During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we were in, never fooled us.
I wonât name them as Iâve no wish to add to their notoriety, but hereâs the real kicker: both had the means to do well legitimately if they each followed through honestly.
The first one was clever enough to rope in people from very different parts, essentially setting up a publishing operation. But it was a swindle, and people were left in debt and jobless.
However, if it had been legit, it would have actually done quite well, and if the con artistâs aim was money, then he would have made some, over a long period, which would have sustained him and his lifestyle.
The second was not clever but came to a business partner of mine with a proposal to become a shareholder. We heard him out, he proposed an amount, and we drafted a cast-iron contract that could see him get a return on his investment, and protect the original principal. The money never came, of course, and we werenât going to alter the share register without it. He might have hoped that we would.
Again, he would have got something from it. Maybe not as good a return as property but better than the bank.
The first is now serving time at Her Majestyâs pleasure after things caught up with him and he was extradited to where he had executed an earlier con; the second, after having had his face in the Sunday StarâTimes, was last heard from in Australia where he conned his own relatives. He’s wanted by the police here.
I donât know where the gratification is here. And rationally, leaving honesty and morals aside (as they do), wouldnât it be better making money regularly than swindling for a quick fix that nets you less? Is it down to laziness, making them less desirous to follow through?
On the first case, I did have the occasion to speak to one lawyer pursuing him. I asked him about my case, since my financial loss was relatively small compared to the others taken in (namely a FedEx bill that a friend of mine helped me get a decent discount on because of her job). Whereâs the con? I was told that it might not have been apparent as the con artistâs MO was to draw different strands, sometimes having them result in something, and sometimes not.
Whatever the technique, it failed him anyway.
And what a waste of all that energy to create something that not only looked legit (as in the TV series Hustle) but could have functioned legitimately with so many good people involved.
That did make the 2010s rather better than the 2000s when the shady characters included a pĂŠdophile (who, to my knowledge, is also doing time), a sociopath, a forger, and a US fashion label that conned a big shipmentâs payment out of us. I doubt Iâd be famous enough to warrant a biography but they would make interesting stories!
Posts tagged ‘deception’
Why con?
07.12.2020Tags: 2010s, 2020, Aotearoa, Auckland, Australia, Bahrain, BBC, business, deception, Fairfax Press, fraud, Jersey, law, New Zealand, newspaper, police, publishing, TÄmaki Makaurau, TV
Posted in business, New Zealand, publishing | No Comments »
Nissan’s own documents show Carlos Ghosn’s arrest was a boardroom coup
22.06.2020I said it a long time ago: that the Carlos Ghosn arrest was part of a boardroom coup, and that the media were used by Hiroto Saikawa and co. (which I said on Twitter at the time). It was pretty evident to me given how quickly the press conferences were set up, how rapidly there was âevidenceâ of wrongdoing, and, most of all, the body language and demeanour of Mr Saikawa.
Last week emerged evidence that would give meâand, more importantly, Carlos Ghosn, who has since had the freedom to make the same allegation that he was set upâcause to utter âI told you so.â
I read about it in The National, but I believe Bloomberg was the source. The headline is accurate: âNissan emails reveal plot to dethrone Carlos Ghosnâ; summed up by âThe plan to take down the former chairman stemmed from opposition to deeper ties between the Japanese company and France’s Renaultâ.
One highlight:
the documents and recollections of people familiar with what transpired show that a powerful group of insiders viewed his detention and prosecution as an opportunity to revamp the global automakerâs relationship with top shareholder Renault on terms more favourable to Nissan.
A chain of email correspondence dating back to February 2018, corroborated by people who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information, paints a picture of a methodical campaign to remove a powerful executive.
Another:
Days before Mr Ghosnâs arrest, Mr Nada sought to broaden the allegations against Mr Ghosn, telling Mr Saikawa that Nissan should push for more serious breach-of-trust charges, according to correspondence at the time and people familiar with the discussions. There was concern that the initial allegations of underreporting compensation would be harder to explain to the public, the people said.
The effort should be âsupported by media campaign for insurance of destroying CG reputation hard enough,â Mr Nada wrote, using Mr Ghosnâs initials, as he had done several times in internal communications stretching back years.
Finally:
The correspondence also for the first time gives more detail into how Nissan may have orchestrated [board member] Mr Kellyâs arrest by bringing him to Japan from the US for a board meeting.
Nissanâs continuing official position, that Ghosn and Kelly are guilty until proved innocent, has never rang correctly. Unless youâre backed by plenty of people, that isnât the typical statement you should be making, especially if itâs about your own alleged dirty laundry. You talk instead about cooperating with authorities. In this atmosphere, with Nissan, the Japanese media duped into reporting it based on powerful Nissan executives, and the hostage justice system doing its regular thing, Ghosn probably had every right to believe he would not get a fair trial. If only one of those things were in play, and not all three, he might not have reached the same conclusion.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2019, 2020, Bloomberg, Carlos Ghosn, corporate culture, coup, crime, deception, email, Hiroto Saikawa, Japan, law, media, Nissan, Renault, Renault Nissan Mitsubishi
Posted in business, cars, culture, France, globalization, leadership, media | No Comments »
Facebook exploits COVID-19 for profit, and viral thoughts
01.05.2020A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm?
Donât really know who has come to some harm.
Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm,
When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) May 1, 2020
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
It was pretty bad, crawling along. pic.twitter.com/GrkT0TmgoS
— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) April 29, 2020
Tags: 2020, Aotearoa, COVID-19, deception, exploitation, Facebook, health, humour, ITV, Mastodon, media, music, New Zealand, news, photography, privacy, statistics, TVNZ, Twitter, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, culture, humour, internet, media, New Zealand, TV, Wellington | No Comments »
The FT covers lawsuit alleging Facebook knew about inflated metrics
21.03.2020Iâll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named.
The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new filings from the lawsuit.
Iâve blogged on related topics for the majority of the previous decade, and in 2014 I said that Facebook had a bot âepidemicâ.
Finally another publication has caught on this, namely the Financial Times. The FT notes something that I did on this blog in 2017: âIn some cases, the number cited for potential audience size in certain US states and demographics was actually larger than the population size as recorded in census figures, it claimed.â Its own 2019 investigation found discrepancies in the Facebook Adsâ Manager tool.
The complaint also says that Facebook had not removed fake and duplicate accounts. Lately Iâve found some obvious fake accounts, and reported them, only for Facebook to tell me that thereâs nothing wrong with them. On Instagram, I have hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts that I reported but remain current. Based on my user experience, the plaintiff is absolutely correct.
Facebook only solves problems it puts its mind to, and all seem to be bolstering its bottom line. This is something it could have solved, and since itâs plagued the site for the good part of a decade, and it continues to, then you have to conclude that thereâs no desire to. And of course there isnât: the more fakes there are, the more page owners have to pay to reach real people.
Over a decade ago, I know that it cost a small business a decent chunk of money to get an independent audit (from memory, we were looking at around NZ$6,000). Facebook doesnât have this excuse, and that tells me it doesn’t want you to know how its ads actually perform.
As I said many times: if a regular person like me can find a maximum of 277 fakes or bots in a single night, then how many are there? Iâm surprised that not more of the mainstream media are talking about this, given that in 2018 Facebook posted an income of US$22,100 million on US$55,800 million of revenue, 98·5 per cent of which came from advertising. Is this one of the biggest cons out there? Hereâs hoping the lawsuit will reveal something. Few seem to care about Facebookâs lies and erosion of their privacy, but maybe they might start caring when they realize they’ve been fleeced.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2020, advertising, California, deception, ethics, Facebook, law, Sheryl Sandberg, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
Facebook takes away user control over their own advertising preferences
15.11.2019Facebookâs advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.
Over the years Iâve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if theyâre uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you have opted out of targeted ads. Now, you canât. If youâre on the desktop, Facebook just wonât show them to you. You can have this window open for hours for nothing to appear (and yes, I have tried regularly).
Maybe you donât have any, Jack? You just said you deleted them. Fact: I do have them, except they are only visible on the cellphoneâand as usual theyâre not that accurate. However, on the cellphone, these cannot be deleted or edited in any way.
I also have a set of different ones if I export my Facebook data, but that’s another story.
And remember when I said I opted out of alcohol ads, yet I still see plenty, especially from Heineken, which has even uploaded my email and private information to Facebook without my permission, and refuses to respond? (I may have to get the Privacy Commissioner to intervene again.) Facebook does say that opting out doesnât necessarily work. In which case, you have to wonder why on earth the feature is thereâregardless of what you toggle, Facebook does what it wants. Even Google doesnât get this bad.
Remember: Facebook offers you features, but they donât necessarily work.
And advertisers: Facebookâs audience estimates, by their own admission, have no bearing on the real population, and there is no third-party auditing. Even if you tailor your promotions, thereâs no guarantee theyâre even reaching the people you want. My interests are certainly incorrectânot that I can do anything about it so you donât waste your money. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of users.
Tags: 2010s, 2019, advertising, cellphone, deception, Facebook, Heineken, privacy, targeting, USA
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
Facebook is getting away with it againâeven though it knew about Cambridge Analytica
25.07.2019Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.
Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on the news, they’ve more than covered the fine on the rise alone.
Bob writes: ‘The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland andâwho knows?âa jolly good way to boost share prices.’
There’s something very messed up about this scenario, particularly as some of the US’s authorities are constantly being shown up by the EU (over Google’s monopoly actions) and the UK’s Damian Collins, MP (over the questions being asked of Facebookâunlike US politicians’, his aren’t toothless).
The US SEC, meanwhile, has released its report on Facebook, showing that Facebook knew what was happening with Cambridge Analytica in 2015â16, and that the company willingly sold user data to the firm. SEC’s Stephanie Avakian noted, ‘As alleged in our complaint, Facebook presented the risk of misuse of user data as hypothetical when they knew user data had in fact been misused.’ You can read the entire action as filed by the SEC here.
Woah this was 12 days before US elections. Facebook employees knew stuff was going on but their DC office appears to have frozen them. Consumers were deceived and harmed through their personal data likely in order to protect Facebook's reputation and share price. pic.twitter.com/rTpSYptVPG
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) July 24, 2019
As I have been hashtagging, #Facebooklies. This is standard practice for the firm, as has been evidenced countless times for over a decade. The settlement: US$100 million. Pocket change.
Tags: 2010s, 2016, 2019, Bob Hoffman, corruption, DC, deception, Facebook, law, politics, privacy, SEC, USA, Washington, William Shepherd
Posted in business, internet, media, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »