Tag: crime

Links of the day – Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia

Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia are among today’s links.

Mind games, wine growers and the Naples mafia are among today’s links along with last person in Britain who lived under Queen Victoria passing away and a touching series of portraits showing the end of the film photography industry.

Cutting out the middle man

Reka Haros is a wine maker in Italy’s Venuto region. Like many small producers her winery struggles with distribution and sales in a crowded market. Reba’s solution of going direct to the customer is one that many businesses should be considering in a noisy world.

Life in protection

I don’t fear death, I fear being discredited. The story of Italian journalist Roberto Saviano and his eight years in protection after writing about the Naples mafia.

Picturing the decline of film photography

Canadian photographer Robert Burley travelled the world with his 4×5 field camera to document the end of analogue photography. It’s a poignant portrayal of how an entire industry comes to and with one technological change.

Last of the Victorians

Ethel Lang, the last surviving Briton to live under the reign of Queen Victoria, died last week at the age 114.

Manufacturing false memories

A frightening physiological experiment shows a cunning interviewer can convince most of us  we committed crimes which we are totally innocent of. This truly is a disturbing story.

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Greetings from the scammers

While the online scams evolve, the venal stupidity of victims doesn’t

The notorious “419 scams” have been around since the early days of the consumer internet.

419 scams are the elaborate internet frauds that try to convince people they unexpectedly come into money. Once a gullible victim takes the bait, they are duped into paying a range of ‘facilitation fees’ and costs that drains their saving.

The term 419 scam comes from the Nigerian criminal code that covers this crime, which was appropriate as most — although not all — of these emails originated from the country.

For a while in the early 2000s, internet users became used to receiving a few 419 scam emails every day but by the middle of the decade they largely dried up as the even the most gullible and greedy idiots became wise to the schemes.

That’s not to say they have completely vanished, this morning quite a distasteful one landed in my inbox.

Greetings,
I wish to seek your assistance to execute a business deal. I am Paul Williams a Contract Agent based in London. I require your consent to present you as next of kin to a client of mine, who died along with his wife and Two kids in the Asian Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines leaving behind a large sum of money without a next of kin. With your co-operation and information available to me you can make a claim on the funds as the next of kin to my deceased client. After release of the funds to you by the financial institution where it is lodged, we can share according to a percentage we agree upon. If you may be of assistance, please reply for further co-operation.
Best Regards,

Paul Williams.

It’s unlikely that Paul Williams exists and even if he did it’s unlikely he’d have anything to do with this unsavory scam that most people would immediate bin when they receive it.

Binning the message was my reaction as well, but as I was about to, it occurred to me that there are enough venal, stupid people in the world who would agree to be involved in such a deal.

No doubt if you asked them they’d say defrauding the deceased family’s estate is a victimless crime as the money would only end up with the government anyway, these people would swear blind they are honest, honourable folk and no doubt they would think they are rather clever.

It’s worth reflecting that dishonest, venal and somewhat dim people do occasionally get their come-uppance in today’s world.

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Exploiting the weak points

The Great ATM Heist illustrates weaknesses in outsourcing business processes

The Great ATM Heist, where a crime gang subverted the credit card system, could well be the digital equivalent of the Great Train Robbery of the 1960s.

While the logistics of the operation are impressive with hundreds of accomplices across twenty countries, the real moral from the story comes from how the gang targeted outsourced credit card processing companies to adjust cash limits.

Again we see the risks of throwing your problems over the fence, a system is only as reliable or secure as the weakest link and, regardless of how tight commercial contracts are, outsourced services can’t be treated as someone else’s concern.

No doubt banks around the world will be having a close look at their systems and how they can trust other organisations’ outsourced operations.

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