Taliban Leader in Peace Talks Was an Impostor

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Jacques-André Boiffard, 1930 }

Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. (…) As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.

Glover and the other twentysomethings who filled the sales force at the downtown L.A. branch worked the phones hour after hour, calling strangers and trying to talk them into refinancing their homes with high-priced “subprime” mortgages. It was 2003, subprime was on the rise, and Ameriquest was leading the way. The company’s owner, Roland Arnall, had in many ways been the founding father of subprime, the business of lending money to home owners with modest incomes or blemished credit histories. He had pioneered this risky segment of the mortgage market amid the wreckage of the savings and loan disaster and helped transform his company’s headquarters, Orange County, California, into the capital of the subprime industry. Now, with the housing market booming and Wall Street clamoring to invest in subprime, Ameriquest was growing with startling velocity.

Up and down the line, from loan officers to regional managers and vice presidents, Ameriquest’s employees scrambled at the end of each month to push through as many loans as possible, to pad their monthly production numbers, boost their commissions, and meet Roland Arnall’s expectations. Arnall was a man “obsessed with loan volume,” former aides recalled, a mortgage entrepreneur who believed “volume solved all problems.” Whenever an underling suggested a goal for loan production over a particular time span, Arnall’s favorite reply was: “We can do twice that.” Close to midnight Pacific time on the last business day of each month, the phone would ring at Arnall’s home in Los Angeles’s exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood, a $30 million estate that once had been home to Sonny and Cher. On the other end of the telephone line, a vice president in Orange County would report the month’s production numbers for his lending empire. Even as the totals grew to $3 billion or $6 billion or $7 billion a month—figures never before imagined in the subprime business—Arnall wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. “He would just try to make you stretch beyond what you thought possible,” one former Ameriquest executive recalled. “Whatever you did, no matter how good you did, it wasn’t good enough.”

Inside Glover’s branch, loan officers kept up with the demand to produce by guzzling Red Bull energy drinks, a favorite caffeine pick-me-up for hardworking salesmen throughout the mortgage industry. Government investigators would later joke that they could gauge how dirty a home-loan location was by the number of empty Red Bull cans in the Dumpster out back. Some of the crew in the L.A. branch, Glover said, also relied on cocaine to keep themselves going, snorting lines in washrooms and, on occasion, in their cubicles.

The wayward behavior didn’t stop with drugs. Glover learned that his colleague’s art work wasn’t a matter of saving a borrower the hassle of coming in to supply a missed signature. The guy was forging borrowers’ signatures on government-required disclosure forms, the ones that were supposed to help consumers understand how much cash they’d be getting out of the loan and how much they’d be paying in interest and fees. Ameriquest’s deals were so overpriced and loaded with nasty surprises that getting customers to sign often required an elaborate web of psychological ploys, outright lies, and falsified papers. “Every closing that we had really was a bait and switch,” a loan officer who worked for Ameriquest in Tampa, Florida, recalled. ” ‘Cause you could never get them to the table if you were honest.” At companywide gatherings, Ameriquest’s managers and sales reps loosened up with free alcohol and swapped tips for fooling borrowers and cooking up phony paperwork. What if a customer insisted he wanted a fixed-rate loan, but you could make more money by selling him an adjustable-rate one? No problem. Many Ameriquest salespeople learned to position a few fixed-rate loan documents at the top of the stack of paperwork to be signed by the borrower. They buried the real documents—the ones indicating the loan had an adjustable rate that would rocket upward in two or three years—near the bottom of the pile. Then, after the borrower had flipped from signature line to signature line, scribbling his consent across the entire stack, and gone home, it was easy enough to peel the fixed-rate documents off the top and throw them in the trash.

At the downtown L.A. branch, some of Glover’s coworkers had a flair for creative documentation. They used scissors, tape, Wite-Out, and a photocopier to fabricate W-2s, the tax forms that indicate how much a wage earner makes each year. It was easy: Paste the name of a low-earning borrower onto a W-2 belonging to a higher-earning borrower and, like magic, a bad loan prospect suddenly looked much better. Workers in the branch equipped the office’s break room with all the tools they needed to manufacture and manipulate official documents. They dubbed it the “Art Department.”

