Appendix C: Note on the role of Billmatic in the Great Financial Glitch of December 2022
Since the voting of the Consumption Protection Laws in February 2022, Rapacious Pty Ltd, established in March 2022, had developed a tremendously successful business with their data capture and resale model. In the course of the brief existence of the company that would briefly become the largest Corporation in the history of the World, three major quantum leaps in its profitability ensured it would be always occupy a prime spot in the History book of the financial world.
The first leap was simply the idea behind the very creation of Rapacious Pty Ltd: pirating data and holding it hostage until a ransom was paid for its release. This process called STD (Safekeeping and Transferring Data), had earned the company the prestigious Consumption Reinforcement Award for the People (CRAP) in 2022 in the first (and only) year of the award. It had allowed Rapacious to absorb HSBC within a week of trading, along with 246 other minor companies. It had of course by then changed its status from an obscure Seattle-based company to a corporation already on the way to stardom. In fact, not having been able to purchase SpaceWhy from Mylong Tusk, it had developed its own companies from scratch, SpaceZ.
Up until the development of the IBISE receiver, profit was mostly being generated by selling saucy photos, messages and videos to businessmen. They were usually pathetic fat and greasy businessmen sending pictures of themselves with their young blonde mistresses, in the mistaken belief that the mistresses would find images of themselves with a fat blob on top more arousing than the thickness of their wallet. The data was usually sold back to the businessmen for fear by the businessmen that the images would become public, and that model was doing quite well.
With a bit of help from social media companies, most of which had by now been acquired by Rapacious, the legitimate wives of the businessmen soon became an even more profitable source of income. Consumption laws standard practice rapidly allowed for Rapacious to collect half of the wives’ share of the divorce proceedings. In many cases, often correlated with the greasiness of the businessmen, that share could increase up to 90%.
The business model was however a rather tedious way to generate money as it involved actually targeting suitable future business partners and using traditional hacking means to enter into the desired business relationships with them. Significant time and effort was also spent countering anti-hacking measures, and that expenditure was at risk of not being fully compensated by the purposely developed Grants Programs, provided by a number of State-sponsored Consumption Protection Laws advocacy groups.
The second quantum leap in Rapacious’s success stemmed from a development by the IBISE (International Bureau for International Space Exploitation), formerly NASA, which had been bought by Rapacious a month after the start of trading to help with setting up SpaceZ. Amongst the Rapacious executive circles, it was rumored that IBISE stood for I can’t Believe It’s So Easy.
IBISE had developed and patented a receiver so powerful that it would actually bend in space the electromagnetic spectrum in the frequencies used for data transfer. If a transmission made from point A to point B was unlucky enough to have one of Rapacious’s receiver located within a radius of less than the A to B distance, the transmission would be wholly absorbed by Rapacious, never to be received by B, unless of course a monetary agreement could be reached.
A few tweaks were necessary initially to let B tell A that something had gone astray with the transmission, as those queries were also being intercepted by Rapacious and never received by A. Some very clever Social media AI routines to decode and filter the messages, even encrypted ones, soon fixed that with a minimum of fuss, especially since those media had been bought by Rapacious within 3 months of trading. This development essentially saved Rapacious from having to expand energy to bring in customers; if Rapacious couldn’t come to the customers, the customers would come to Rapacious.
There was a messy period between July and September 2022 when a number of lawsuits forced Telecommunications companies into receivership and data flow was stemmed for a while. Simply put, so much communication was being absorbed by Rapacious and its rapidly developing network of IBISE receivers, that people started to sue telecommunication companies for failing to deliver on their service. A few attempts by green popup companies were made to start communication going again via smoke signals, but it was generally agreed that this was not an efficient way of doing business.
Rapacious bought the telecom companies one after the other and promptly resumed business. A small caveat added to the PDS of the network operators simply stated that they would now take no responsibility for any loss of data; and that any action taken against them in that regards would be dealt with all the kneecapping power that the Consumption Protection Laws gave them.
To maintain the customer base, but also for PR purposes and to stem the flow of suicides by greasy businessmen, Rapacious decided to engage in a vast program of self regulation so as to not make too much profit. The coms companies they had bought altered the frequencies used to avoid capture by the IBISE receiver. In turn IBISE would alter the spectrum of captured frequencies. This internal arms race was somewhat moderated when communications started to enter the UV spectrum and a lot of people in the vicinity of the receivers were starting to die of skin cancers.
The IBISE scheme came to an abrupt end in November 2022 as OP Dump judged that the program of self regulation by Rapacious was illegal with regards to the Consumption Protection Laws, and he got the entire IBISE board sacked.
In the meantime, Rapacious had been developing its third profitability Quantum leap. The innocent-looking program called Billmatic was launched in October 2022, just before the end of the IBISE program. Even with a return to conventional methods of Data Capture and Storage, the profits generated by Billmatic simply dwarfed all the previous profits generated to date by Rapacious within a week of the launch.
Part of the set of Consumption Protection Laws allowed the mere reading a document to be accepted as tacit acceptance of it and of all the terms and conditions it contained. Simply put, code embedded in any email sent by a company using Billmatic would cause a subroutine to scan the eye movements of the reader via the reading device camera. Once read, as deduced by the clever code, the reader would simply be billed to the tune of what the sender was asking, with no possibility to unread the information nor renege on the payment of the bill.
Some other fantastic features of Billmatic were:
One day in November 2022, the founder of Rapacious Pty Ltd, now Rapacious Inc., Mr Ike Ranvaders, had decided that he had had enough of the game. He had after all been in it for the best part of 9 months, and the demise of the IBISE program had left a bitter taste, so it was time for him to cash in his chips.
He was after all 22 years old and feeling that he was getting older and bolder by the minute. One final financial operation would do the trick of setting him up comfortably in a remote galaxy somewhere near Proxima centauri or Beltegueuse.
Ike decided to franchise the Billmatic concept, the use of Billmatic by a