White collar criminal investigations and prosecutions have declined as counter-terrorism, drug, counter-espionage and politically motivated investigations have (greatly) increased. Is it reasonable to expect the majority of people to act virtuously when doing so puts them at great disadvantage in an effectively unregulated environment? This is what Liv Boree might call a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish.
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
Most people put their grocery carts back, stop at stop signs and lights at the middle of night on a lone road, and there's plenty of examples where people go out of their way to do the right thing. There's this common misconception that most people are act immorally but in reality the law is only written for the few. For a very clear example, I doubt murder rates would change were it not illegal. Most people don't want to kill and recognize it as intrinsically immoral. The problem is that we ignore normal behavior and this makes us overestimate abnormal behavior.
This is one of the root problems of Western society today and I think it has its origin in the financial crisis. The perpetrators got off scott free everywhere (except Iceland) and everyone who wasn’t a banker ended up paying the price.
The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.
The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.
...a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish
It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.
<< has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article
I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.
It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.
<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.
I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.
Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank. They were a “quant” and claimed to be using sophisticated algorithms to trade the market. In reality they were making gut based trades with fake software full of complicated derivatives trading algorithms. Fooled some of the most well paid people in the world
> Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank.
Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.
He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.
Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).
They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.
He was fired on the spot [1].
I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.
[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical after just the first story in this article. It says it takes place in 2006. Why would this person spend an hour reading these names over the phone instead of emailing them? I could understand plausible deniability, but if the woman with cancer thought this guy was in the compliance office, surely she wouldn't be thinking he wants to sidestep compliance rules.
The whole thing smells extremely fishy, perhaps I'm just jaded be all the ever present grift online these days. And these con artists "coming clean" to write a book so they can bask in the glory of their exploits? STFU, you're a slimy douchebag, and your attempt to write a "true crime" book is even lamer.
I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.
I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.
> Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level,”
Frank Abagnale is now believed to have lied about most of the cons he supposedly perpetrated. Is there any good reason to believe this Robert guy is more legit?
Maybe this guy did some social engineering at one time or another but the idea that he could get any employee at a Wall Street firm to spend an hour reciting the cell phone numbers of all their executives is a load of bullshit.
Well nowadays they might come as <put your favorite db/os/tool> account managers out there. I have seen one and then realized they are probably not account managers.
Honest question - is bonding over the nationality of ancestors really that big a deal in the US?
It seems to be a solid theme in this.
It just strikes me as odd that a nation with such a patriotic mentality define themselves as Welsh, Irish, Scottish etc because their great grandparents came from there. Besides, it’s a well established fact that if you can’t sing Yma o Hyd from start to finish, your Welsh credentials are confiscated.
Umm. Well, if you turn up for Mass on April 17 at St. Patrick's in downtown Washington, DC, you will see a number of users wearing sashes of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and when you leave, you will see some young women doing step dances before the door. (And if you continue on to bars with Irish names of one sort or another, you will find persons of many ethnic heritages drinking too much.)
Alexandria, Virginia, used to have Highland Games, in which descendants of (generally lowland) Scots will toss cabers and so on.
There are big Italian-themed feasts in New York.
The Germans I think were a bit daunted by a couple of world wars in the last century.
> until some tech industry folks created a little thing called LinkedIn that made publicly available much of the information I charged a lot of money for.
TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks
I'm still reading the article, but "Rabbit Hole" is an interesting recent series on Paramount Plus if the idea of a show featuring corporate espionage is interesting to anyone. I think it's an under-featured mini genre given how many people work quite boring corporate jobs who could use something thrilling to fantasize about.
These days, it would seem that simple training of employees that requests such as these (if they are ever legitimate requests), should only come in over internal communication systems that effort is presumably put into keep only employees access to and would identify the employee using it.
Wouldn't be full proof, but would raise the bar significantly and increase the crime committed thereby reducing those who are willing to do it.
This is part of the training where I work. Some places even let people know to be careful when updating Linkedin, exactly because people are stalking it to find new people to lure into some ruse
it's pretty unbelievable that someone would be pulling in 7 figures just for providing a list of people that worked at a company. all of that information feels so public. his clients were really willing to pay so much to... poach the employees?
[+] [-] howmayiannoyyou|2 years ago|reply
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarr|2 years ago|reply
The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.
The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|2 years ago|reply
If we were in a society where values were held to a high regard, you might see different headlines like:
"Failed actor takes on new role of regulating officials for financial gain".
or even a few years earlier:
"Selfish man vilifies volunteer firefighters in California for not doing enough to save his house".
[+] [-] joe_the_user|2 years ago|reply
It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago|reply
I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.
It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.
<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.
I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.
[+] [-] greatpostman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|2 years ago|reply
Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.
He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.
Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).
They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.
He was fired on the spot [1].
I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.
[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
[+] [-] supahfly_remix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnsaff2|2 years ago|reply
Why would one trust a person who advertises themselves as a liar?
Do they suddenly turn honest in order to write a book?
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
The whole thing smells extremely fishy, perhaps I'm just jaded be all the ever present grift online these days. And these con artists "coming clean" to write a book so they can bask in the glory of their exploits? STFU, you're a slimy douchebag, and your attempt to write a "true crime" book is even lamer.
[+] [-] cwdegidio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycombiredd|2 years ago|reply
I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.
I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.
[+] [-] metadat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stametseater|2 years ago|reply
> Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level,”
Frank Abagnale is now believed to have lied about most of the cons he supposedly perpetrated. Is there any good reason to believe this Robert guy is more legit?
Either way he's still a con artist I guess.
[+] [-] ip26|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcurry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i-use-nixos-btw|2 years ago|reply
It seems to be a solid theme in this.
It just strikes me as odd that a nation with such a patriotic mentality define themselves as Welsh, Irish, Scottish etc because their great grandparents came from there. Besides, it’s a well established fact that if you can’t sing Yma o Hyd from start to finish, your Welsh credentials are confiscated.
[+] [-] cafard|2 years ago|reply
Alexandria, Virginia, used to have Highland Games, in which descendants of (generally lowland) Scots will toss cabers and so on.
There are big Italian-themed feasts in New York.
The Germans I think were a bit daunted by a couple of world wars in the last century.
[+] [-] htrp|2 years ago|reply
TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks
[+] [-] mariojv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] compsciphd|2 years ago|reply
These days, it would seem that simple training of employees that requests such as these (if they are ever legitimate requests), should only come in over internal communication systems that effort is presumably put into keep only employees access to and would identify the employee using it.
Wouldn't be full proof, but would raise the bar significantly and increase the crime committed thereby reducing those who are willing to do it.
[+] [-] magnuspaaske|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mock-possum|2 years ago|reply
this really really doesn't ring true for me.
[+] [-] easyTree|2 years ago|reply