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Aurornistoday at 1:32 PM1 replyview on HN

Everyone is a criminal mastermind after reading about someone else getting caught: You only have to say you wouldn’t do the thing that they did and you can smugly imagine yourself getting away with it.

He didn’t acquire 300 gold bars and the other currency at once. He was getting these over a long period. He works for an intelligence agency, so he knew that his actions were going to be investigated. If he was doing any of these routines suggested in the comments like buying a rural plot of land to bury them or taking up camping (alone, by himself) these are all going to raise suspicions and become another thing that could give me away.


Replies

93potoday at 3:58 PM

> he knew that his actions were going to be investigated

I disagree - my take when I first read this was that this was likely a pervasive thing that senior people all did, and they all knew about it. This guy pissed off the wrong person and so they took him down. Same for the lying about credentials - I am sure everyone is like "hey Jim, did you want to apply for that promotion?" with the response of "I can't because I didn't serve long enough", and the final reply of "oh just make up the numbers, everyone does and they don't check".