In Sydney, Australia, an accountant was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill a client who he had stolen almost $84,000 from. He had failed to remit those amounts to the government for taxes owed by the victim. The motive was, unsur­pris­ingly, to “stop Mr Williams from bringing the fraud to light.”

This is pretty crazy stuff. Seems like a tragi­cally low amount of money to get someone killed over. I mean, how much do you pay a hitman to do the job? $10-20K? He was convicted of the fraud as well.

Here’s a New Zealander that spread $300,000 across over 80 different clients — an average of $3,750 per client. Diver­si­fying the revenue streams allowed the enter­prising chap to make much more than $84K.

Regardless, the old maxim is still holding: If you’re committing a fraud, you will get caught. Then you’ll have to decide if you want to contract the killing of the person who caught you or just face the music.