Tom Hughes

A former embezzler, Tom Hughes writes and speaks on the subjects of Ministry, Professional Responsibility and Financial Crime from his home in northern Vermont.

[Elvin @bytecoin23]

It’s unsettling how easy fake growth can look when the shelves seem full.

Crazy Eddie was one of the best-known electronics chains in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. The ads were loud, the sales were real, and customers believed they were looking at a high-volume retail machine.

That image helped the company go public in 1984 and build credibility with investors. But behind the numbers, members of the Antar family were doing something much more deliberate: first hiding cash to evade taxes, then reversing the scheme and pumping fake inventory and fake profits into the books.

The mechanics matter. They overstated inventory, manipulated purchase records, and used false counts to inflate gross margin. In retail, inventory is one of the easiest places to manufacture profit, because if the stock number is wrong, earnings can look stronger without any real improvement in the business.

By the time the fraud unraveled, investors were left with a company that looked profitable on paper and was far weaker in reality. The story is a reminder that strong sales, media visibility, and a famous brand do not prove the accounts are clean.

Which fraud case do you think was the most mechanically clever?

If you want more breakdowns like this, follow for the next one.

#FinancialCrime #Fraud #CorporateFraud #AccountingFraud #WallStreet #ForensicAccounting #Investing #SEC

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

I like how these same fuckers say that Platner is a smart, well-read, history buff... who just happened to not recognize he'd stuck Heinrich Himmler's super famous hat decoration on his chest.

I knew what that fucking thing was when I was a little kid, having read books about WW2 because I thought the tanks, planes, and guns were cool. And I went to a shit tier rural K-8 with a hundred kids, half of which could speak English, and only half of those could read, not an elite seventy thousand dollar a year prep school, like Mr. History.

This same fucker is online commenting and correctly identifying period uniforms, equipment, and weapons, but oh no, he's an innocent "doofus" who got drunk and got the SS emblem common to Aryan Nation felons who think the swastika is too mainstream and not hard core enough.

There's no way that son of a bitch didn't know what he was permanently embedding in his own skin. Quit gas lighting us, you fools. Nobody is that gullible.

[Tom Hughes @formercriminal]

@goneers Dems: He may be a N@zi pervert, but hey he’s *our* N@zi pervert!

[Tom Hughes @formercriminal]

@SharylAttkisson @RobManess It’s not that she lied about the snipers. Politicians lie. It’s that she suggested our servicemen and women would intentionally place her in harm’s way and expected us to believe it.

[The Iceman @the_iceman64]

90% of the soldiers on the first boats to hit the beach didn't live to see the end of the day. Look at those faces. Some of them never made it to 18.

Never forget that they paid the ultimate price for our freedom. We live our lives the way we do because of them.

[Mr. Star Spangled MAGA @4thOfJuly365]

Watching footage from WW2 makes me realize how brave this generation was and how pathetic the current one is.

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

John Rich celebrating “Our Greatest Generation.” If you are young, or you don’t get that concept, watch this! 💪🇺🇸🔥😢

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Because you are a former Royal Air Force general, let me put the reason for @PeteHegseth’s D-Day speech in terms you will recognize.

In 2005, Boeing hired James McNerney, a disciple of Jack Welch’s school of cost-cutting, as CEO. He later said, “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

The results were catastrophic.

As Eric Ries documented in his book Incorruptible, management focused more and more on financial engineering while the engineers inside Boeing watched one program after another unfold with growing horror. We have their internal records because of the investigations into the 737 MAX crashes.

Engineering raised the alarm. Management’s answer never changed: costs, deadlines, stock price. The number on the slide had become the mission, and the airplane underneath it had become an afterthought.

That is the trap. Stock price was never the product. It was a proxy for the product, a stand-in for whether Boeing built aircraft people could trust their lives to. McNerney optimized the proxy and destroyed the thing it was supposed to measure. Two planes full of families paid for the difference.

One Boeing employee later confessed, “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year.” Psychologists call that moral injury: the inner damage a person carries from knowing they did harm by saying nothing.

What does this have to do with DEI, migration, and the agendas being pushed across the EU and UK?

Everything. They run on the same machinery.

A minority arrest rate is not justice. It is a proxy for justice, a stand-in for whether a city is safe and its law applied equally. Starmer’s government optimized the proxy.

Officers who flagged the cost of a pivot to DEI, the victims who came forward, the communities who watched predators walk, all of it was feedback, and all of it was waved off because the statistic was moving in the politically correct direction. The number improved. Justice did not. Just as Boeing’s engineers were told costs, deadlines, stock price, Britain’s police were told the quota, the optics, the politics.

Welch chased ROI. Starmer chases DEI. John Kerry chases CO2. All ignored the people in front of them telling the truth. Both mistook the dashboard for the world.

