down.
It's hard not to be horrified of all that goes on. The government tax incentives and welfare schemes that slosh around are insane.
Counterpoint: trusting your family also creates some of the most unhinged legal drama.
One branch of my family has a bit of a “trailer park slum lord” thing going in the Southeast. Buy foreclosed lots, rent them back to the former owners, clean out the ones who can’t or won’t pay.
That branch includes one brother who is very much not welcome in the family business. He’s a scammer who’s known to show up and claim property when anyone near the community dies. Sometimes he even waves a convenient will. He’d happily file a few lawsuits if he thought there was any chance of getting a payout.
There is zero chance that the family business can pull those kind of accounting tricks, because they know their brother would come ruin it. And that’s for quite literally clannish behavior!
Trusting each other works until it doesn’t. There’s a reason that bigger institutions accrue more and more guardrails.
The real lesson, as always, is 'coordination problems are hard'. The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well. The Orthodox Jews believe they have a divine commandment to obey their rebbe. Albanians stab each other in the back all the time, but they keep the drama in-community- informing on their shady dealings is the one sin that gets you cut off. The mafia enforces their no-defection policy lethally.
I suspect your slumlord kinfolk lack the ruthlessness of the albanians and mafiosi, and the central coordination point of the feudal lord, and the genuine belief of the Jews.
Weirdly, it might have been done precisely to keep assets in the family in case of divorce. "Oh, sorry honey, you thought you were going to get 50% of everything? In fact I don't personally own anything, it's all family trust/business assets, so good luck with that!"
(I'd been binging a lot of dumb Youtube 'revenge stories' and a couple of these have that exact set-up: wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything into a trust/years back before they got married put everything into the business name so the house, cars, etc. are all technically business assets that they have the use of).
Local feudal lord arranges it so blood kin have the use of houses, cars, bank accounts and so forth, but if greedy spouses try to despoil them in a divorce, they end up with nothing since technically the married kids own nothing. Kids know that when Father kicks the bucket, they'll inherit, so they have no incentive to go against this arrangement. If they do end up getting divorced, they know they'll lose nothing.
For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".
Yeah but they've still fundamentally got to come for the property of the divorced. They can't easily reach out to third parties
Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.
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