Solid, Liquid, Polycarbonate
Blame it on the Grain
Let’s talk about products labeled as “organic”. In theory, products with an organic label adhere to the USDA’s rules about how they are grown or raised. They are generally more expensive, and sales have quadrupled in the last decade. Americans love organic food. There’s one problem: there is no evidence it’s any better for you than normal food. Harvard Health says it plainly:
While organic foods have fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and are free of hormones and antibiotics, they don't appear to have a nutritional advantage over their conventional counterparts. "There've been a number of studies examining the macro- and micronutrient content, but whether organically or conventionally grown, the foods are really similar for vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates," says McManus.
Now, I work in advertising, so I’m probably the last person who should be scolding people for buying shit they don’t need, or overpaying for what is essentially a large-scale marketing campaign by the organic food industry. Organics do not seem to be going away, so if people feel better buying them, that’s great.
You’d think that a $40 billion dollar food industry would have strict guidelines and enforcement. All those people paying a huge mark-up want to know their food is really organic! Well, you’d be wrong:
Although the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 requires certifying agents to conduct periodic residue testing of organic products, we found that NOP officials did not incorporate these provisions into NOP regulations. None of the four certifying agents we visited conducted periodic residue testing of the approximately 5,000 certified operations for which they were responsible, and there is no assurance that certifying agents performed regular periodic testing at any of the approximately 28,000 certified organic operations worldwide.
That’s from the 2010 audit of the organic program by the USDA’s inspector general. None of the agents charged with certifying food was organic actually inspected any of the operations. Cool! What were they doing all day? The USDA claimed it was too expensive to test organics, and so they…simply didn’t do it! Okay.
So we’ve established that organic foods have no nutritional benefits, and that the government agency in charge of classifying organics doesn’t actually inspect the facilities where they’re produced. What could go wrong?
The reason you’re about organics is this story, from the Kansas City Star. For years, a man named Randy Constant was able to sell non-organic grain, corn, and other crops as organic and pocket millions of dollars in the process:
During the first two thirds of the past decade, Constant sold more than 11.5 million bushels of non-GMO corn and soybeans, and almost all of it was falsely labeled as organic.
Constant had a close call in 2007 when he was caught selling genetically modified soybeans to a buyer in Nevada. They were able to detect the ruse because tests exist to identify whether crops have been genetically modified, but not whether they’ve been sprayed with chemicals, which violates the “organic” certification.
That’s right, you can’t test to see whether something is actually organic, unless you happen to test the crops immediately after they’ve been sprayed or harvested, before the chemicals have had time to wash off. What a good system!
A system with no oversight to begin with, in charge of detecting things it can’t test for. And it’s growing every year, making tens of billions of dollars for farmers. We export it all over the world! As a matter of fact we aren’t the only ones in on this scam, as I learned from an absolutely bonkers white paper, which is called, seriously, “The Turkish Infiltration of the U.S. Organic Grain Market” and boy:
Agronomists, with experience in the organic industry, have estimated that one bulk cargo ship of grain could be equal to the annual production of 50-80 US certified organic farms.
I do not know whether the Turks are trying to flood our organic grain market with “fake” product but, again, organic is essentially a meaningless label, and American farmers are doing it too!
Randy Constant appears to have been particularly good at passing his products off as authentic. People who knew him said he was a smart guy, and understood the industry, which seem like key markers of success for a Midwestern crop salesman. It’s probably a little shitty of me to make fun of corny trade publications, but I am absolutely not above pointing out that in 2017 Randy was featured on Successful Farming’s “10 Successful Farmers to Watch” list, pictured below:
I love it. There’s something pure about naming your magazine about farming Successful Farming. His house was raided by law enforcement the same month the article came out.
Those of you who read the Star piece - you should, it’s good - will note I have avoided the sordid details of Randy’s personal life. He was clearly a troubled person, and used the proceeds of his fraud to do a lot of dumb things. After he was sentenced, he committed suicide. It’s a sad story.