{ Michael W. Hudson, How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis | Continue reading }

image { Peter Garfield }

Laws that criminalize insider trading cover corporate insiders and those they tip, but not specifically Congress. (…)

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that during the past two calendar years, 72 congressional aides from both parties made trades in companies that their bosses’ help oversee. Among them are top advisers to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their timely investments proved profitable, but the staffers deny the trades sprung from inside knowledge, the Journal reported.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

It’s not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network–how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { Many of the most popular applications on the social-networking site Facebook have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. | Wall Street Journal | full story }

image { Polly Morgan, Black Fever, 2010 | taxidermy crow wings, wood, wire }

Even demonstrably false or irrelevant information can influence judgments, which in turn influence decisions. (…)

Policy makers have long recognized the potential danger of false statements by advertisers. But in the belief that most adults are suitably skeptical about promotional puffery, Congress has tried to prohibit only the most blatantly false or explicitly misleading claims.

But what about merely irrelevant statements, or only implicitly misleading ones? Standard economic models say such claims are, well, irrelevant, so there should be no need to regulate them. But according to recent behavioral research, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Although cigarette advertisements, for example, typically portray smokers as young, healthy and attractive, smoking can make people look older and less healthy. Such ads make no explicitly false claims, but that doesn’t make them less misleading, even for informed consumers.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { A girl playing noughts and crosses, a Playboy centrefold, Sky satellite dishes, the trill of a modem – all have hidden meanings | The secret messages written into the fabric of our world }

{ But who exactly bought what? Even Mr Hirst admits, “I’m still finding out.” Dealers acquired some works, but 81% of the buyers were private collectors purchasing directly. | How Damien Hirst grew rich at the expense of his investors | The Economist | full story }

{ The Art Damien Hirst Stole | more | Thanks Tim }

Over the past few months, we have learned about extraordinary levels of excessively bad corporate behavior.

As bad as the Bailouts were from an economic, wealth transfer, and moral hazard perspectives, it turns out that the grim reality was an order of magnitude worse than previously believed.

We have since learned that many TARP recipients, bailed out banks and other ne’er-do-wells were actively engaged in cooking their books. I don’t mean various FASB 157 permission to lie, and other legal but nefarious activities. I am referring to the 2002-2007 era of scams, frauds, and outright theft.

The public’s righteous indignation over the lack of just desserts for the perpetrators of these frauds has morphed since September 2008 into an unresolved, unfocused anger. When this all plays out, we might very well see bonus clawbacks, fines and penalties, disgorgement of ill gotten gains, and criminal arrests for some of the major names at the biggest brokerage houses.

Why do I think that 2 years later, some justice might be done? The truth is slowly coming out, as insiders provide testimony, release papers, and even offer up recordings of conversations to various investigators and prosecutors.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

photo { American Standard (remix), a work based on 4 x 5 negatives Simone Bergantini bought in Brooklyn at a secondhand shop }

A collection of paintings that have caused art aficionados to turn a deep shade of purple and have provoked upset and anger throughout the art world are to go on show.

The forged works include a fake Botticelli, which was bought for a higher price than a genuine work by the artist sold at the same time. A gallery director almost had to resign because of another one, a fake Holbein.

In an unprecedented spirit of public transparency (and perverse pride), the National Gallery in central London is dusting down its holdings of forged paintings, accidentally bought as genuine works, supposedly by Botticelli, Holbein and Durer, among others, and showing them off to the public.

Some experts within the gallery actually prefer the fakes to the real thing, they revealed yesterday. Rachel Billinge, a research associate in the gallery’s conservation department, said she sometimes looked upon the forgeries with more admiration than the works by their genuine counterparts. “Sometimes you can appreciate their techniques, and the effort they put in, more than the original that was churned out by a bored apprentice at a workshop,” she said.

The last known fake bought by the gallery was in the late 1950s, when it acquired a painting believed to be a genuine Rembrandt, An Old Man in an Armchair. Signed and dated falsely, many curators have marvelled at its extraordinary technique and artistic achievement.

{ The Independent | Continue reading }

About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The drivers’ scheme, the commission said, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip. The drivers, officials said, flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million.

