There ought to just be a blanket criminal law for intentionally causing financial damages to citizens over a certain amount. Fraud is typically a civil matter, but the problem comes when someone causes $5000 of fraud to 200 people, which is made much easier by the internet. It doesn't make financial sense to sue for that amount. If we had a law that intentionally causing $1 million or more of civil damages is also a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison this would allow DAs to apply well deserved criminal penalties without having the possibility of criminalizing harmless behavior.

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tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-]

Fraud is almost definitionally not a civil matter. There is civil fraud, but it bears the same relationship to fraud as the Goldman's wrongful death case did to the OJ criminal case.

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terminalshort 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not talking about technical definitions. The fact is that if you have a fraud case in the USA, there's a 99% chance civil court is the only place it's ever going to be filed.

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tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-]

From where do you draw that statistic?

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terminalshort 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's not a statistic. It's my personal experience in business and what my lawyers have told me. The 99% is just a number I pulled out of my ass to mean "basically always." If I were going to put money on it, though, I would say it's actually an understatement. Do you have any statistics?

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tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes: the DOJ reports on things like qui tam cases and on total recoveries from all criminal fraud cases, and I think you have the ratio flipped.

	▲	terminalshort 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The DOJ??? Are you even trying to be serious here claiming the feds are getting involved in anything more than a vanishingly small percentage of fraud claims?