I too want safe minorities, higher share prices and a cleaner planet. We all do. That is exactly the point. McNerney wanted a higher stock price too. The disaster was not the goal. The disaster was measuring the proxy and calling it the product.

Last year, touring colleges in London, a family friend asked me a version of the question Boeing’s own engineers asked each other before the crashes. Theirs was, “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator-trained aircraft?” The answer was no. Mine was simpler: would I put my daughter on streets policed by a two-tier system, where carrying pepper spray to defend herself is a crime but the men she fears walk free?

Which brings us to Hegseth.

This is not the usual venue for these arguments, and I understand the objection. I endorse his saying it here anyway, because it needs to be said, and because the people who most need to hear it are the ones who have learned to look at the dashboard instead of out the window.

You know the cost of silence better than I do. The veteran who watched Afghan allies rape children on our own bases and was told to stand down, to protect the relationship. They enforced the rules of engagement because those were being measured by you. That man is carrying moral injury for the rest of his life. Some of them did not survive it. Too many witnessed a dual tiered system - US/UK troops held accountable for honest ROE mistakes while Taliban used women and kids as shields - and paid the ultimate price for saying nothing.

This is not the ideal place to bring up politics but is absolutely the right place to prevent further moral injury.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.

She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.

Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.

Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.

Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.

She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.

By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Let me ruin your June for a second.

Every year when National Gun Violence Awareness Month rolls around, the same people who have not read a single page of John Lott's 13,312-regression peer-reviewed study start posting pictures of children and demanding you feel responsible for deaths you did not cause and had nothing to do with.

So. Let us talk about children. Since they brought it up.

In 2006, the CDC recorded 642 accidental firearm deaths in the entire United States. For children under the age of ten — the number was 31. Thirteen under age five. Eighteen between five and nine.

Tragic? Absolutely. Every single one.

But here is the number that will not appear on a single "Orange Friday" awareness post: 80.

Eighty children under the age of five drown in bathtubs every year. Every. Single. Year.

ALMOST THREE TIMES as many children drown in bathtubs annually as die from ALL firearm accidents combined — including adults. And forty more drown in five-gallon water buckets. The kind you buy at Home Depot for $4.99.

I have given this information at talks and watched jaws drop, because people genuinely believe the number is in the thousands. They have been so thoroughly marinated in "gun violence awareness" content that their perception of actual risk is completely detached from reality. That is not an accident. That is the point of the campaign.

Where is Bathtub Awareness Month? Where is the congressional hearing on five-gallon bucket control? Where is the hashtag? Where are the orange ribbons for the children who drowned while their parents were in the next room?

There are none. Because the campaign was never about children. It was never about safety. If it were about safety, they would be equally outraged about cars — which killed 1,305 children that same year. Or fire. Or drowning. But they are not. The selective fury lands exclusively on firearms. And if you are a scientist, which I happen to be, you do not get to cherry-pick your data based on which conclusion you prefer. Quinn's Law Number Six: facts are the enemy of liberalism.

Now let us talk about what the actual data says about guns and safety, because John Lott ran 13,000-plus statistical regressions across every county in America and the results are not ambiguous.

Fifty-six percent of convicted felons surveyed in a ten-state study said they would NOT attack a target they believed was armed. Fifty-six percent. The deterrence is real, it is documented, and it functions whether or not a shot is ever fired. The firearm you carry protects your neighbor whether your neighbor knows it or not.

When states passed right-to-carry laws, multiple-victim public shootings — what the media insists on calling "mass shootings" to maximize terror — dropped by 67 percent. Deaths in those events dropped by 75 percent. Injuries by 81 percent. States that adopted these laws virtually ELIMINATED mass public shootings within four to five years. The remaining events? They happened almost exclusively in the specific locations where guns remained banned. The gun-free zones. The places we hang the sign that only the law-abiding ever read.

There were between 760,000 and 3.6 million defensive gun uses in the United States last year alone, depending on which of fifteen national polls you consult. A JAMA Network Open study from March 2025 estimated 489,000 DGUs in which a firearm was actually discharged. The Department of Justice's own National Crime Victimization Survey puts the conservative floor at 65,000 defensive uses per year against assaults, robberies, and home invasions.

No dead body. No coverage. No awareness month.

Here is one more number for you: 74. Seventy-four percent of convicted felons in a National Institute of Justice survey said they actively avoided homes they believed were occupied by armed residents. Criminals respond to incentives. That is not ideology — that is basic deterrence theory, and it is confirmed by the people who actually commit the crimes.

I also want you to think carefully about something the Supreme Court already settled. DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989). Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005). Two separate rulings establishing that the government has NO legal obligation to protect you as an individual. None. You are your own first responder. That is not my opinion — that is settled constitutional law from the highest court in this country.

So the political class that just told you the government is not required to protect you... is also the one demanding you surrender the tool you use to protect yourself.

