The Night Before Griftsmas
The Smash and Grab Bag
Since this is the final newsletter of the year, I’ve cleared out my bookmarks and provided you, dear readers, a list of stories I didn’t get to properly write about because 2020 happened. Enjoy!
The New York Times details the “cum-ex” tax credit scandal in Europe. Essentially, hundreds of traders, bankers, and lawyers engineered a complex series of stock trades to trick European governments into paying them multiple tax credits on a basket of stocks. Incredibly, they ripped off an estimated $60 billion dollars in 5 years. Germany is bracing for a wave of new cases since the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution runs out soon.
Michael Hobbes, reporter at the Huffington Post and host of the excellent You’re Wrong About podcast, writes about the “Golden Age of White Collar Crime”. A justice system that favors the wealthy and well-connected is enabling American elites to steal, defraud, and hide their money with little fear of punishment. COVID-19 has further exacerbated not only wealth inequality, but inequality of outcomes - we’ve watched the people who caused the American pandemic crisis become literally immune to the consequences of their actions.
The Wall Street Journal exposed the massive investment fund the Mormon Church has quietly built over half a century. A whistleblower told the IRS the Church had used member donations to amass over $80 billion dollars via investments around the globe. The fund operates under near total secrecy - especially from members of the Church, who likely had no idea their tithing was going to grow the organization’s wealth exponentially, rather than engaging in the charitable work it expects of its congregants.
At GQ, Josh Dean details a bank heist straight out of a movie script. I won’t spoil the details, but it’s got a (mostly) happy ending, and a compelling cast of characters.
The NY Times reports fake check schemes are up 65% since 2015. If you get a check in the mail you don’t recognize, don’t deposit it. People under 30 are more likely to fall for the scam because they don’t understand how checks work.
Finally, an answer to the question we’ve all been asking: can you hire a hit man on the dark web? Sadly, the NY Times says the answer is no, and they were unable to find any real murderers for hire. There’s an academic paper about the phenomenon, but essentially scammers have found a way to extract large amounts of money from disturbed people who are determined to have someone killed. Sometimes the sites are used in stings. If you really want someone dead do it yourself or, better yet, don’t do it at all.
Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News tells the tale of Daniel Yomtobian, founder of Advertise.com and operator of a network of click fraud websites. Fraudsters use a combination of botnets - hijacked real computers - and other tricks to send fabricated clicks to websites, racking up ad revenue for themselves and their clients. Yomtobian used browser “toolbars” and downloadable extensions to fake web traffic from unwitting computer users all over the world, making himself tens of millions of dollars in the process.
The New Republic details corruption and collusion among rival factions in Kurdistan to rip off the US military. Documents supplied to the Government Accountability Project show the billionaire Bazrani family - the Kurdish “mafia” according to locals - working alongside political rivals to inflate oil and gas deals with the Pentagon. A complex network of shell companies funnels bribe money to officials and profits to the Bazranis and their collaborators.
Aaron Gordon at VICE writes about the broken algorithm that poisoned American transportation. For decades, city planners relied on travel demand models to secure funding for road and infrastructure projects premised on faulty algorithms that may or may not be rigged to ensure a steady flow of cash to contractors and developers. Was it bad faith or bad data? In politics, it’s hard to tell the difference.
Chiara Eisner writes in Wired about questionable memory supplement Prevagen and its long-disputed claims of efficacy. Despite scam supplement stories regularly appearing in the news, the general public still doesn’t seem to understand the industry is nearly wholly unregulated in the US. The maker of Prevagen spent years preying on fear of memory loss, while their product did nothing and caused harmful side effects in some people. Under our current regulatory structure, there’s little cause for optimism anyone will step in to stop these companies making billions a year pushing their useless and potentially dangerous snake oil.
The New Republic uncovers a new way tech companies and publishers are ripping off schools - rather than selling reusable e-books to schools, they are charging inflated rents. School libraries are spending large percentages of their budgets leasing e-books rather than buying their less expensive paper cousins. The Internet Archive attempted to create a free e-book lender with few restrictions to helps schools forced into e-learning during the pandemic, so a cartel of publishing houses immediately sued and shut it down.
Apple’s Head of Global Security was indicted in a bribery scheme to acquire concealed-carry gun permits for Apple’s security team in exchange for…iPads. Two officers at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department allegedly extorted quite a few people, but the Apple chief got pinched for playing along with the scheme, offering $70,000 dollars’ worth of iPads in exchange for four gun permits.
The MIT Technology Review looks at how North Korean hackers turn the cryptocurrency they steal into real money for their dear leader. Typically, it involves bouncing the crypto around to many different wallets, and then finding a real world “fence” who will convert it into cash with no questions asked. North Korea has spent decades building a highly sophisticated hacking network, for espionage and as an income source for an economically isolated dictatorship.
Thank you for your continued support of ASD, best holiday wishes, and here’s to a new year full of scams!
Short Cons
WSJ - “With StreamScam, swindlers used a practice known as “spoofing” to trick advertisers into believing their ads were running on legitimate apps and devices, according to Oracle.”
FTC - “The top gift card brands that scammers demand change over time. Reports to the FTC suggest that eBay is now the gift card of choice for scammers.”
Reuters - “The U.S. National Security Agency issued a rare “cybersecurity advisory” Thursday detailing how certain Microsoft Azure cloud services may have been compromised by hackers and directing users to lock down their systems.”
CNBC - “A fake shipping link can launch ransomware like it did for Hoehn, or it can redirect to a counterfeit branded page that asks for credit card or personal information to reroute a package, or tricks you into entering your username and password.”
CNET - “Nikola is closing out a rough 2020 with news that another of its planned vehicles won't see the light of day. The startup zero-emissions vehicle manufacturer had previously announced a deal working with refuse giant Republic Services to build a battery-powered garbage truck, but that EV collaboration is no more.”
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