[HN Gopher] My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his ...
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My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his way to the top
Author : aagha
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-04-23 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (narratively.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (narratively.com)
| stametseater wrote:
| From the author's bio
|
| > _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 wrote:
| It's idempotent. He pulled the greatest ruse, convincing you of
| his exploits as a con artist when in fact he wasn't the great
| con he said he was ;)
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Yet another fiction writer that writes fiction and lies about it
| being a true story?
|
| Why would one trust a person who advertises themselves as a liar?
|
| Do they suddenly turn honest in order to write a book?
| [deleted]
| cwdegidio wrote:
| It totally screams of another "Confessions of an Economic
| Hitman." It will be a bestseller, be proven fake, and then
| quoted a million times.
| metadat wrote:
| To be fair, it's only a memoir. This doesn't invalidate your
| points, though - only recommended as a pure entertainment read.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| > 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
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| greatpostman wrote:
| 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
| supahfly_remix wrote:
| Was this person ever found out?
| greatpostman wrote:
| They got fired and the whole trading operation collapsed.
| They never discovered the extent of the facade, but there
| were suspicions. The whole thing went on for 15 years. A
| major portfolio. By then he had enough to easily retire
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Why would they be fired, if they were one of the top 50
| people in the bank? From a pure profit perspective, if this
| guy was that good, did it really matter if he was using
| 'sophisticated algorithms' or not?
|
| (I may have misunderstood your first comment. If so, please
| let me know.)
| karaterobot wrote:
| I assumed they meant top 50 on the org chart, not
| necessarily the top 50 in objective performance over a
| long term. I could be wrong.
| __alexs wrote:
| The risk profile of someone who is consistently lucky is
| probably quite different from someone who is consistently
| right.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I'm not sure you can dismiss someone being "consistently
| lucky" so easily.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster
|
| The thing that would concern me more is the pattern of
| dishonesty than that the person did well over a long time
| by just going with their gut.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| > Superforecasters do not predict the future with perfect
| accuracy: Bloomberg notes that they made a prediction of
| 23% for a leave vote in the month of the June 2016 Brexit
| referendum. On the other hand, the BBC notes that they
| accurately predicted Donald Trump's success in the 2016
| Republican Party primaries.[11]
|
| Is there any good documentation on superforecasters
| efficacy? Like with actual statistical measurements?
| Because the Wikipedia article is really dumb.
| DANmode wrote:
| The entire metric is "beating the market".
|
| If someone showed me airtight, verifiably top tier calls
| over _15 years_ (especially the last 15) I 'd probably
| rub whatever rabbit's foot they asked.
| nullc wrote:
| Are you aware of the old random stock pick fax scam?
|
| You get some huge list of fax numbers. You pick some
| random penny stocks and fax each one a different random
| pick, telling them it's going to explode. Then you look
| and see which picks fail and you discard those numbers.
|
| Eventually you get down to a small list of numbers they
| you've been consistently making amazingly prescient stock
| picks to for the last weeks/months... then you tell them
| all to invest in some dogcrap that you've cornered or ask
| them to buy your latest picks, or some other story to
| extract a lot of money from them.
|
| The victims rubs your rabbit's foot and you cash in.
|
| Thing is that the same scam can be performed in a
| decentralized manner, even by accident, just by having a
| lot of investment advisors some of whom get a
| consistently lucky run.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| The longer the horizon, the less so.
| PakG1 wrote:
| The interesting question is whether he developed any
| tacit skill or tacit knowledge that would explain his
| consistent success but would also be difficult to
| communicate or explain precisely because it's tacit, and
| therefore can only be described as listening to his gut.
| In the article, something like this is described:
|
| _I can tell she is going to say something else, and I'm
| pretty sure I know what it is. She's going to share with
| me how much time she has left. I can hear it in her
| pauses. After so many years working the phone, I've
| learned to pick out the nuances, the things being said
| behind what's being said, entire life stories even, in a
| hesitation or vocal inflection, in blank moments in
| time._
|
| It's difficult to explain what makes a pause have meaning
| or nuance, and yet, this guy may be able to interpret
| them consistently in a simple phone call without seeing
| facial expressions and body language. Tacit stuff is
| really tough to define and nail down. So it's easy to say
| gut feeling instead. But as tacit stuff finally gets
| clarified, defined, and explained, we're often able to
| see that tacit stuff is anything but a gut feeling.
| bitL wrote:
| College education sometimes kills some major talents so
| one could also imagine that people who avoided higher
| education might keep some rare talents distinguishing
| their performance from the others. Tiny chance but it
| might happen.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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._
| astura wrote:
| >I don't know how they found out? Is that public information?
|
| Verifying degree is extremely easy in most cases - the
| background check company will just call the registrar. It's
| probably done through an API nowadays.
| LandR wrote:
| For my current job I had to get proof of my degree,
| institution and grade.
|
| Thos was for a degree between 1999 and 2003.
|
| They wanted info down to the month I started... I had no idea
| so just guessed a month in 1999... They got back to me to
| check what was up as they had determined I actually started
| in some other month...
|
| They even wanted proof of what High school I went to.
|
| Some companies are super thorough!
| vsareto wrote:
| >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.
|
| Personally, if I found out and they could actually do the
| work, I would let it pass. I'd consider it a white lie in
| that case.
|
| I think it's more of a harm to society to use degrees as
| requirements when they aren't actually required. This too is
| lying, but you won't see companies facing penalties for
| putting a degree requirement when one isn't necessary for the
| job.
| the_snooze wrote:
| If you're looking at it from just a qualifications
| standpoint, then you're right. However, there's more to a
| person than their qualifications and skills. Judgment and
| character matter too.
|
| If someone were to lie to my face and waited until I caught
| them before owning up to it, then giving them a pass tells
| the world that I'm A-OK with deceit as long as they deliver
| results.
| dmreedy wrote:
| > Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire
| him?"
|
| I would propose a slightly more cynical model:
|
| It might not look good if it goes public
| nanidin wrote:
| If word gets out that this company doesn't check
| backgrounds, then this company will be inundated with
| fraudsters.
| willcipriano wrote:
| A bit more cynical:
|
| People with college degrees act as a group. By enforcing
| the educational cartel they prevent poorer upstarts from
| competing with them.
| greesil wrote:
| Maybe penalizing people for lying on their resumes is a
| good idea.
| gunshai wrote:
| So they fired someone for lying, despite 10 years of work
| history.
|
| Seems like there's more to that then just not having the
| degree.
|
| Your college degree is not correlative to your ability to
| actually do a job. He probably did a lot more than just that.
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| Or high-level jobs have no accountability for actually
| being good at something.
| jedberg wrote:
| > I don't know how they found out? Is that public
| information?
|
| When I graduated college (UC Berkeley, very large public
| school in California) I had to go to the registrar to pick up
| my diploma since I graduated off cycle. In line in front of
| me was a guy who seemed to know the lady at the window well,
| and put down a piece of paper and said "got another list to
| check". The lady went into the back, so I asked the guy what
| he was doing.
|
| He told me he worked for a background check company and was
| there about once a month with a list of names to verify
| graduation dates. He told me a lot of his work comes from
| government and big companies. He then suggested that if I was
| going to lie about graduating, make sure it was to a small
| company that can't afford background checks!
|
| He also told me that almost every month there is at least one
| person who fails to have the degree they claim to have.
| bitL wrote:
| This is done via parchment.com these days, they send you a
| nice e-diploma whose signature can be verified in Acrobat
| Reader or on their site directly.
| nullc wrote:
| Dunno how long ago that was, but these days universities
| tell you that they're prohibited by law to disclose such
| information. In the US the applicable law is FERPA-- which
| was passed in 1974-- but there are similar rules in other
| countries. You might well have been witnessing a violation,
| it certainly happens.
|
| The general difficulty in checking such things is part of
| why that form of fraud is so ubiquitous.
| snthd wrote:
| FERPA -
| https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
|
| >Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory"
| information such as a student's name, address, telephone
| number, date and place of birth, _honors and awards, and
| dates of attendance_. However, schools must tell parents
| and eligible students about directory information and
| allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount
| of time to request that the school not disclose directory
| information about them.
| jedberg wrote:
| FERPA doesn't apply when the person has a signed
| agreement to allow disclosure. Same way you can request
| that one college send your grades to another (for grad
| school apps for example).
|
| Doing a background check is the same thing. It's
| authorized by the student.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| This has been the case forever. Society's values ebb and flow.
|
| 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".
| rcarr wrote:
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << 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.
