Exactly!

As with so many convicted fraudsters, he only got caught because of his greed. It always fascinated me how people operating a decent (in terms of return!) fraud would get greedy and get caught. There was a documentary years ago about VAT carousels: the experts were like, it’s impossible to detect this at low levels. Low levels = people making hundreds of thousands a year. They pushed and pushed the fake goods and it went to millions and bang, detected and imprisoned.

This guy made $20M in a few weeks by legally! arbitraging bitcoin differential pricing across countries. He’s done! He can buy a nice house somewhere, retire, make speeches!

Of course, the kind of guy who spots these opportunities is probably also the kind of guy who thinks he can get away with much more…