I want fewer people dead. That is why I know the data. That is why I read the book. That is why I am furious every June when emotion and fundraising replace science and evidence in a "debate" that has actual life-or-death consequences for real people.

You want to honor the children? Honor ALL of them. The ones who drowned. The ones who died in car crashes. And the ones who will never be born because a woman alone in her house at 2 a.m. had no way to stop what was coming through her door.

But what do I know — I am only a published textbook author, a science teacher, a father of four, and a combat medic who spent his career reducing human suffering and who actually read the peer-reviewed data before forming an opinion.

IF you agree:
LIKE this post so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it.
SHARE this.
COMMENT below — did you know the bathtub number? Or did the narrative keep that from you? Tell me.

And if you want MORE of this -- the data, the history, the science, the stories -- JOIN Bski's Classroom community on X or YouTube.

#MAGA #Veterans #Trump
@JoJoFromJerz @GuntherEagleman @catturd2

[Sam E. Antar @SamAntar]

⚠️ A lesson in white-collar crime:
Why decent people are the easiest people to defraud.

Fraudsters exploit trust, kindness, ethics, morality, and the natural human instinct to believe someone who seems respectable.

Exploitable Weaknesses

White-Collar criminals use a combination of persuasion and deceit to achieve their objectives. Fraudsters prey on the psychological and cognitive vulnerabilities of their victims using the following techniques:

Fraudsters consider your humanity, needs, desires, ethics, morality, and good nature as weaknesses that they can exploit in the commission of their crimes.

Fraudsters measure their effectiveness by the comfort level of their victims. They use a combination of charm and deceit to achieve their objectives. It is far easier to get a potential victim to believe your lies if they like you.

Fraudsters fabricate false integrity to gain the trust of their victims. Stature, generosity, and virtuous deeds gain the respect of their potential victims and make it less likely that victims will question their behavior.

White-collar criminals will always have the initiative to commit their crimes. Your ethics, morality, and good nature limit your behavior, but fraudsters have no such constraints on their behavior.

The ethical foundation of our society is based on trust and the legal basis of our society is based on the presumption of innocence.

The inclination to trust and the presumption of innocence gives the fraudster the initial benefit of any doubt while they are free to plan and execute their crimes.

Therefore, trusting, and decent law-abiding human beings are easier prey for fraudsters.

Note: Originally published 07/08/2014 ➡️ https://t.co/8szVQ4CfAc

[Tom Hughes @formercriminal]

Hey @HomeDepot I’m about to abandon $1,800 worth of stuff in my online cart. You think somebody might want to pick up the phone?

[Eric Schwalm @Schwalm5132]

"It was the time sheets that made people look into him...."

I wish people could see what the Army finance office will do when a soldier gets overpaid $20.00. Then I would like to show them the oversight that our Travel System (DTS) has for a soldier to get paid for spending one night in a hotel. Next I would show them the weekly Battalion meeting where every leader can see the names of every soldier in their unit who owes money for travel cards/DTS/paychecks. Finally I will show them the withdrawal and clearing process for the various OPFUNDS that are used during overseas operations.

The army will crush a soldier for owing a single penny and this dude signs for $40 Million in Gold bars and puts them in his house....and the ONLY reason they found them was because he cheated on his time sheets.

We have soldiers and their families living in trailers and we will go through their finances with a fine tooth comb.

We have Illegals, Child care center operators, and senior executive band people bilking the Government for MILLIONS/BILLIONS and people seem to discover it by "chance".

Every last fraudster caught with over a million dollars should be dropped from a space shuttle and allowed to re-enter the earth's atmosphere so we can watch them turn into a ball of flame for our entertainment.

[Greg Price @greg_price11]

Kathy Hochul: Can Donald Trump even name the "1993 Knicks championship team" that doesn't exist??

President Trump: Literally catching Charles Oakley in his arms while sitting courtside in the '90s.

[Sam E. Antar @SamAntar]

NEW: Did the Singham Network Move $100 Million Abroad Through a Charity With No Employees?

Full investigation with receipts:
🔗https://t.co/VPPVTOJ2o3

Everyone's chasing Neville Roy Singham's nonprofit network for the hard thing: foreign influence, China, propaganda. Congress, federal agencies, the press — all on that track. It's contested, it's slow, and it may take years.

I'm pointing at the low-hanging fruit: the tax returns.

It's the oldest lesson in white-collar enforcement — sometimes the case you can actually prove isn't the dramatic one, it's the bookkeeping. You don't have to prove anything about China to ask whether these groups followed the same Internal Revenue Code as every other charity in America. That gets answered line by line, on filings they signed under penalty of perjury.

So start here. One charity in that network had ZERO employees.

No staff. No officer on payroll. Nobody.

It reported moving $101,983,568 out of the United States.

