Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.

I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.

This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".

The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.

So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?

I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.

Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?

Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing.

As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence.

The question is: now what?

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so.

What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.

The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.

It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.

It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).

There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.

[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.

[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...

"the history of the midwest" seems awfully specific and easy to redefine as required.

That being said, it was a fairly interesting article about fraud in general, but if this is the only fraud article he wrote, why is that? There's lots of public frauds going on right now, is he going to write about them next?