The 1.8 million fares represent a tiny fraction of a total 360 million trips over the 26-month period in question.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Terry Richardson | Related: After two models spoke out about Terry Richardson’s alleged sexual misconduct on shoots, Jezebel asked readers to write in with any stories they may have about the prolific photographer. | NY mag | full story }

During his swindling career, Mr. Quinn helped run a giant boiler-room operation out of a villa overlooking the French Riviera, had a champion racehorse and was alleged to have helped former financier Martin Frankel pull off one of history’s largest insurance frauds. U.S. authorities say he stole an estimated $500 million total.

His record, which includes three SEC injunctions and two federal criminal convictions, stretches back to 1966 when regulators barred the 28-year-old Mr. Quinn from the brokerage business for peddling shares of a bogus Florida land company. In 1992, a federal judge called Mr. Quinn an “incorrigible” recidivist whose business activities “appear to be devoted exclusively to securities fraud.” Yet he has served a total of only about six years in prison—with most that in France.

All of that could change now. Last November, at the age of 72, he was arrested by federal agents as he stepped off a plane from Ireland at John F. Kennedy Airport and charged with helping orchestrate a $50 million telecommunications fraud.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

bonus:

The most audacious burglary gang in recent Hollywood history–accused of stealing more than $3 million in clothing and jewelry from Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other stars–appears to be a bunch of club-hopping Valley kids, motivated by vanity and celebrity-worship.

{ Vanity Fair | Continue reading }

The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”

In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually a United States government plot to those that claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered at the direction of the royal family or British intelligence.

In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation. (…)

Does the Internet, with its increased democratization of information, help spread conspiracy theories or help expose them? Mr. Aaronovitch says that it was obvious that “sites endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories and those subscribing to them in passing far outnumbered sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.”

He writes that the Internet has enabled the “release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd,” and that “cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other’s interests impossibly exotic and even mad.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Last week, I read a few articles in relation to results from a recent Australian Hotel Association (AHA) survey, revealing that women are consistently more likely to pilfer than men. Millions of dollars a year in the hotel industry, are lost to theft; from tiny soft face towels, to larger items like statues. Essentially, anything not nailed down. (…)

While exploring other topics on the subject matter to cover, I learned about the different tactics reportedly used by women to steal.  Did you know about Crotch Walking? Taken directly from- Associated Content.com: Shoplifting Statistics and Tactics, explains it as, “Crotch walking is a theft tactic that is cleverly performed by women. They simply wear a full dress or skirt into the store; place an item between their thighs, and walk out of the business like it is any other normal shopping day. Women with stronger thighs have been known to shoplift larger ticket items like electronics.” 

{ Bust | Continue reading }

{ Skimmer found Dec. 6, 2009, attached to the front of a Citibank ATM in Woodland Hills, Calif. A skimmer is a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. | Krebs on Security | more }

Bank robbers have threatened tellers with knives, shot their way into banks and tunnelled up into vaults. But one woman in southern Russia chose a more peaceful method: Police say Galina Korzhova hypnotised a bank teller into handing over tens of thousands of dollars in what is believed to be just one in a series of daring, if non-violent, bank robberies.

Galina Korzhova was arrested, said Anton Kornoukhov, a spokesman for police in the southern city of Volgograd, on suspicion of hypnotising a bank teller in the nearby town of Volzhky into giving her more than $80,000. She is suspected of having robbed up to 30 additional banks in what Russian media have called a “grand tour” around the country.

“She met the woman on the street, saying that she would remove curses and help cure sick relatives,” said Kornoukhov in a telephone interview.

Korzhova is accused of telling the bank employee, whose name has not been released, to put the money into a plastic bag and meet her outside the state bank Sberbank, on Communist Street in the small town. There, the case goes, the teller gave Korzhova the money.

{ The Global Post | Continue reading }

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

I’m a trained hypnotist myself, so my first reaction was skepticism. You can’t hypnotize someone that quickly and reliably. But then I put on my criminal mastermind hat and tried to figure out how this crime could be committed as described.

