Patrick is too polite to mention it, but frauds work much better if the fraudsters are also fully integrated into the political machine of the people nominally investigating the fraud.

All I remember hearing about this is how creepy and racist it was to look for kids at a black-owned daycare. It was a scam the whole time?

Yeah, the fraud’s been around for a while and the Biden DoJ was investigating it. One of the guys got fingered trying to bribe a juror¹ but he stole half the bribe money.

The politicization of the issue means that Democratic Party aligned people continually flag any reference to the scam on HN though. If anyone else said that someone broke in and stole all the records from a daycare days after it was accused of fraud it would be considered a bald-faced lie but because of the political alignment (this is VP candidate Walz’s state) everyone is forced to pretend there’s no scam.

¹ Paradoxically the one honest juror who reported the bribe was removed from the case. No others reported any bribe which obviously must mean they received none.

> They will sometimes organize recruitment very openly, using the same channels you use for recruiting at any other time: open Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and similar. They will film TikTok videos flashing their ill-gotten gains, and explaining steps in order for how you, too, can get paid.

> As a fraud investigator, you are allowed and encouraged to read Facebook at work.

I tend to believe this, but it would be a lot more compelling with links to a case where Facebook/TikTok posts were useful evidence.

Great article, ties in neatly with observations among many that fraud, grifting, and devolution of the social contract has escalated greatly since 2020.

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?

Under "In which we briefly return to Minnesota":

> And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

In... the same section where he cites all of the evidence the government has put together against the fraudsters. What is the issue? That these investigations should have been more prominently featured in the mainstream news? Would that have helped or hurt investigations?

> Of course, as the New York Times very carefully wordsmithed recently:

>> Minnesota officials said in early January that the state conducted compliance checks at nine child-care centers after Mr. Shirley posted his video and found them “operating as expected,” although it had “ongoing investigations” at four of them. One of the centers, which Mr. Shirley singled out because it misspelled the word “Learning” on its sign, has since voluntarily closed.

> An inattentive reader might conclude from this paragraph that the Times disputes Shirley’s reporting.

The New York Times is literally quoting what the Minnesota officials said. What were they supposed to do, add on "but a kid on YouTube says differently"?

I don't think the serious response to Nick Shirley's "journalism" is that there was no fraud; rather, it's that he came into the situation with a thinly veiled agenda and fed his audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Did his video make it more or less likely that we'll be able to investigate and resolve the fraud situation in MN? I guess that depends on how serious you think the laughably corrupt Trump administration is, but the fact that they seized on this as an excuse to send in 3000 ICE agents is not exactly promising.

The reason that "the left" is rolling eyes at the fuss being made over this fraud is:

1. The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted. Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

2. This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

Let's recall some of the things that have happened in the US over the past year:

1. Executive steals congressionally-appropriated money and uses them for their own purposes

2. Presidential pardons are for sale

3. Naked bribery of the executive via ballrooms, crypto, chunks of gold etc

4. Open market manipulation via tariff pump and dump schemes.

5. Endless personal profiteering, including things like using the military to steal foreign assets and deposit them in personal bank accounts.

Any of them far more interesting and immensely consequential to the future of the country, but of course, none of this is to be found on Patio's blog. People like him are an essential pillar of any authoritarian dictatorship - like the mainstream media's endless passive-voice sane-washing of Trumps statements and actions, his job is to use his existing credibility to give credence to lies, half truths and distractions. After reading his blog, readers can rest easy knowing that Trumps actions in MN are perfectly fine and justified.

I like these attempt to dismiss Minnesota scandal by switching attention to reporter's personality. "Right wing", "low epistemic standards" (whatever it means), "sensationalized framing" etc etc.

OP even calls it "an attempt to expose fraud", like the reporter didn't clearly show all these forever-empty childcares with somalian thugs.

On Shirely, and the reaction: there's a markedly different valence to a fraud 'investigation' seeking to arrest, try, convict, and imprison _fraudsters_ vs one seeking (through a thin veil) to mar an entire community and bring about their violent dispossession at the hands of unaccountable little green men. It would not be an unreasonable person that strongly supports the former and opposes the latter.