Sysadmin, Spouse Admit To Part in 'Massive' Pirated Avaya Licenses Scam (theregister.com) 83
A sysadmin and his partner pleaded guilty this week to being part of a "massive" international ring that sold software licenses worth $88 million for "significantly below the wholesale price." From a report: Brad and Dusti Pearce admitted one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. After agreeing to a plea deal, the Pearces must also forfeit at least $4 million as well as gold, silver, collectible coins, cryptocurrency, and a vehicle, and "make full restitution to their victims," the US Department of Justice said. The pair from Tuttle, Oklahoma -- a city better known for its cattle ranchers and alfafa hay than pirated software -- were alleged to have sold pirated Avaya business telephone system software licenses.
The licenses were then used to unlock features of the popular telephone system, which is used by thousands of companies around the globe. Dusti Pearce was said by prosecutors to have looked after the accounting side of the business, although only the wire fraud charge remains under the plea deal. Brad Pearce had previously worked as a customer service employee at Avaya, and was said to have used his admin privileges to "generate tens of thousands of ADI software license keys" that he sold to his main customer, Jason Hines, as well as "other customers, who in turn sold them to resellers and end users around the globe," said the DoJ.
The licenses were then used to unlock features of the popular telephone system, which is used by thousands of companies around the globe. Dusti Pearce was said by prosecutors to have looked after the accounting side of the business, although only the wire fraud charge remains under the plea deal. Brad Pearce had previously worked as a customer service employee at Avaya, and was said to have used his admin privileges to "generate tens of thousands of ADI software license keys" that he sold to his main customer, Jason Hines, as well as "other customers, who in turn sold them to resellers and end users around the globe," said the DoJ.
Sounds like (Score:1)
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There may not be a reseller. Avaya ain't cheap.
It's the old joke: "$88m, what will they do with their 5 line PBX?"
Always surprising (Score:3)
... how these morons expect to not get caught. Yes, audits may take time and come years late. But if you embezzle enough, you will get caught. Funnily, I have heard recently from an expert on this type of fraud that for clever embezzlers, the threshold is around $5M. The problem of these idiots is that they cannot stop and think the past is a reliable predictor for the future.
Re:Always surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Crime pays. Jordan Belfort did 22 months in jail for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud. His cell mate was Tommy Chong! Jordan still hasn't paid restitution and wrote the Wolf Of Wall Street book. He's doing just fine.
Re:Always surprising (Score:4, Funny)
No, you don't understand. We are talking about fractions of a penny here...
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Geez....WTF is the deal today?
Are the terms husband/wife/spouse on the do not use list, or do they now somehow offend someone?
I'm just trying to pinpoint where the normal world and common sense common terms and generally held beliefs by the majority of humans got upended ....?
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You were clearly bothered enough to write a post for the other dullards to mod up like it was some conspiracy to push "woke" upon the world.
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Have you got a better reason to explain it?
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Just using partner means some sort of relationship between people other than married couples.
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Just using partner means some sort of relationship between people other than married couples.
Does it, though? What definition are you using that says "partner" specifically excludes a spousal relationship? Partner is just a less specific word. All spouses are partners, not all partners are spouses.
man spouse to woman, woman spouse to her man.
What about two men married to each other? Husbands, spouses, or partners?
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DoJ says:
Office of Public Affairs | Business Owner Pleads Guilty in Massive ...
Jul 28, 2023 Brad Pearce's wife, Dusti Pearce, is alleged to have handled accounting for the illegal business.
The Reg is full of whackjob marxists, allegedly.
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The Reg is full of whackjob marxists, allegedly.
I doubt they have any political motivation, their goal is simply to churn out as many clickbait ad infested "articles" as possible. Having a stylebook and paying a copy editor costs money. It slows down the publication of new content.
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In this case I think it's likely just poor writing or editing.
So using a synonym is "poor writing or editing" now? Good lord.
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Or, here's a thought, his wife was also his partner, as in literally "partner in crime".
In this case I think it's likely just poor writing or editing.
So using a synonym is "poor writing or editing" now? Good lord.
Whoa there, I'm going to need you to back up, that doesn't play to the OP's woke agenda allusions and might be a little too credible for /.
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Re: Always surprising (Score:2)
You don't write very well and you're bright as a stump, so it's not surprising that you haven't noticed that when people write they try to avoid using the same words over and over again because that gets repetitive rapidly. No woke mind virus is necessary, only a mind.
