A Stacker Darkly

NFT Heists, Stimulus Checks, Copper Heist, and Substack

NFT Heists

I had been waiting to write about NFTs - non-fungible tokens - because it’s an emerging technology (for us normies) and also I did not want to incur the wrath of the crypto enthusiasts who’d eagerly point out all the ways I explained them incorrectly. Well, I didn’t have to wait long before the NFT heists began:

Nifty Gateway—an NFT marketplace that was bought out by the Winklevoss twins back in 2019—announced on Monday morning some of its users were swept up in a small-scale hack that saw their accounts and credit cards compromised.

Uh oh! So what happened? Apparently hackers accessed user accounts at Nifty, stole their NFT collections, then used whatever funds they had attached to the account to buy and sell more NFTs, and pocket the proceeds of those as well. Not good!

And, perhaps as a preview of what our crypto future looks like, even when the thieves are identified the exchanges may not move to reclaim the stolen goods:

Per Miraflor, Nifty promised him that it would reverse the ten grand spending spree that was charged to the card that it had on file for him. As for the artwork that was allegedly stolen from his collection and sold through these third parties, Miraflor said on Twitter that the company told him it would be unfair to take the pieces back from their new owners.

Nifty makes it pretty explicit in their ToS that they aren’t liable for damages on their platform, though they are required by their banking agreements to refund fraudulent credit card charges. NFTs have been hot for less than 6 months, so I’m excited to see where this goes.

Stimulus Checks

It was unequivocal good news when Congress passed the American Rescue Plan aka the latest round of COVID-19 stimulus aka the stimmy and most Americans realized they’d be receiving $1400 checks, with additional assistance going to low income families and parents. There’s a lot of good stuff in the ARP, which surprised me, because I assumed the Senate would water down anything remotely progressive in the bill.

Anyhow, one thing the ARP did not contain was a shield against debt collectors, because of course not:

Recipients with unpaid credit card or medical bills for which a company has obtained a judgment against the debtor could see the fresh infusion taken from their bank accounts, potentially preventing those in need from getting the emergency cash.

They protected the previous round of $600 payments, which was good, and had nothing to do with the political party in power I am certain. There is some good news, though, as the IRS has said it will not go after ARP stimmies…sort of:

The IRS has agreed not to reduce economic stimulus payments for some people who owe federal tax debts, the agency’s in-house watchdog said Monday.

However, the move won’t shield people with some other debts, including state taxes and overpayments of certain federal benefits.

Oh, and also if you were a good citizen and filed your 2020 taxes you may be out of luck:

However, [Collins] noted that the change won’t cover those who have already filed their 2020 returns or file them before the IRS can make a necessary computer programming change. It also won't affect most categories of debt.

Debt collectors reaped a windfall last year during the pandemic, as the government put more money in peoples’ pockets and they were allowed to use the courts and aggressive tactics to take it from them. Thus far, 2021 looks to be more of the same.

Copper Heist

I write about quite a few elaborate scams. Some veer fully into “heist” territory, but I can’t recall any of this scale:

Commodities trader Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. struck a deal last summer to buy $36 million of copper from a Turkish supplier. But when the cargoes started arriving in China, all it found were containers full of painted rocks.

The saga unfolds like a gangland thriller, with the Swiss trading house saying it’s been the victim of cargo fraud. Before its journey from a port near Istanbul to China even began, about 6,000 tons of blister copper in more than 300 containers were switched with jagged paving stones, spray-painted to resemble the semi-refined metal.

I mean…$36 million is a lot of dollars, but also 300 containers and six thousand tons of copper seems like a lot of stolen goods to move. Like, from a purely logistical standpoint. You have to move shipping containers full of metal and replace them with shipping containers full of rocks. Matt Levine did the math on this, and it’s bleak:

Okay so $36 million for 6,000 tons is $6,000 per ton, or $3 per pound, making bulk copper less valuable by weight than a turkey sandwich. But you don’t just have to transport 6,000 tons of copper from the ships—eight different ships!—where you stole it to wherever you want to sell it; you also have to transport 6,000 tons of paving stones to the ships. Really you’re getting $1.50 per pound transported.

I appreciate the boldness of the scheme, although as you’d expect it was hard to keep quiet and they’ve arrested a bunch of people who were involved. All the poor saps who had to move the metal and rocks and shipping containers got a raw deal in all of this. Oh, and the minerals company probably isn’t going to get its money back because they forged the cargo insurance, haha:

Normally, in such cases of non-delivery a trading house could make a claim against a cargo’s insurance policy. But Mercuria found that just one out of seven contracts used by the Turkish company to insure the cargo was real. The rest had been forged.

I realize this is a serious crime and all, but I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when they opened the first container full of painted rocks in China - why bother painting the rocks? I have no idea - and then the second, then the six hundredth. The boss on the phone, screaming, as the cargo inspectors deliver the bad news. It’s a great mental image. I wonder what they’re going to do with all that copper.

Substack

I had initially written a lot of words this week about Substack and my thoughts on it, but instead I will link this explainer about the current controversy with the platform you are currently reading this on. I am just a guy with a small newsletter, I don’t do this for money, but I can vote with my feet and I do not want my writing to drive traffic, eyeballs, and revenue to a company that has decided to amplify some truly heinous voices. I am not calling for a boycott of Substack - indeed, some writers I very much enjoy are on it, and I do not blame them if they stay. But, some time within the next few weeks, I’ll be moving to another platform. Hopefully(!) nothing will change for you, readers, and I will keep writing this thing because I enjoy it and the world will never run itself out of scams.

Short Cons

Buzzfeed News - “The payment was subjected to what one bank executive has described in court testimony as “senior level scrutiny” from the bank’s lawyers and anti–money laundering officers.”

CNN - “The city averaged 39 robocalls per resident in February, YouMail found. That's more than two and a half times the national average, which is about 14 to 15 calls monthly for each person, according to YouMail.”

WaPo - “Policy experts and gig economy observers said tech companies benefited from their workforce’s access to programs the firms did not pay into, lessening the pressure to make workers employees at a time when they were engaged in a heated political battle over workers’ status.”

Tips, thoughts, painted bricks to scammerdarkly@gmail.com