The judge claimed - absurdly, in my view - that it was necessary to sentence Randy to 10 years in prison for one count of wire fraud, and said he caused “incalculable damage” to the organic food industry, whatever that means. The USDA, for its part, has said it’s trying to improve oversight and inspections, though until they invent a way to detect the chemicals, I’m not sure what good it will do.
So yeah, the whole thing is dumb and sucks, but do we really deserve anything better? Paying a mark-up for woo woo science is in our DNA as Americans. One last fun tidbit about Randy is that he raised a bunch of money for an aquaculture start-up called Quixotic Farming which lost millions of dollars and was “a spectacular failure” in his own words. At least he had a sense of humor.
The Day the Music Died
For the sake of this intro, I’m going to assume most of my readership were born in the 80’s and 90’s. We grew up with some analog devices - CDs, tapes, corded phones - and we watched as everything turned into bytes on a computer hard drive.
Napster is often cited as the moment digital music took off. Suddenly anyone could have access to music via MP3s. People predicted the music industry would never recover. Twenty years later, it’s still doing fine. But for a period of time, a network of clever enthusiasts found ways to get copies of CD and DVD masters out of production facilities, giving their online followers access to music and movies days or weeks before anyone else.
This story came out in 2015, but it stuck with me, because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It tells the tale of Bennie “Dell” Glover, an employee at a CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina, who would become central to the Internet’s most notorious gang of pre-release music leakers.
In the 1990s, before MP3s became a thing, Glover and some of his colleagues would smuggle CDs out of the manufacturing plant and burn them at home, either for personal use or to sell as bootlegs. His factory was acquired by Universal music, who published more desirable albums from hip-hop and rock artists, and for awhile his bootleg CD business thrived. Despite increased security at the plant, Glover found ways to get the discs out. They were quite inventive:
At the end of each shift, employees put the overstock disks into scrap bins. These scrap bins were later taken to a plastics grinder, where the disks were destroyed. […] If there were twenty-four disks and only twenty-three made it into the grinder’s feed slot, no one in accounting would know.
So, on the way from the conveyor belt to the grinder, an employee could take off his surgical glove while holding a disk. He could wrap the glove around the disk and tie it off. He could then hide the disk, leaving everything else to be destroyed. At the end of his shift, he could return and grab the disk.
That still left the security guards. But here, too, there were options. One involved belt buckles. […] The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards wouldn’t ask anyone to take them off.
Glover was promoted to management, and was able to ensure that when big releases were brought to the factory for pressing, he could insert his moles into the production line at the right times. Some of the stories from the plant are very music industry:
Every once in a while, a marquee release would come through—“The Eminem Show,” say, or Nelly’s “Country Grammar.” It arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. When one of these albums was pressed, Van Buren ordered wandings for every employee in the plant.
I’m enjoying the mental image of some poor assistant tasked with treating a master tape like the nuclear football. Rolling up to the factory in a bulletproof limo, only to sit there and watch as machines whirr and a bunch of CD burners prepare to unleash “Hot in Here” out into the world.
Glover was introduced into the world of MP3s and digital file sharing by a friend of his. He connected with a person named "Kali” who was the head of Team RNS, the group responsible for ripping, encoding, and releasing the music Glover appropriated, sometimes weeks before the album came out.
Kali cultivated other contacts, including a college DJ at UPenn who had access to the occasional radio promo disc and was able to burn and leak it before release. He had radio DJs from all over the world, music journalists, and people who lived overseas, in countries that sometimes got releases before the US market.
Glover, for his part, parlayed his success and access to “Scene” sharing sites to start a local movie bootlegging business in his home town. He bought DVD burners and ripped theater releases days or weeks before they came out on video. Generally groups like Kali’s banned their members from selling copies of anything they downloaded, but Glover had a pass; Kali needed him, and his access to the pre-release albums.
Napster was sued out of existence in 2001, but the recording industry wasn’t able to fully purge the new peer-to-peer sharing model with all of its lawsuits. The door had been opened, and it would prove impossible to close.