Read that again. More than a hundred million dollars, sent abroad, by an organization with no one working there. And that's not even the biggest red flag on its returns — it's one of eight. Every one comes straight off these groups' own IRS filings, public to anyone. 🧵👇

🚩 RED FLAG 1 — The foundation called its own recipients "noncharitable." On its own IRS return. THREE times on the same form. People's Support Foundation Limited (a private foundation) flagged the two groups it was funding as "noncharitable" in three separate IRS boxes.

🚩 RED FLAG 2 — On the SAME page, it labeled OTHER recipients "public charity." So this wasn't a clerical slip. The foundation knew the difference, used both labels on one return, and deliberately put these two in the noncharitable column. That distinction is the whole ballgame: funding a "noncharitable" group triggers strict IRS monitoring rules that funding a public charity does not.

🚩 RED FLAG 3 — It moved $73,731,279 to those two noncharitable groups anyway. Over six years.

🚩 RED FLAG 4 — So who vetted the grants? With no employees and no officer pay, there was nobody on staff to check who received that $101 million, draft an agreement, or confirm where it went. The oversight the IRS requires for money like this — somebody has to actually do it.

🚩 RED FLAG 5 — $0 in monitoring costs. That oversight work costs money. On six years of returns, People's Welfare Association reported $0 in every professional-fee category where that cost would show up. If the oversight happened, who did it — and where's the bill?

🚩 RED FLAG 6 — Money in ≈ money out. $102.7M came in. $101.98M went out. It kept about $721K — seven-tenths of one percent — and ended 2024 with $324,050 and no staff. That's the financial fingerprint of a pass-through pipe, not an organization running its own programs.

🚩 RED FLAG 7 — The foreign recipients aren't named. $101M went abroad, broken out only by world region. Where it actually landed isn't on the public return.

🚩 RED FLAG 8 — $15,017,020 in political contributions sits downstream. People's Welfare Association reported more than $15M in political (§527) contributions over the same six years — exactly the kind of spending the foundation's missing oversight rules exist to prevent.

And one more, because it answers the obvious objection. "Maybe the FOUNDATION paid for the oversight." It did report ~$540K–$617K a year in professional fees. But its own required schedule says what that money bought: investment management. Every year. $0 for grant oversight.

Here's the honest part. Any ONE of these has an innocent explanation. Foundations fund (c)(4)s. Groups outsource work. Charities run lean. But all eight — in one chain, same money, same six years — is a lot of coincidence to ask a single structure to carry.

I'm not telling you it was designed this way. A tax return doesn't show intent, and I won't pretend to read minds. I'm telling you what the documents say, and asking the question a pattern like this is built to provoke: is there an innocent explanation for ALL of it at once — and where in the records would you find it?

That last part matters. The answer isn't on the public returns. It's in grant agreements and monitoring files that only an authority with subpoena power can pull. Which is the whole point: you don't need to resolve anything about China to ask this. You just need to read the filings.

I'm a forensic accountant. I follow documents, not politics. The returns are still on file. Anyone can read them — and I'll walk you through every line 👇

🔗https://t.co/VPPVTOJ2o3

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

May 1918. Blackstone Hotel

Taft checks in and the clerk mentions Roosevelt is eating dinner there. The two hadn't spoken in six years.

They ran against each other in 1912, splitting the Republican Party and handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson. The friendship was dead.

Taft walked into the dining room anyway.

Roosevelt's friends saw him coming and went silent. He turned around. Taft was smiling.

Roosevelt jumped up and bear-hugged the man he had once called a "Fathead" with "Brains of a guinea pig".

The dining room stood up and applauded. Strangers who had read about the feud for years watched it end in real time.

Eight months later, Roosevelt died.

At the funeral, Taft stood alone and wept.

He later told Roosevelt's sister: "Had he died in a hostile state of mind toward me, I would have mourned the fact all my life. I loved him always and cherish his memory."

Don't wait.

[Sam E. Antar @SamAntar]

Memo to @NJGov Mikie Sherrill: Memorial Day honors those who died for this country. Using it as a stunt to grandstand for people who entered it illegally is not compassion. It’s political narcissism with a press release.

[Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 @TulsiGabbard]

It was an honor to visit your husband’s grave today on your behalf, and to pay my respects. It was wonderful to see the beautiful flowers representing many others who did the same. Our nation owes a debt of gratitude to those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and to the loved ones they left behind. Thank you for your service and sacrifice @SharrellAnne2 🙏🏽

[SharrellAnne @SharrellAnne2]

This is probably a long shot, but if anybody happens to be in DC this weekend and plans on visiting Arlington, I would love to see a fresh photo of my husband’s grave in Section 60.

SSG Alan W. Shaw
Section 60, Grave 8451
B Co 1/12 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division
November 10, 1975 - February 9, 2007

There’s just something about knowing people still stop by, still say his name, still remember. 🇺🇸⭐🇺🇸