Expert Advice

Bruce Bagley, Fake Gun Permits, and Phony Amazon Reviews

If I Was Gonna Do It

For many years, University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley was one of the top experts on money laundering in Latin America. He wrote a book called Drug Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Violence in the Americas Today. This was apparently also an entry on his To-Do list, because, well, I think you know where this is going:

…federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Bagley with laundering $2.5 million in dirty money out of Venezuela between November 2017 and October 2018.

The prosecutor who announced the charges couldn’t resist having a little fun with it.

Today's charges of money laundering and conspiracy should serve as an object lesson for Bruce Bagley, who now faces a potential tenure in federal prison.

The joke works especially well because there is no parole in federal prison, so he doesn’t have to worry about performance reviews.

For someone who wrote the literal book on money laundering, Bagley doesn’t seem to be especially good at it:

starting in November 2017, prosecutors say Bagley started receiving mysteriously huge chunks of cash — sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time — from bank accounts in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The feds say Bagley then withdrew 90 percent of the money via a cashier's check, handed the money to an unnamed individual (listed as "Individual-1"), and then kept the remaining 10 percent for himself.

This is not subtle! When you create a new bank account and it suddenly starts receiving 6-figure wires from countries with a reputation for money laundering, your bank may notice. His “opsec” in other areas was not great:

"Bagley and Individual-1 discussed the fact that they were moving Individual-2's funds and that the funds represented the proceeds of foreign bribery and embezzlement stolen from the Venezuelan people. Despite this fact, Bagley continued to receive money from accounts belonging to Individual-2, and continued to pass the majority of those funds to Individual-1. Moreover, Bagley entered into sham contracts that purported to justify the transfer of Individual-2's funds into Account-1."

I’m starting to wonder whether some enterprising (or bored) agents at the Miami FBI office decided to see whether they could entrap the guy who wrote the book they read for their anti-money laundering training. In my mind, it went something like:

INDIVIDUAL-1: Mr. Bagley, I am told you are an expert in money laundering. My friend has money from CRIMES that he would like to LAUNDER through your bank accounts.

BAGLEY: I’m in.

FBI AGENT-1 (sitting in unmarked van): I thought this would be harder.

Perhaps the Imaginary Feds felt guilty and tried to help out Bagley, freezing his accounts to give him the chance to rethink his decisions.

Bagley's accounts were shut down in October 2018 due to suspicious activity. But, the feds say, he then opened another account — and allegedly again accepted dirty Venezuelan cash two more times.

Bagley! What are you doing, man? It’s a real testament to how people who should absolutely know better seem to lose their common sense brain receptors when money is involved. Maybe the old saying is true and those who can’t do should stick to teaching.

License to Shill

The Huffington Post has uncovered a large-scale Facebook grift targeting gun owners.

Concealed Online, a for-profit company based in California, exploits a Virginia law that lets non-residents apply for concealed-carry permits after completing a safety training online. Through its website, it gives its customers the video training and a test, then charges them up to $130 for a certificate of completion.

Concealed Online is…concealing from their audience that it’s not an actual firearms permit. They have created versions of their site that allow visitors to bypass the safety course entirely, and receive the certificate immediately. They are very committed to helping people save time:

Concealed Online has used Facebook’s geo-targeting ad technology to specifically reach people in New York, Maryland, Illinois, Oregon and California with language including, “BETTER BELIEVE IT! A 2018 ‘Timesaver Law’ Grants ALL CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS the Right to Qualify ONLINE for FREE to Carry Concealed!” and “Carry Legally in Your State.” 

None of these states would honor Virginia’s non-resident permit, even if someone were to go through the process of obtaining one, as opposed to the certificate, which is, again, not a permit. The company is telling people to do illegal things with their firearms. Surely Facebook will do something about this! Hang on.

Facebook, which prohibits ads containing “deceptive, false, or misleading claims,” has long been aware of such complaints. But upon reviews in 2018 and earlier this year, it ruled that Concealed Online’s ads did not go against its policy, and it has continued to cash the company’s massive checks. Concealed Online has run 25,000 ads and paid Facebook more than $6.4 million since late last spring, which is as far back as public ad-spending data goes.