In 2004, the FBI and international law enforcement agencies raided more than a hundred people suspected of piracy. The RIAA’s investigators had tipped them off to the existence of Scene groups, and the cops did industry’s bidding. Kali took steps to secure his group and lock down access, even stripping potentially identifying data from the group’s releases.
By 2006 Glover’s bootlegging business was thriving; he had been doing it for years at this point. Many in the Scene were growing up, becoming adults, debating what else they should do with their lives. In 2007, Kali shut RNS down. Their final leak was a Fall Out Boy album.
Neither Kali nor Glover could fully stay out of the Scene, however, and both got back in. Later in 2007, Glover found himself in a…unique situation. Kanye West had been beefing with 50 Cent, and 50 had declared that if Kanye sold more copies of his upcoming album, he’d retire. I completely forgot this happened! Anyhow, Glover got copies of both albums in advance of release, and was suddenly faced with a monumental decision - if he leaked one of the records before the other, he could hurt sales and cause a marquis rapper to literally retire from the game. He decided to do it:
Universal officially released the albums on Tuesday, September 11th. Despite the leaks, both sold well. “Curtis” sold almost seven hundred thousand copies in its first week, “Graduation” nearly a million. Kanye won the sales contest, even though Glover had leaked his album first. He’d just run a controlled experiment on the effects of leaking on music sales, an experiment that suggested that, at least in this case, the album that was leaked first actually did better. But Glover was happy with the outcome. “Graduation” had grown on him. He liked Kanye’s album, and felt that he deserved his victory. And 50 didn’t retire after all.
Like many people I write about, Glover had escaped scrutiny for so long, had pirated over two thousand albums in half a decade, and had made himself a nice living. He was, he admits, drunk on his own success, and didn’t think he could get caught. On September 12th, 2007 he got a wake-up call:
In the dawn light, Glover saw three men in the parking lot. As he approached his truck, he pulled the key fob out of his pocket. The men stared at him but didn’t move. Then he pressed the remote, the truck chirped, and the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.
The men were from the Cleveland County sheriff’s office. They informed Glover that the F.B.I. was currently searching his house; they had been sent to retrieve him.
The agent in charge attempted to turn Glover on Kali, but he wasn’t having it:
Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make. He could play dumb, and further the investigation of Kali. Or he could warn him off.
“You’re too late,” Glover said. “They hit me yesterday. Shut it down.”
“O.K., I got you,” Kali said. Then he said, “I appreciate it,” and hung up.
I am a strong proponent of the No Snitchin’ philosophy, and while this is not legal advice it’s generally not good to entrap or rat out your accomplices. It’s significantly harder for them to make a case without testimony! Good for Glover.
However! Like many people who have been caught with incriminating evidence, who are up against a deeply unfair criminal justice system that spends most of its efforts coercing deals and confessions, Glover decided to plead guilty and testify against Kali, who turned out to be a young man named Adil Cassim. Glover’s initial loyalty had proven extremely helpful - when he was arrested they hadn’t found any files, and only a tenuous connection to RNS. Despite Glover testifying at his trial, Cassim was acquitted by a jury.
Glover, for his part, only served 3 months, which is good. None of the other people he’d interacted with during his time as probably the single most prolific leaker of music in the world served more than a couple of months behind bars. The FBI had cracked the case and rounded up the people behind the “most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history” and had a couple of short sentences to show for it. The good guys won?
It turned out the music industry would adapt and be fine. Whatever you may think about iTunes, or the various streaming services, or how artists are compensated, the fears of the RIAA in the 2000s have not been borne out - people still pay for music, albums are still released, and life goes on. I’ll let the article play us out:
On the day that Glover’s home was raided, F.B.I. agents confiscated his computers, his duplicating towers, his hard drives, and his PlayStation. They took a few pictures of the albums he’d collected over the years, but they left the duffelbag full of compact disks behind—even as evidence, they were worthless.