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| The problem is that in this case there's an extraordinarily
| lucrative opportunity for anyone willing to take it, meaning
| even if most people would see this and think "I don't want to
| be that person" there'll still be people who will do this
| line of work, regardless how immoral it might be
| corbulo wrote:
| Your point is parallel to the ideas surrounding the realism
| of altruism.
|
| People return their shopping carts because its the right
| thing to do, but also there is minimal cost. As the cost
| ramps up the calculation for a 'selfless' act is effectively
| inverted to bias self interest instead.
|
| This is how you get the current state of the financial
| sector. Ironically altruism is so cynically dismissed that
| its actually used as a marketing strategy to pursue self
| interest, with no one bothering to disassemble it because no
| one believes thats the motivation anyway (see: subsidizing
| homeowners with bad credit using homeowners with good
| credit). Leaving the only people who do believe it
| functioning out of partisanship and lack of curiosity.
|
| 'Abnormal' behavior is exponential in its effects. Much like
| a fire, it only stops if contained. Thats why total laissez
| faire deregulation is naive. Even if most people do the right
| thing, society is not silo'd from the minority who does the
| bad things.
| stametseater wrote:
| > _People return their shopping carts because its the right
| thing to do, but also there is minimal cost._
|
| Apparently in some communities (such as Germany) it is
| believed that people cannot be counted on to return the
| shopping cart properly unless the cart holds a small value
| coin hostage. So the tolerated cost of selfless acts isn't
| some human constant, even in developed societies like
| Germany where people have their basic needs met.
|
| In fact it's even more complicated than that, because
| specific kinds of selfless acts have different degrees of
| perceived importance in different cultures. In some
| cultures, it's considered _very_ important to feed your
| guests, even if that means the host has to go hungry. In
| other cultures, feeding your guests isn 't important or
| expected, even from hosts with comfortable abundance.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| If murdering was legal, most people still wouldn't murder. If
| murdering reliably earned 1 million dollars, then most
| _people_ still wouldn't murder but most _money_ would be in
| the hands of killers
| smcin wrote:
| You're making me think what the price-demand elasticity
| curve for murder might look like _( "Would you off someone
| for $100K? What if we told you they were a bad person")_.
| Kind of like Bridget cold-calling in "The Last Seduction",
| making outrageous propositions in calm language.
| atoav wrote:
| btw you can do italics on HN using asterisks like _this_.
| elcritch wrote:
| Jumping from returning shopping carts to murder is a bit of a
| leap though. Sure most people wouldn't commit murder.
|
| However, its much much easier for things like returning
| shopping carts become less common. How many stores have left
| San Francisco and Portland downtowns due to unabashed theft?
|
| I agree that much of it also starts with leaders. If the top
| eschelon is busy with NIMBYism and gaming share prices to get
| theirs, it won't be long before normal folk start questioning
| doing the moral thing in order to get ahead.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _...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.
| elcritch wrote:
| Will they also redo the massive horrors relewsed on the world
| that Marxists did? Wait, FTX seems like a prime example.
|
| Capitalism in itself is incomplete, I believe it requires a
| strong moral principle in a populous to work well. Trying to
| shoehorn that moral basis into capitalism as Marx did just
| results in a very destructive system.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Capitalism also kills a lot of people, but it has a better
| UX, as it mostly kills people that are invisible to us.
| elcritch wrote:
| Sure capitalism kills people, but not nearly the same
| order of magnitude. The worse cases of unbridled
| capitlaism killed far less than any one of worse cases of
| communism where we're talking to the tune of hundreds of
| millions. Then capitalism helped spawned things like the
| "green revolution" that prevented mass starvation across
| the globe since then.
| dymk wrote:
| You really think they're not aware of Marx?
| [deleted]
| rcurry wrote:
| 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.
| easyTree wrote:
| -- More times than I can remember they'd say, "I can't believe
| I'm actually talking to you." And I wanted to respond: "You're
| not." -- lool :-)
| compsciphd wrote:
| reminds of the husband on The Americans.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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
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