• justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
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        14 days ago

        A very common scam by the upper and elite classes was roughly:

        1. Start a shell company in one of the colonies, state its purpose to do something related to logging/mining or just outright colonization.
        2. Get big buisness loan from London bank under the name and address of that firm.
        3. Close up the business.
        4. Repeat in a different colony.

        Some of the “intolerable acts” were designed to prevent this from being possible. One of the biggest ones would be the “stamp act” that would provide the british banks a paper trail to track exactly who purchased deeds and other things for the fake companies.

        This is explicitly why the initial riots in Boston and New York were completely faked. This is also why the Adams brothers(signers of the dec of independence) forced their newspapers to run fake letters and articles astroturfing support for a revolution.