Water, With Hydrogen
On a lighter note, let’s talk about gas. A company called Trusii has been selling a machine they claim adds hydrogen to water, which gives it healing properties that can cure a wide range of health conditions. Sound familiar? What’s new, in this case, is the way Trusii scammed its customers. To purchase one of their home water machines customers would take out a loan from a third party company, and Trusii would then cover the cost of their payments if they fulfilled certain obligations, like making positive posts on social media. I know it’s a little confusing, but Trusii told them it would send them money to make their water machine loan payments if they became brand ambassadors. Sure.
The stories from customers are about as awful as you’d imagine:
Heather Anderson, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, said she was told to publish a “boast” video online to promote the product, even after her machine started to develop mold.
[…]
Karen Wondergem, an educator in Arizona with a thyroid-related health issue, said her machine stopped working two months after she received it. A company representative told her over Skype to fix the power supply connection with duct tape. In August, she said, her water started tasting funny and the bottles she filled up had a musty smell.
[…]
Soon after Micah Curtis’s Trusii machine arrived in June, it flooded her kitchen. Curtis, who works as a credit specialist in New York, said that experience made her uncomfortable promoting the product to her audience of more than 3,000 Instagram followers.
The thing is, they probably could have gotten away with the scam for a bit longer if they’d sold water machines that actually worked. They aren’t expensive! I found electronic water filter machines online for as little as $150. I bet they don’t flood your kitchen or grow mold after a month! Come on, people.
Of course, the primary scam was that Trusii was receiving the full price of their machines from the finance companies who paid them the $7,000 or $10,000 for the units, and left the customers on the hook for the payments. It won’t surprise you to learn that they did not send the customers the installment money. One of the lenders is suing Trusii and claiming they will “protect and advocate for the consumer” which should mean they will absolve everyone of their debt for the scam machines. We’ll see.
The owners are also boringly shady:
The reason many of the customers in the study didn’t get paid is that they failed to fulfill the program’s requirements, the owners said. They did concede that there have been some problems with the hardware, which they chalked up to “growing pains.” As for the case study, they said Trusii didn’t make any money from the program and had actually overpaid clients $2.5 million because of an accounting error.
If I were going to run a scam company selling bogus water filter machines, and it turned out I sourced my bogus machines from a lousy manufacturer, and a journalist from CNBC called me about it, I don’t think I’d do an interview! If I did an interview, I don’t think I’d blame my customers for the machines being broken. I also don’t think I’d make any claims about an accounting error that mistakenly paid out millions of dollars. This obviously isn’t legal or PR advice, but if Trusii’s owners happen across this blog I hope they do better in the future.
Scams like this keep happening because we have a massive, unregulated “alternative” and “natural” therapy market in the United States. People are allowed to sell water machines and make dubious health claims. They’re allowed to call it “biohacking” and charge $10,000 for a shitty plastic mold cultivator.
Their customers are desperate, and suffering from serious health conditions, which makes them especially susceptible to wild claims. It is easy for outside observers to look at stories like these and think “there’s no way I’d fall for that”, but the reason they’re so effective, and that we read about them practically every week, is that the brain is wired to want to believe things when we’re in an emotionally vulnerable state. I’ve written about romance con men who prey upon women who are lonely. Imagine what you’d do to feel better when you’re sick or hurting, or what you’d do for a loved one.
In a perfect world we’d have watchdogs, government agencies and other groups who’d help protect us from our flawed brains. Instead we have sad stories about people who wished for a better, happier life and got taken in.
Short Cons
Washington Post - ““This is organized fraud on a massive scale,” said Gabriel Openshaw, Overland’s vice president of e-commerce. “These sites are stealing our images and sending customers horrendous-looking knockoffs — or nothing at all — in exchange for their money.””
NY Post - “Facebook and eBay pledged Wednesday to more aggressively tackle scammers trading fake and misleading product reviews in new agreements with British regulators.”
ZD Net - “Dating apps Grindr, OkCupid, and Tinder are allegedly spreading user information like sexual preferences, behavioural data, and precise location to advertising companies in ways that may violate privacy laws, according to a study conducted by the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC).”
Don’t get bamboozled:
Tips and organic recipes to scammerdarkly@gmail.com.