Ahhhhhhhhhh, yes. Very good. Surely once the press contacts them someth-

Facebook conducted another review of Concealed Online’s ads after being contacted by HuffPost this week. It determined that the ads with a shareable link leading straight to a checkout page do violate Facebook’s policy against “unacceptable business practices.” Those direct-checkout ads will no longer be shown, a Facebook spokesperson said. 

But so far, it appears the tech giant has only taken action against a single ad.

Got em! Great job everyone. What’s even more wild is that this is the second story in a year about this company. They’re one of the biggest political ad spenders on the entire platform! Again! They were last year too!

I’ve done quite a bit of advertising on Facebook - some of it political - and I can say with quite a bit of confidence that a normal advertiser would not be able to get away with selling a highly misleading product that could get its customers into legal jeopardy via highly misleading ads. While the $6 million in ad spend HuffPo reports is significant to you or I, it is a drop in the bucket for Facebook. To become the highest level of Marketing Partner with Facebook, a company has to spend $25 million in a year.

Facebook doesn’t need the money, and they certainly don’t need the controversy. Why keep this company as a client? Facebook won’t tell us, and there are limits to how much policing of their platform journalists can do. My wild speculation is it might have to do with a certain tech founder’s fear of pissing off conservatives. Who can say!

I hope none of my readers need to hear this, and I’ll be writing more about it next week, but please be extremely careful buying things you see advertised on Facebook. And leave your gun at home.

Zero Stars

I thought I was done writing about Amazon for a couple weeks, but BuzzFeed News is back at it, this time with a story about people who receive knockoff items and write glowing reviews about them.

Sellers reach out to Jessica through targeted Facebook ads touting free items or dedicated review groups with thousands of members, and give her a specific set of instructions to purchase their products on Amazon. After she leaves a 5-star review, the sellers reimburse on PayPal or in an Amazon gift card, and let her keep the items she reviews.

Again, Amazon’s systems are woefully unprepared to deal with sophisticated scams like these. To get a sense of how widespread this is, one needs only look at how popular it’s become on social media:

Sellers started inviting Jessica to private Facebook groups with names like “Secret Rebate Club” and “AMZ Freebies.” One of the groups has nearly 30,000 members.

Thirty thousand members! There are even tiers of these groups, with special invite-only crews that, I assume, give the best quality goods? Many of the products these companies - who are mostly located in China - sell are not good quality at all.

Jessica is afraid to use the electronic appliances she receives, which often come with incomprehensible instructions written in both English and Chinese. She took photos of one product, a foot spa, without adding water or plugging it in.

Jessica also doesn’t trust health and beauty products on the site, because of her boyfriend, a chemist, who has found toxic ingredients in analyses of unregulated products.

Imagine being a chemist and your girlfriend’s side gig is rating unsafe Chinese cosmetics five stars on Amazon. Therein lies the problem - these fake reviews aren’t simply giving these companies an unfair edge in the Amazon marketplace, they’re assuring consumers that low quality - possibly dangerous - products are actually safe and good. That’s a consumer safety nightmare, and one that Amazon does not feel any obligation to handle. They’ve actually been courting Chinese businesses, as the WSJ reported recently:

The Journal earlier this year uncovered 10,870 items for sale between May and August that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled, lacked federally-required warnings, or are banned by federal regulators. Amazon said it investigated the items, and some listings were taken down after the Journal’s reporting.

Of 1,934 sellers whose addresses could be determined, 54% were based in China, according to a Journal analysis of data from research firm Marketplace Pulse.

Last week, we talked about how Amazon can’t stop counterfeit products in its Marketplace, but the far more dangerous trend could be foreign sellers unloading their dangerous products on unwitting American consumers, and paying a shadow network of fake reviewers to boost the products to the top of the listings. I had not expected to be advising people to not buy anything on the Internet within a couple months of starting my scam newsletter, but we may be almost there.

Short Cons

Justice Dot Gov - “Antonio DiMarco was a serial swindler, using stolen identities to access auctions, place winning bids on multimillion-dollar artworks, and defraud lenders and insurers into believing that he owned artworks he never actually acquired.”

Jenny Odell - “Maybe this explains what’s so galling to people about the Folsom & Co. not-really-scam: It simply lays bare the categorical deception at the heart of all branding and retail.”

Wall Street Journal - “The scale of her loss—nearly $340,000—and the ease with which the money was moved out of her accounts show why scam calls persist. They work, even on people who think they would never fall for one.”

Tips to scammerdarkly@gmail.com.