Besides this being an impressively reported and written story, to me it's also another example of how wrong I continue to have been, since watching "Catch Me If You Can" and thinking that there wasn't much chance for a Fred Abagnale to exist in the modern centralized digital world (the Fyre Festival is of course another recent example of high-flying fraud). Reading about how easy it was for the victim's boyfriend, recently associated (but not convicted) with a criminal hacking group, to make himself seem like a big social media/crypto influencer makes me think that the arms race between verification and obfuscation will go on for a long time.
This story was also another reminder of how fast and overwhelming the news cycle seems to be these days. I remember reading Tomi Masters' death because of how unusual it was, but had completely forgotten about it until reading this story. If you asked me to remember when I first read about her case, I would've sworn it was at least half a year ago. But her death was reported in late December, so just about 1.5 months ago.
arms race between verification and obfuscation will go on for a long time.
It's worse at the top. Theranos. Madoff. MMM. Better Place. The entire binary option industry. Scams are getting bigger. Billion dollar scams were rare in history until recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis : man prints almost 1% of the GDP in Portugal in "real" forged notes through an elaborate scheme, and nearly manages to buy the bank of Portugal.
Alves dos Reis is a great story. He managed to forge the central bank request to print notes, the notes were literally from the same printing presses so they weren't even fakes, as you mention.
I recently got hold of the book ("the man who stole portugal") and it's full of tremendous little details, like the notes being delivered by the printers in travelling trunks to the left luggage office of Victoria station. The whole thing relied on William Waterlow being spectacularly naive combined with Reis' skills in forging credentials and letters of introduction.
I think Albania is a bit of a special case though.
The crisis happened pretty soon after the fall of Communism. The country had not built up any the government institutions required to govern the new proto-democracy. As a result the government didn't merely fail to reign in the scams -- they actually encouraged them (presumably some government officials profited, which is why the people revolted).
The result in Albania should be seen in the context of other major post-revolutionary histories. It was worse than the transition in, say, Poland but much better than, say, the French Revolution.
The fact that the crisis happened to take the form of Ponzi schemes is just one example of the weirdness of history.
He said they were rare, not unheard of. There have been several in the last 5yrs while your quoted links have 50yrs between them. Surely that is considered a significant speed up?
That one still gets me as they solved none of the problems they claimed to have solved as far as blood testing goes, and there was zero legitimate indication they had....
Long story short, Elizabeth surrounded herself with politically powerful, but medically unqualified people like Kissinger and Gen. Mattis. The book Bad Blood does a very good job explaining the depths of the deception.
I think you make it too short. Isn't it interesting that people "like Kissinger and Gen. Mattis", hard and experienced men, allowed themselves to deceived by basically a pair of crooks?
From what I've understand, upper management at Walgreens was very skeptical of Theranos but the CEO was very enamored with Elizabeth Holmes and wouldn't listen to anything negative his staff was telling him.
I think some people just have a reality distortion field they can project, it works best in person, and the CEO spent more time in hers than everyone else at the company. It's the reason why nobody finds a con at all convincing when it's told second-hand.
Being conventionally attractive is probably very helpful but I bet the bar is higher for women would-be con artists than men.
I suspect many of them may have known it was a scam but expected it to last long enough to IPO cashout. No proof but it is a possibility. That or they had their arrogance exploited.
Fair enough, I think a lot of that had to do with how these powerful men learned what the "truth" is - since they were not qualified to understand the details of the technology from a scientists/engineers perspective, they relied on expert opinions, and many of those "experts" were also enamored with her charisma and youth, and so everyone gave her a thumbs up because everyone else had given her a thumbs up.
And to give credit where credit is due, she masterfully cultivated these relationships and used that mutual reputation network she built to create her own "truth" with her lies. Had she stuck to politics she may have been President. Hell, had she gone into software, her "fake it till you make it" strategy might have worked (not saying I'd want to work for her). Her downfall was simply that she applied this loose relationship with the truth to medical devices, which have a much higher bar for objective truth than other technologies.
