• Dojan@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Aye, I’m honestly fucking sick to death with the bullshit companies can get away with.

    It’s such a minor and niche thing, it doesn’t even affect me, but something about it just really stuck with me. There’s this Korean online game company called Nexon, that a while ago was fined less than $9 million USD for selling a product that they lied about. There’s this little gambling feature in the game where you pay a small sum of money and you get some random bullshit in return. Only the advertised features purported to be in this lottery, weren’t in the lottery at all.

    Over the past decade or so they’ve made almost around $400 million USD on this, and then they get fined 9.

    And it got me thinking. If I fraudulently managed to obtain half a billion dollars and got caught, that would instantly be spirited away from me, and I’d be hit so hard with legal fees I’d be bankrupt for the rest of my life, but when a company does it they get away with it scot-free. Nine million is nothing compared to what they earned defrauding people.

    So what’s the message here? Companies are free to break the law however they please and they’ll be hit with a slap on the wrist. They still had a massive net gain by selling literally fucking nothing since the thing they sold isn’t a physical fucking good, it’s a bunch of fucking pissy little bits in a shitty fucking probably Oracle fucking database somewhere and nothing comes out of it. Just fucking go ahead and defraud people, if you get caught you’ll have to pay the “oopsie you did a bad thing” tax.

    And sure, this is just some shitty fucking gaming company running some ancient game, but it’s not like they’re unique in doing this! Lots of companies exploit their customers one way or another and when they’re caught very little comes out of it.

    I saw an article about CPAP machines killing people by shoving plastic foam down the user’s throats, and if you bought one of these machines you can get up to $100. I’ve no idea what these particular machines cost, but in general CPAP machines go for like $500-$1000 each!

    If I as an individual get discouraged from crime by long prison sentences and exorbitant fines I can’t have a hope in hell to ever pay off, then companies should too! Complete and total bankruptcy would definitely fucking suck for the workers that had nothing to do with whatever illegal BS was going on, but perhaps it’d serve as a deterrent for the corrupt stinking prolapsed anuses that run the fucking things!

    We don’t need to protect companies that break the law.