The trick is to hypnotize the targets well ahead of the actual day of the robbery, perhaps several times, and weed out the people who don’t instantly return to the so-called trance state upon suggestion. Then on robbing day, a simple suggestion at the store or bank can produce the instant results you need. The subjects have been pre-trained.

The hard part of this scheme is finding a way to get the right people to agree to hypnosis ahead of time. I imagine he advertised in a local publication, offering to help people quit smoking or lose weight. When people called for an appointment he would ask what sounded like standard questions, including age and occupation. If someone had the right sort of job, he set up an appointment and started the process. On any given day, he could hypnotize several new clients while testing for the most susceptible subjects who also handle money.

The next part would be a bit tricky. You can’t get a hypnotized person to do something that would violate his basic sense of right and wrong, or to put himself in danger. The brain has some sort of safety mechanism to prevent that.

In the surveillance video on the web, the hypnotist is seen taking the money from the register himself while the clerk seemed to be watching. This might be part of his workaround. The clerk wasn’t committing the crime so much as observing it. And perhaps the hypnotist said he was borrowing the money, or the manager had asked him to bring it to him in the parking lot, or some other story that obscured the ethical boundaries.

It could work. He’d need to be an excellent hypnotist, but that isn’t so rare.

{ Scott Adams }

photo { Elinor Carucci }

The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.

We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.

{ Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security | University of Cambridge | PDF }

illustration { Richard Wilkinson }

Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside.

Each undercover patient had rehearsed an extensive back story, and the supposed family members who visited them were professional actors. A remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.

The project, which took place this spring in De Gelderse Roos, a psychiatric complex about 40 miles from Amsterdam, was not a sting operation. The staff was told there would be mystery shoppers, of a sort, in the facility over a couple of months.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Le fou est le joueur déréglé du Même et de l’Autre. Il prend les choses pour ce qu’elles ne sont pas, et les gens les uns pour les autres; il ignore ses amis, reconnaît les étrangers; il croit démasquer, et il impose un masque.

{ Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 1966 }

video { San Clemente, directed by Raymond Depardon and Sophie Ristelhueber, 1977 }

Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, and Nihilartikels, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry.

The neologism Mountweazel was coined by the The New Yorker magazine based on a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Another term, Nihilartikel, is of uncertain origin, combining the Latin word nihil, “nothing” with German Artikel, “article.” There is also the specific term “trap street.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map covers, for the purpose of “trapping” potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the “trap street” on their map.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The town of Agloe, New York was invented by map makers but eventually became a real place.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Adelphia Communications, Barings Bank, Enron, HealthSouth, HIH Insurance, Hollinger International, Tyco International, WorldCom/MCI, Xerox…the white collar crime list goes on. But, did the executives at these companies start out as criminals or did they head down the slippery slope to criminality one misplaced step at a time? According to research to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, there are twelve steps to white-collar crime. (…)

The researchers have broken down the process of white-collar crime into 12 steps, with steps one to four explaining how the “players” first encounter and support each other and begin to spot the opportunity for illegal activity.

These first four steps are: The perpetrator is hired into a position of power. Second step, personality and life circumstances affect the perpetrator in such a way that they recognise their power. In the third step “drivers” who turn a blind eye or condone certain activities come into view. The fourth step sees passive participants recognizing an opportunity.

In steps 5 to 8 the truth of escalating illegal activity is hidden.

In step 5 reluctant participants are drawn into the web of deceit by the “leader”. In step 6 distrust of the other people involved emerges. In step 7, the perpetrator recognizes they have their accomplices in a vulnerable position and begin to exploit that position. In step 8 bullying tactics become increasingly common as illegal goals are aimed for.

In steps 9 through 12 the perpetrator’s actions are challenged and publicised revealing the white-collar crime.

In step 9, the crime continues, but the perpetrators, trapped in their insatiable addiction, become more blaze, taking bigger risks, and seeking more lucrative exploits.

In step 10, an undeniable paradox becomes apparent, as the participants’ values and their behavior are now obviously in conflict.

In step 11, a whistleblower steps up to the mark and the leader loses control.

Finally in step 12, blame is laid at the feet of the perpetrator at which point they either deny everything or admit their guilt and seek forgiveness by laying bare their activities.

{ Inderscience/EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Finlay MacKay }