We have seen our share of weird cases involving Craigslist, but nothing like these: Continue reading ‘Craigslist Crooks’
Archive for the 'Dirty Tricks' Category
A good look at how modern crooks operate from Michael Thomas at The Daily Caveat.
Hedge Fund Dirty Tricks and the HBOS Implosion
You’ll love this article from The Daily Telegraph - an inside look at the “dirty-tricks unit” of a London-based hedge fund. This story has all the good stuff - PIs, hacking, the obligatory sub-prime mortgage crisis connection, rogue traders, market manipulation - it’s one stop shopping.
An interesting post on B2B Sales Pipline:
Adam…asked a pricing question about an application component that could not be purchased alone…
…this question doesn’t pass the “Smell Test”…
Called him anyway…Cell Phone, with no company name provided…
…search Adam’s name in LinkedIn. Lo and behold - Adam works for a competitor. I called the competitors office, asked for Adam, and let him know that I would love to chat with him, since it’s always good for competitors to get to know each other. At the time of this posting, Adam has not called me back, and has likely joined the witness protection program.
This kind of amateurish nonsense passes for Competitive Intelligence far too often.
Infamous hacker Kevin Poulson paid the defaulted Yellow Page accounts of escort services to get their defunct telephone numbers reactivated. He collected the profits and when the police became interested, only the original advertiser was on record with the telephone company. I once saw this done in a home renovation scam.
In Cynthia Hetherington’s excellent book, Business Background Investigations: Tools and Techniques for Solution Driven Due Diligence, she tells of a group of crooks who moved into an office recently vacated by an insurance company. They took-up the old phone number and began selling insurance.
When new policy holders complained about bad service to the insurance company’s head office, the scam was revealed, but the crooks had moved on.
It’s not just people who have their identity stolen.
I just found this:
“WikiLeaks.org is developing an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.”
I’m not sure how I might use this site, but it does have some very interesting instructions on how to submit material anonymously.
EASY TO PLANT CAMERAS IN HOTEL ROOMS
THE recent sex DVD scandal involving former Malaysian Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek shows how easy it is to rig a spy camera and film someone without their knowledge.
Experts tell The New Paper on Sunday that it takes anyone just 30 minutes to rig a spy cam.
It takes the professionally trained even less time…
I wrote about the dangers of mobile telephones a while back. Now we have a new term for the abuse of GPS tracking associated with mobile telephones — Geoslavery.
This story links geoslavery to the probable murder of Stacy Peterson.
We wrote about this here in Ten Private Investigators Indicted on 7 Dec 07.
Wired Magazine has posted the Indictment of the accused who allegedly employed false pretenses to gain personal information. A related Wired article compares this type of pretexting to the HP mess.
The accused are from Washington, California, Oregon, Texas and New York:
Emilio Torrella, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Brandy Torella, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Steve Berwick, BNT Investigations, Washington State
Victoria Tade, C.I., Inc., California
Megan Ososke, P.I. and Information Services, Oregon
Robert Grieve, Robert Greive International, Texas
Ziad Sakhleh, Robert Greive International, Texas
Darci Templeton, sole proprietor, Texas
Patrick Bombino, AAA Allstate Investigations, New York
Esau Pinto, AAA Allstate Investigations, New York
The Indictment alleges that BNT supplied the improperly obtained personal information to the PI’s for a fee. BNT was not identified as a private investigation firm in the Indictment, but was identified as a company that sold its pretexting services to PI firms. Some of the PI firms even advertised for sale to other PI’s what they were obtaining from BNT.
Accusations #17 and #21 allege that BNT obtained medical information by pretext, much in the same way as was revealed by he Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Confidentiality of Health Records in Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Justice Horace Krever.
Ten private investigators were indicted on December 5, 2007,in Seattle, WA, by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The alleged defendants collected information via pretext from the I.R.S., Social Security Administration, various State Unemployment Insurance Departments, private financial institutions, banks, pharmacies and hospitals. The alleged defendants fraudulently posed as the individuals about who information was sought.
If this is true, they broke Rule #1.
Washington State requires a Private Investigator to be licensed. However, it seems that BNT Investigations and the three named individuals in Washington state might not have state-issued Private Investigator’s licences. I don’t know the licence status of the others.
This type of behaviour is not new. In Canada, this issue was, in part, dealt with during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Confidentiality of Health Records in Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Justice Horace Krever.
The Royal Commission heard from over 500 witnesses, including private investigation firms, insurance companies, hospitals, and others. During 1976 and 1977, the Royal Commission found evidence of hundreds of successful efforts to acquire health information from Ontario hospitals and doctors under pretext.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada admitted to the Royal Commission that its members had gathered medical information through “various sources” without the authorization of the patients.
Several investigation companies went out of business due to the Royal Commission exposing their activities.
Where there are clients willing to pay for this improper and unprofessional behaviour, there will be providers of such services.
An article entitled Stalked by a cell phone: Who’s spying on you? warns of the danger of downloading software to your cell phone, connecting to the Internet from a mobile phone, and the dangers of letting it get out of your sight.
Commtouch, an Israeli security firm that specializes in protecting e-mail integrity, says that it has detected a new malware outbreak that is spread through e-mails claiming to be from private investigators. According to Commtouch, the e-mails tell recipients that a private investigator has been recording the recipients’ phone calls and that an audio file of one of the calls is attached to the message. When unwitting recipients download the “call” to their hard drives, their computers become infected with malware…
Some common subject headings for the malware e-mails include “I’m monitoring you,” “You’re being watched” and “The tape of your conversation.” Commtouch says that the malware is sent in the form of a password-protected, compressed file that appears to be an MP3 sound file.
A growing proportion of our research is directed at reputation management efforts. It is very easy for someone to put up a Web site or Blog that libels a company or person anonymously.
I found two excellent articles about companies that claim to erase, or at least push lower in the search engines results, negative comments about a company. The first, is on an MSNBC Blog called The Red Tape Chronicles and the second is on Forbes.
I have no idea about the effectiveness of these services, but they represent an interesting concept.
Google accounts present a serious risk to employees who use them in the workplace. Google accounts allow you access to Gmail and another interestng feature, your search history. Unfortunately, your Google account does not time-out.
Now imagine you’re at work. You sign-on to your Google account and check your mail and use Google Reader to check some RSS feeds. You are then called away from your desk. You don’t sign-off, afterall, its only Google. Well your collegue drops by and decides to do a search and check his mail. He searches for a prostitute for tomorrow evening and checks his Gmail and finds yours.
Your collegue has now added some interesting entries to your search history and read your mail. My Yahoo presents a similar risk.
This leads me to think of some interesting oportunities that this offers if I set-up virgin Google and My Yahoo accounts and place them on an unattended PC.
I’m a firm believer in letting other people do my research. Why should I do ‘original’ work that has already been done. When we do research to assist reputation management a lot of work has been done for us by rumourmonger and rumor debunking sites like Snopes. However, some malicious rumors originate with jealous competitors and radicals and require extensive research to identify the source, intent, and motive.
For instance, rumors that one company or other is owned by the KKK or one CEO or another donates money to the Church of Satan have circulated for decades. However, the Internet have given such rumors wings.
Companies can be destroyed by malicious rumors. A soft drink marketed to minorities in northeastern US cities, was almost bankrupted by a rumor that the drink contained a chemical that would make black men sterile.
Rumors can put lives at risk. In 2005 a rumor spread by cell phone text messages caused violent riots in Pakistan. The rumor was that men would loose their manhood if they shook hands with a foreigner.
In Rumor in the Marketplace: The Social Psychology of Commercial Hearsay (Auburn House Publishing, 1985), the authors suggest a public and forceful denial of the rumor as soon as possible by using solid evidence backed by experts. Sometimes the expert evidence is expert research that debunks the rumor.
In an article entitled Dissing the competition through dirty tricks! Arthur Weiss cites an article that illustrates how a campaign of dirty tricks might unfold. The cited Times Online article is very educational.
More recently, the Canadian insurer, Fairfax, was the target of a campaign of malicious disinformation from a group of Wall Street Hedge Fund managers. The company is now suing them for $6 billion - claiming that their aim was to manipulate the market by creating uncertainty about the company and its future. These include a variety of dirty tricks - false emails and letters, espionage attempts and more.
The main actor accused of conducting the dirty tricks campaign was Spyro Contogouris. Googling “spyro contogouris” brings up more than you might want to know. Especially the claim that Contogouris was working for the FBI.
