<story><title>Uber&apos;s &apos;hustle-oriented&apos; culture becomes a black mark on employees&apos; résumés</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work-culture-travis-kalanick-susan-fowler-controversy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>It can be worse. Something similar is happening to the &amp;quot;binary option&amp;quot; industry in Tel Aviv, Israel. A &amp;quot;binary option&amp;quot; is a bet on whether some financial indicator will go up or down. While there are such things as real binary options on real exchanges, the ones sold from phone banks in Tel Aviv are bets against the house.  The house sets the odds and usually wins, and even when they lose, most binary option shops don&amp;#x27;t pay up. 80% of investors lose everything. In Israel, it&amp;#x27;s illegal to scam Israelis this way, but completely legal to scam the rest of the world.&lt;p&gt;The scale of this industry is substantial.  It&amp;#x27;s doing at least $1.2 billion a year in income, and that&amp;#x27;s the part that pays taxes in Israel. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the scam was growing rapidly.&lt;p&gt;Then, in 2016, the jaws began to close.  The US CFTC won a big case against the biggest binary option firm in Israel, Banc de Binary.  They had to pay back everybody who lost money and pay huge damages.  (Banc de Binary once offered $10,000 to anyone who would remove that info from their Wikipedia entry. That attempt backfired, badly.) Then there was a 15-part expose in the Times of Israel, titled &amp;quot;The Wolves of Tel Aviv&amp;quot;.[1]  Now, finally, there are more investigations and a bill to make it illegal to run this scam out of Israel. Banc De Binary ceased operation a few weeks ago. (Or at least they disappeared, removing their sign from the Banc De Binary Tower.) At least four other binary option &amp;quot;brokers&amp;quot; have gone out of business in recent weeks.&lt;p&gt;As a result, there are lots of layoffs. Scamming people from a phone bank was a good-paying job. The companies liked to hire recent immigrants to Israel who could speak the languages of their target countries fluently.  English and Arabic were the most popular languages.  A lobbyist for the binary option industry, testifying before a committee of the Knesset, claimed that there are 20,000 people employed in binary options in Israel, and 60,000 people indirectly. &amp;quot;You see the building boom right now in Tel Aviv? Well, you can just say goodbye to that because most skyscrapers in Tel Aviv will be empty. There will be no one to fill them up.&amp;quot; There&amp;#x27;s even a claim from the binary option industry that shutting down this scam will increase terrorism, because it will take away the income of thousands of Arabs.&lt;p&gt;So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people.  A former employee of a binary option company faces a far worse black mark than being from Uber. The binary option salespeople are full time con artists. Nobody legit in finance is going to hire them.  Getting any legit job will be tough.&lt;p&gt;(World&amp;#x27;s smallest violin plays.)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&amp;#x2F;the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-vast-amoral-binary-options-scam-exposed&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&amp;#x2F;the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterisP</author><text>If this results in common knowledge that parents will tell to their college-age kids &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t go working for scammers, because when they get exposed this will be a black mark on your CV for years&amp;quot; - well, then that&amp;#x27;s a good thing for society in general, as it will make recruiting for &amp;quot;technically legal, not yet explicitly prohibited&amp;quot; scams harder.</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber&apos;s &apos;hustle-oriented&apos; culture becomes a black mark on employees&apos; résumés</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work-culture-travis-kalanick-susan-fowler-controversy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>It can be worse. Something similar is happening to the &amp;quot;binary option&amp;quot; industry in Tel Aviv, Israel. A &amp;quot;binary option&amp;quot; is a bet on whether some financial indicator will go up or down. While there are such things as real binary options on real exchanges, the ones sold from phone banks in Tel Aviv are bets against the house.  The house sets the odds and usually wins, and even when they lose, most binary option shops don&amp;#x27;t pay up. 80% of investors lose everything. In Israel, it&amp;#x27;s illegal to scam Israelis this way, but completely legal to scam the rest of the world.&lt;p&gt;The scale of this industry is substantial.  It&amp;#x27;s doing at least $1.2 billion a year in income, and that&amp;#x27;s the part that pays taxes in Israel. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the scam was growing rapidly.&lt;p&gt;Then, in 2016, the jaws began to close.  The US CFTC won a big case against the biggest binary option firm in Israel, Banc de Binary.  They had to pay back everybody who lost money and pay huge damages.  (Banc de Binary once offered $10,000 to anyone who would remove that info from their Wikipedia entry. That attempt backfired, badly.) Then there was a 15-part expose in the Times of Israel, titled &amp;quot;The Wolves of Tel Aviv&amp;quot;.[1]  Now, finally, there are more investigations and a bill to make it illegal to run this scam out of Israel. Banc De Binary ceased operation a few weeks ago. (Or at least they disappeared, removing their sign from the Banc De Binary Tower.) At least four other binary option &amp;quot;brokers&amp;quot; have gone out of business in recent weeks.&lt;p&gt;As a result, there are lots of layoffs. Scamming people from a phone bank was a good-paying job. The companies liked to hire recent immigrants to Israel who could speak the languages of their target countries fluently.  English and Arabic were the most popular languages.  A lobbyist for the binary option industry, testifying before a committee of the Knesset, claimed that there are 20,000 people employed in binary options in Israel, and 60,000 people indirectly. &amp;quot;You see the building boom right now in Tel Aviv? Well, you can just say goodbye to that because most skyscrapers in Tel Aviv will be empty. There will be no one to fill them up.&amp;quot; There&amp;#x27;s even a claim from the binary option industry that shutting down this scam will increase terrorism, because it will take away the income of thousands of Arabs.&lt;p&gt;So 20,000 scammers are becoming unemployed, in a city of only 400,000 people.  A former employee of a binary option company faces a far worse black mark than being from Uber. The binary option salespeople are full time con artists. Nobody legit in finance is going to hire them.  Getting any legit job will be tough.&lt;p&gt;(World&amp;#x27;s smallest violin plays.)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&amp;#x2F;the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-vast-amoral-binary-options-scam-exposed&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesofisrael.com&amp;#x2F;the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Flammy</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve heard pieces of this story, so thank you for the history and summary.&lt;p&gt;I suspect what you say is true, this is a &amp;#x27;black mark&amp;#x27;. Working for Uber? Maybe if you are in upper management, would it be a similar &amp;quot;black mark&amp;quot; but even then, are you going to blame every C_O for their scandals? Probably not all. As for the 98% of employees? I doubt working for Uber will seriously impact their next job (and much less all following jobs).&lt;p&gt;Just think, today we don&amp;#x27;t hold it against middle management or individual contributors who happened to be employed at Enron at the wrong time...</text></comment>