Tag: crime

25K trafficked artifacts

This is the culmination of 4 years of investigation into a major smuggling ring that began with the discovery of a looted archaeological site in the small town of Riesi in the Caltanissetta area of central Sicily. Before the coordinated raids, Italian authorities confiscated 3K artifacts, 1200 forgeries and 1500 tools of the looting trade including metal detectors.

Biggest Digital Heist

Yet experts point out that even if Katana was the mastermind, he was just one guy in a crime that surely must have had many authors. Unlike the bank jobs of yore, digital heists are amoeba-like ventures that divide over and over again as the malware proliferates. “We’ve already seen the modification of Carbanak and multiple groups using it. Same case with Cobalt.” In recent weeks, employees at banks in the Russian-speaking world have been receiving emails that appear to be from Kaspersky, the security company that unearthed Carbanak. The messages warn recipients that their PCs have been flagged for possibly violating the law and they should download a complaint letter or face penalties. When they click on the attachment, a version of the Cobalt malware infects their networks. It turns out cyberheists may not die even when their suspected perpetrators are nabbed.

First Cyberattack in 1834

The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.

War on Fake Reviews

An Amazon spokeswoman explained that when a product is hit with many reviews in a short period of time, the company’s systems will automatically suppress all but “verified” purchases. But this preventative measure, too, can be easily gamed. “People would buy our game, not play it, leave the terrible review, and instantly request a refund,. It’s a well-worn tactic.” In his estimation, user-review systems such as those used by Valve, Steam’s developer, are so vulnerable to exploitation that they require as much moderation as social-media platforms. “The ethics and utility of these systems boil down to this: if a platform is going to have it, they have to be able to manage it to protect people from abuse and harassment, or they become responsible for that abuse”

Fentanyl at scale

What happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. Narcos was child’s play:

Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes ~1 week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: 1 dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. 1 kilogram from China sells for $3800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30m.

2021-11-06: Easily scalable synthetic drugs created a new type of drug lord:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21b, the same as Citibank’s. Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for 3000 murders in a drug war that took 300k lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth $3b—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.

2023-06-19: China doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to crack down on fentanyl, arguably for geopolitical reasons.

From 2018 onwards, drug war cooperation with the United States declined in concert with the more general deterioration of US-China relations. In August 2022, cooperation ceased altogether. There have been no high-profile Chinese prosecutions since a trial in Hebei in 2019. While state media continues to boast of “an intensified fight against narcotics” and “the strictest drug control in the world,” this rigour does not apply to fentanyl. The opioid’s traffickers have come to enjoy a great sense of impunity. America’s crisis has intensified as a result, and the Party will certainly be enjoying the historical parallel.

2023-06-23: Deaths are through the roof and all this article manages to do is to paw ineffectually at prevention.

The shift to synthetics has put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage by dramatically reducing drug prices — recent estimates suggest that fentanyl prices have fallen rapidly, by roughly 50% from 2016 to 2021. It has also made it much harder to detect and therefore interdict drugs. A great deal more law enforcement is therefore needed simply to return to the pre-synthetic level of efficacy.

Red Hook Weed

The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped. Sometimes neighbors in apartments overlooking the building caught a few whiffs of marijuana along with the cherries. David Selig thought the smell of pot might be the result of workmen smoking it on their breaks. The police had failed to find suspicious signs. An increase in energy consumption consistent with the use of grow lights had not been detected, possibly because the factory had its own gasoline-powered generators, and a drug-sniffing dog had not been able to discover a definitive scent of marijuana. Independently, environmental investigators, acting on a tip, began to look into possible violations in the dumping of wastewater from the cherry-manufacturing process into the sewer. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office more or less forgot about the marijuana investigation.

Retiring in Prison

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than 6x, to almost 6M. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40% either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. They have no one to turn to when they need help.

Deadly Youtube

Killer gets 180-day sentence for YouTube stunt gone wrong

They planned on taking the Internet by storm with footage of Perez firing a gun at Ruiz, who believed that he could stop a bullet with nothing more than a hardcover book. There were a couple of issues with this plan. First, trusting a book to protect you from death, unless you’re boning up on how to make an anti-venom, is insane. Second, the pistol that Perez fired at her beau was a .50 caliber Desert Eagle. For the uninitiated, this is an insanely powerful handgun. With the right load, a round fired from it can bop through a bulletproof vest or pierce light ceramic or steel armor. In short, there was a very high probability that a book wasn’t going to cut it.

Despite this, Perez stood 30 cm away from her man and fired a single round. It went through the book! It went into him! He was killed! She got it all on tape, with not one, but 2 cameras. When Ruiz went down, she called 911 and told the operator what had happened. In December, Perez plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to 180-days in jail for the crime.

Gray Hat

Most of all, Hutchins was bored, and he wanted to work again. “Not having access to my botnet-monitoring stuff is depressing”. While Hutchins declined to discuss details of his case, except to maintain his innocence — the trial is still pending, though such cases often end in settlements — he feared the damage was already done. Cybersecurity is a business based in trust, and he worried that the allegations alone made him unemployable. (He had recently noticed a number of Twitter bots commenting on his case with anti-American bents, which he speculated could be someone trying to use his case to divide the American cybersecurity community.)