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Did anyone notice that the title of the article said they pair was sysadmin and spouse, and then in the article text it comes back and says sysadmin and "partner".
Geez....WTF is the deal today?
Are the terms husband/wife/spouse on the do not use list, or do they now somehow offend someone?
I'm just trying to pinpoint where the normal world and common sense common terms and generally held beliefs by the majority of humans got upended ....?
Honest guess is they avoided saying "Brad and his husband" specifically to avoid offending the kind of chronically offended, true victims of every story, that are so offended by the idea of other people having an opinion, they constantly need to get ahead of it and let us know that THEY, the real victim, are offended by what someone else might have thought.
Yah, we get you.
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This just nicely illustrates that many people are not very mature and get triggered by the most tiny and irrelevant things.
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I'm just trying to pinpoint where the normal world and common sense common terms and generally held beliefs by the majority of humans got upended ....?
Almost like language is fluid and changes over time to reflect society.
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Did anyone notice that the title of the article said they pair was sysadmin and spouse, and then in the article text it comes back and says sysadmin and "partner".
Geez....WTF is the deal today?
Yeah I see this everywhere, and even in kids shows! I was watching a show with my kid and they were talking about "the bear" then they switch to "the mammal" and then "the mother" and then "the hunter". This is that poly shit they're trying to indoctrinate kids these days. The creature is one or the other, not both, whoops now I'm doing it too!
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I had a friend who was a regional manager for a gas station chain, and one of his biggest issues was employee theft. The typical case involved fraudulent returns - the employee would claim somebody returned an item worth (let's say) $30, then just take $30 out of the register.
The thing is, if they'd kept the fraud minimal, they'd never
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Nobody really knows because doing a full financial audit is really expensive and regulators only require it for banks and some other financial service providers at this time. And without that you cannot be sure either way.
For regular financial audits, the $5M total figure as threshold (one employee or collaborating group at one company, multiple years) seems to be relatively well established. What is unclear is how many are smart enough to stop at, say, $1M or below and still cover it up nicely. My take wou
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It puzzles me why someone netting that much profit would stay in OK of all places instead of moving to, say, Cape Verde.
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Greed. They wanted even more. The downfall of most repeat embezzlers.
You Buy The Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
And the software should be free.
Re: You Buy The Hardware (Score:2)
Yep. One way to target waste would be to ban time-based licenses for local functionality on hardware like phones, servers and network equipment.
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Then everyone would have to pay full price for every available feature whether they are needed or not. The cost of software development would just be added to the hardware price and everyone will be forced to pay the full amount for all the bells and whistles.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious.
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It's not obvious to everyone that enterprise-level hardware is licensed per feature. You expect everyone to pay thousands more for features they will never use because "muh software should be free!!"
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Actually I expect people to not choose a vendor that is trying to shaft them.
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Then everyone would have to pay full price for every available feature whether they are needed or not. The cost of software development would just be added to the hardware price and everyone will be forced to pay the full amount for all the bells and whistles.
Maybe companies should consider incentives/rewards for their customers and include enabling those already built-in more features, at no extra charge, with renewed service/support contracts. BMW could have done stuff like this with the subscriptions for their built-in seat warmers -- continue to get your car serviced at the dealer and get access to subscription features at no extra charge ...
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Those extended features can cost a ton to develop and are often niche.
Re:You Buy The Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Those extended features can cost a ton to develop and are often niche.
This is where I think Sonicwall has one of the best balances in the industry. If you buy the hardware, it's yours forever. It comes out of the box with some limited amount of general software updates and support, but whatever version you land on, it will do routing and NATing and IPSec tunneling and port-based firewalling until the hardware gives out. At no point does that baseline level of functionality ever stop working.
Want the security functions, like Geo-IP blocking, content filtering, IDS/IPS, DPI, e-mail scanning, and other security services? *that* is a subscription, and those definitions are regularly updated to include changes in those things.
Avaya...doesn't do that. they charge a fortune for the hardware, and then you pay per-extension, and then you pay per-line on the number of incoming SIP trunks...none of which requires any more or any less R&D to develop and are core functions of the system.
What these folks did was wrong; I'm not debating the morality here. I'm simply saying that Avaya is the Oracle of phone system world, and while they 'won' in court, they definitely wouldn't win any hearts or minds in the court of public opinion.
It's okay though, like Oracle, they're circling the drain because new businesses aren't starting with them. Avaya license costs are both exorbitant and unnecessary for all but the largest of call centers. Hosted VoIP providers, and even on-premise options with 3CX or Bicom can work well; a job I used to have ran the company on Asterisk almost flawlessly with a SIP trunk from the ISP.
Re: You Buy The Hardware (Score:2)
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So when I buy a Dell PC, Microsoft Windows should be free?
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They charge you extra? Mm hmm, that's what I thought.
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No, but at least I shouldn't be forced to pay for it when I don't use it.
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Dell is junk, anyway. All OEM PC makes are. If you want a real computer you build it yourself with readily available STANDARD parts and then install Linux on it for free. If you want Windows then buy it or pirate it.
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It's possible. https://slashdot.org/story/06/... [slashdot.org]
Re: You Buy The Hardware (Score:2)
Your ability to run windows shouldn't expire or be non transferrable, which Cisco and a lot of enterprise vendors do.
Carceral state (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Carceral state (Score:5, Insightful)
That's likely state, not Fed. And s/he likely pleaded guilty. The point is that Draconian sentences shouldn't even be available, since they're used as a tool by the system to bully people into pleading guilty, even if they're not factually guilty.
And yes, the government should be required to prove its case, even if that means that some guilty people walk, even if it costs them money. Taking away even a year of a person's life isn't something to cheap out on.
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"Draconian sentences shouldn't even be available"
You keep failing to mention the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which would have told you that a sentence of 20 years isn't actually available. What a maximum sentence means is that if found guilty of this charge even under the worst possible set of conditions and prior convictions with a hanging judge the sentence cannot possibly be more than twenty years.
Crying about the maximum sentence with out mentioning the sentencing guidelines is the moral equivalent t
Re:Carceral state (Score:5, Informative)
I know a dude who pled guilty to a financial crime who had never profited and wasn't in on the scheme. Prosecutors knew it, but didn't care. "Someone had to pay" and the two perpetrators had died of AIDS, actually. Some insurance scam thing involving AIG, the two perps were agents who had collected a huge premium and never forwarded it on, knowing their time was short and figured they'd have a good time in their last year or two, this being back when the disease was an actual death sentence. The guy I knew was the underwriter. When he was told he'd have to sign his home over to his defense attorney for legal fees, he pled guilty.
Pretty average outcome from what I understand.
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Your friend opted for the lifelong stigma of a criminal conviction and (I assume?) some amount of prison time rather than the temporary stigma of being broke?
Don't doubt your story, it happens all the time, it's not fair, but I wouldn't have made that decision in his shoes. I was charged with a crime I didn't commit. Copping a plea never crossed my mind. I rejected the offered ACD [fastlawpc.com] (tl;dr, a New York State process where the charges are dismissed and sealed if you stay out of trouble for six months) becau
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He was mostly concerned about his wife being on the street. Some things are more important...
I would have told him to fight it but I didn't know him until much later. I found out because he was going for a clearance and a felony conviction requires a dispensation in writing from either an armed service Secretary or the SecDef. He wasn't getting either, being pretty low on the totem pole. The administrative judge was sympathetic but statute law is what it is.
I told him to try to break it open but he was
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5 year sentence in the fed, served 4, by the way.
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He did make a mistake, he didn't push the perpetrators to forward the premiums firmly enough and left himself open to prosecution if they both died. Lazy ass dude, probably not worth 5 years in jail though.
Re:Carceral state (Score:5, Insightful)
A maximum sentence of 20 years (literally more than most murderers serve) for theft from Big Corp is unconscionable
Do you think eight digits of fraud should be treated the same as two or three digits of shoplifting from Walmart? Poor Bernie Madoff, all he did was steal some money, and the evil criminal justice system gave him a life sentence.
The only purpose of such Draconian sentencing guidelines in the US is to bully people into pleading guilty
That's not how the Federal Sentencing Guidelines work. The best you'll get for a guilty plea is a two level downward adjustment for "acceptance of responsibility", which at the extreme end of the scale knocks roughly 5 years off the range. Most crime would fall in the middle and you'd get significantly less of a reduction. It ain't nothing, particularly at the high end, but it wouldn't convince me to plead guilty to a crime I hadn't committed. Spending 25 years in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass Prison for a crime you didn't commit is hardly better than spending 30. Might as well take your chances with the jury. Or the judge. More acquittals come out of the Federal system with bench trials than jury trails. And you retain your right to appeal if you don't plead guilty.
save those in authority the effort of actually proving their fuckin' case
When the Feds go to trial they win >90% of the time. If you find yourself on the wrong end of a conference room table with the US Attorney you can count on them being able to prove their case. Up to you what you do with that. The winning move would be to avoid ending up in that predicament in the first place.
You should save your sympathy for the people who actually are railroaded by the criminal justice system. It certainly happens but not in this instance.
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You don't understand how the American "justice" system works ... going to court means risking being convicted of ALL crimes one is accused of, whereas plea bargaining means that someone pleads guilty to lesser charges or some charges are removed from consideration.
I think the *maximum* sentence for something like the crime described here should be 10 years, with possibility of parole after 50% (5 years). And yes, one of the shittiest aspects of Ronnie the Senile Clown's term was the removal of Federal paro
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Homie, I've actually been charged with a crime, so don't presume to tell me what I know and do not know about the American criminal justice system. I could give you a wall of text about its many problems but none of them apply here. These people aren't victims. They had access to the best lawyers money can buy, which they paid for in part or whole with the proceeds of the very crime they just plead guilty to! I had to cover the entire cost of my defense, using money I actually earned, not stole, at a ti
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Incarceration rates in the US say otherwise.
At the end of the day, I don't have the power to change the US. Too many uneducated, brainwashed nincompoops who vote here and LIKE their restrictions.
My best option is to vote with my feet. I won't miss it much.
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I will also add that COVID did a number on the in-person economy of the US. I *like* going to events in person, working in person, shopping in person, eating out in person (even if alone). Serendipity. Everything seems to have moved toward an app or delivery model since 2020.
It was refreshing to be back in Europe this summer, which is much more conservative (with a small "c") and less willing to embrace any kind of "new normal." Life felt indistinguishable from the pre-COVID before time -- if anything, i
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Wah, wah, America sucks, wah, wah, the EU is better. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. ;-)
Last time I engage with you boss. It's lamentable, we could actually have a fun fact based conversation if you wanted, and I suspect we agree on more than we disagree.
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A maximum sentence of 20 years (literally more than most murderers serve) for theft from Big Corp is unconscionable
Do you think eight digits of fraud should be treated the same as two or three digits of shoplifting from Walmart? Poor Bernie Madoff, all he did was steal some money, and the evil criminal justice system gave him a life sentence.
This... And forget the poor old big company, his victims were likely small businesses just trying to make an honest living.
The penalty isn't for the profit he deprived from a big and in their own right abusive company, it's for all the people he knowingly sold stuff he didn't have the rights to. Avaya should also be up on extortion charges, but that's a different argument, I've zero sympathy for them, I have sympathy for the poor shmucks who gave this arsehat money under deliberately false pretences.
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in often squalid conditions that pay lip service to rehabilitation.
I think you are wrong about this.
They don't even pay lip service to rehabilitation.
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What a great example of "how to lie with statistics". Compare the MAXIMUM sentence of one crime with the AVERAGE TIME SERVED of another.
The MAXIMUM sentence for murder is life without possibility of parole (or in some states, death). The average time served before first release for murder is 18 years.
The MAXIMUM sentence for wire fraud is 20 years. The average time served (for fraud of this size) is about 5 years.
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20 years? (Score:2)
You could probably off their CEO for less.
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Jerkoff or knockoff? Context is everything.
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Because semen.
Woah, that's greedy and goes against the scene (Score:2)
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Modded down by Avaya reseller lol
The real crime (Score:2)
The real crime is that there are people out there still using Avaya. I mean, why? Why would you PAY someone to do that to you?
For most businesses, asterisk is just fine. Freepbx if you want a pretty pretty gui. Even larger businesses can use asterisk, and although you would certainly start needing specialized techs at a certain point, they're still going to come cheaper than just about anything Avaya AND be more user friendly and functional.
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Well, in the critical 24x7 enterprise world, open source PBX software isn't going to get you the support you need. And even if it's a small business - will the guy who you paid cheap to do it support you to?
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I've heard this argument, but I've also been a part of massive outages from the likes of 3com, Cisco and of course Avaya. In several instances it took all day to even get someone to look at the problem.
Ultimately your overall experience comes down to your first tier support, and I'd much rather have a simple to use/learn solution with almost no license shenanigans so my inhouse staff can fix most issues quickly ( instead of having to call support ).
Incidentally, asterisk DOES have enterprise support. Paid