Some situations are easier to rationalize when you are an outsider. I think many people were sceptical of Theranos. Maybe Elizabeth Holmes was charismatic enough to overcome scepsis in most people. It is baffling that she managed to become a billionaire with this tactic. I'm wondering, however, what her long-term plan was (she probably didn't have one, since everything seemed to work out well).
Besides, I found this piece on Wikipedia funny:
> In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America due to a $9 billion valuation of Theranos.[5] By the next year, following revelations of potential fraud, Forbes revised her net worth to zero dollars,[6] and Fortune named Holmes one of the "World's Most Disappointing Leaders".
Oops, we were off by 9 billion dollars, how disappointing.
Sure, from the outside, with hindsight etc. But people like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis occupy power roles that demand difficult and correct decisions from the inside and without benefit of hindsight. That a pair of crooks went through this discipline and experience like a hot knife through butter tells us something about the nature of power an deception.
It's a function of the propagation of technology. Everything is automated, and all code is not equal. If you're to figure out some way to steal money electronically from your bank, and there is no defensive code in place, how will anyone ever notice? The automacy of code can allow these schemes to fly under the radar in a way that physical robbery can not.
You have to normalize to something like the GDP or GDP per capita or similar, with inflation numbers from the past cannot be compared to numbers in the present.
Binary Options aren't fake, they just sell an awful gambling product to dumb people.
MMM what? 3M, or Mr Money Mustache's blog?
What about Better Place? There wasn't just a startup that tried and failed and paid its insiders too much money?
Madoff is an interesting case, because some of his customers were traditional conservative institutions, not just fools looking for a get rich quick scheme (who deserve what they get), but apparently avoided any auditing for many years?
> In October 1994 Mavrodi managed to win a by-election to replace Andrey Aizderdzis in the State Duma, and with it immunity from prosecution.[17] Mavrodi claimed to be the victim of jealous bureaucrats, and that MMM shares would regain their value if he was elected.[18] During the campaign he was supported by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who hoped that Mavrodi would provide him with future financial backing.[19] After being elected he appeared in the State Duma only once, to vote against an attempt to strip him of parliamentary immunity.[20]
Binary options are "fake" in that they're often promoted by boiler-room operations in a fraudulent manner-- it's not like they're something that's actively traded on the market. If anything, it's more common to use a "collar" strategy in order to get a similar sort of exposure, but benefit from liquidity of the ordinary options markets.
Great talk by the way, he's an incredibly charismatic and well spoken story teller, also a consultant for the FBI and a successful businessman - which makes you think about just how important likability and charisma are both to being a successful social engineer and being successful in-general. People will let you stray pretty far from reality if they like you - Holmes, Abagnale, and apparently Troy Woody (at least to this poor girl). Eventually reality catches up, one way or another.
Carders and fake ID manufacturers would be right in line with Abagnale's life. Everyone gets caught in the long run, the key is getting out of one scam and into a new one before you get busted.
Something that may not be obvious is how victims (companies, at least) frequently want to bury the story just as much as the person who conned them. "We lost 8 digits of internet money last night and have no idea who did it" just doesn't sound good to other people who are supposed to trust you.
Typical Buzzfeed though--it is basically a story designed to continue legitimizing the pot biz. Instead of portraying the girl as a dumb stoner, which is really what she was, she is held up as some kind of brilliant hero. I've never met a single pothead who was actually brilliant except in their own minds and amongst their circle of (also high) friends.
This story was also another reminder of how fast and overwhelming the news cycle seems to be these days. I remember reading Tomi Masters' death because of how unusual it was, but had completely forgotten about it until reading this story. If you asked me to remember when I first read about her case, I would've sworn it was at least half a year ago. But her death was reported in late December, so just about 1.5 months ago.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale