Gleaming the Curve

Joe Exotic, Martin Shkreli, Grandparent Scams, Bloomberg, and Space Crime

What the Tiger Saw

I know we’ve all had a lot of coronavirus news, so let’s talk about the other plague sweeping America right now - Tiger King. Yeah, I’ve seen it. I have…thoughts about the show. But, after it was over, I wanted to know more about what the hell was going on. It’s certainly not the first TV documentary to do a lousy job providing background on its protagonist(s).

And so, I came across an article in Slate examining one of the more entertaining elements of the show - the music:

To begin with, the songs that are presented as Joe Exotic’s … aren’t. They were written and performed by Washington state musicians Vince Johnson and Danny Clinton…

Oh HELL yeah. Tell me more:

…whom the Clark County Columbian flagged in 2010 as local artists to watch because several of their songs were due to be featured in a movie called Nude Nuns With Big Guns.

I love it. Did he sing on them at all? Maybe, a little:

Joe Exotic didn’t write any of the songs, and he didn’t even sing on most of them, although a few seem to feature his vocals mixed low over Collins’ and Johnson’s recordings. But it’s hard to imagine them being sung—or being pretended to be sung—by anyone else.

So - spoiler alert! - I went back and watched the funeral scene from the show again, and he does seem to be singing over the song, which still has the original vocals. Not quite as horrifying as lip-syncing a song you didn’t write at your husband’s funeral, but not not horrifying.

Anyhow, we’ve finally exposed Joe Exotic as a fraud. It’s been a long time coming.

M-M-Martin Shkreli

Okay, this is corona news, but it’s very entertaining corona news, in the form of disgraced and imprisoned Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli. What’s he up to?

The disgraced biotech entrepreneur is asking for a “brief” three-month furlough from his federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Penn., to spend time researching potential treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

“As a successful two-time biopharma entrepreneur, having purchased multiple companies, invented multiple new drug candidates, filed numerous INDs and clinical trial applications, I am one of the few executives experienced in ALL aspects of drug development from molecule creation and hypothesis generation,” Shkreli wrote in a scientific paper posted online this week.

There is…a lot happening here. You may remember Shkreli as the guy who made news for buying the rights to rare drugs and jacking the prices up 5,000% but, since that was somehow legal, that isn’t why he ended up in jail. He ended up in jail for run-of-the-mill securities fraud, because ripping off sick people is okay, but when you rip off investors the government will step in.

Shkreli is a joker, and a convicted fraudster, but he’s not wrong about this:

In the author statement at the end of the paper, Shkreli dismissed the drug industry’s response to Covid-19 as “inadequate.”

There is a meme, created by Clickhole, for this occasion:

Credit where it is due, Shkreli is audacious. Not only does he ask for a temporary release from prison to, uh, solve coronavirus? He also, generously, insists he might not make money off it:

I do not expect to profit in any way, shape or form from coronavirus-related treatments. I believe any company developing a coronavirus drug should seek to recoup its cost at most and be willing to perform the work as a civil service at the least. If the government is willing to reward industry for their work on this catastrophic situation, it will be at each company’s discretion to accept, negotiate or deny such funding, including bulk purchases, cost reimbursement, tax credits and other benefits.

No, please! I absolutely could not accept all this admiration, and money! I’m blushing! I expected to read a lot of ridiculous stories during the pandemic, but “Martin Shkreli wants out of jail to stop a global pandemic” was not on my radar. Others have joked that he could team up with Elizabeth Holmes. I am just glad for a brief moment of levity in all this mess.

More Mask Fraud

Last week I wrote about Turkish companies making counterfeit surgical masks. This week it’s Instagram mask scammers:

Researchers found at least 10,450 accounts on Instagram that have popped up in the past few months selling masks, some of which appear to be scams and most of which aren’t vetted for safety or price concerns. The offers appear through a main page or by using the app’s features including Stories, where posts vanish after 24 hours, or live video. Many of the accounts have only popped up in the past month or two, and most appear to be based in China

Very good. These sorts of posts are somewhat harder for Facebook to police because they aren’t all paid aids. That said, checking how much money Facebook makes each year, they should absolutely be able to police this sort of thing. Like, this isn’t subtle:

Most of the accounts have few followers, but some have tens of thousands. An account called N95 Health Foundation accumulated about 99,300 followers, and on Tuesday, the page linked to a website, registered April 5, selling a box of 10 N95 masks for $50.

Pretty easy to filter for keywords like this! N95 Health Foundation doesn’t even…make…sense? Maybe they are big fans of the NIOSH air filtration rating system. I’m an N100 guy, personally.

Grandparent Scams

There are so many different types of scams, and so much news going on each week, it feels overwhelming. But, once in awhile, scams and news converge and I can write about a new (to this newsletter) type of scam. This week? Grandparent scams:

In grandparent scams, scammers pose as panicked grandchildren in trouble, calling or sending messages urging you to wire money immediately. They’ll say they need cash to help with an emergency – like paying a hospital bill or needing to leave a foreign country.

Faaaaaantastic. I can absolutely imagine my grandparents falling for one of these scams. With the pandemic in full swing, scammers are using the virus as a way to bilk money out of seniors. It’s not great. Grandparents have enough to worry about right now. Can we give them a break?

More Quack Doctors

Dr. Oz is a quack. Let’s establish this out of the gate. He has the distinction of having been dragged in front of Congress and yelled at by United States Senators for pitching snake oil diet products on his wildly popular television show. He’s promoted psychic mediums as real. He embraces unproven holistic remedies. He created a reality show that filmed dying patients without their families’ consent. His celebrity status is equal parts ridiculous and dangerous.

Apparently Oz has decided a pivot to right wing media was smart, and he’s become a regular on Fox News. This, of course, got the attention of the president. And, well, you know where this is going:

In the past couple of weeks, Trump began hearing more and more about—and watching Oz, now a Fox News regular, discuss—hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that Trump aggressively touted as a coronavirus treatment, much to the dismay of various medical experts and scientists.

As if the quack doctor who brought this to the president’s attention wasn’t bad enough, now we have a high profile celebrity huckster talking about it. Other than appearing on television, it seems Oz is actually helping to dictate US health policy, which is terrifying:

Trump has told officials that it would be “a good idea” if they talked to Oz, one of the sources added. Top administration officials, including Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, have privately spoken to Oz in recent days to discuss the virus and his views on the possible treatment […]

“It's a rough-and-tumble study, but she’s agreeing to do it, or look into it, anyway,” Oz claimed.

This guy shouldn’t be anywhere near a TV camera, much less a medical study run by the government to treat a pandemic. But he’s mastered the strategy other charlatans have used to worm their way into the White House:

Oz has appeared on Fox News 21 times since March 24, including a virtual town-hall event where he promoted hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment and got to speak directly to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Oz is still in the midst of a media blitz that has focused on swinging by some of the shows that Trump watches most obsessively.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but, like, does Oz think he’s helping? Is this just another way for him to stay relevant? It’s hard to know with these people. What is clear is that by, at the very least, confusing the government’s response to coronavirus, they will certainly get more people killed.

The NCDF

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the National Center for Disaster Fraud, or NCDF. It was set up by the Department of Justice after Katrina, to help catch people attempting to profit off disasters. While disasters are typically limited to certain areas geographically - think earthquakes, hurricanes - the pandemic is global and if you’ve read this newsletter or turned on the news in general, you know that it has attracted every manner of fraudster.

Our Attorney General may otherwise be a giant piece of shit, but this week he instructed the DoJ to prioritize investigations of fraud schemes related to the pandemic, so that’s good. With everything that is going on, it’d be nice to have a coordinated law enforcement response to these scams. Given it’s being run by our government, I assume this will be the opposite of that.

Let’s Remember a Guy

Mike Bloomberg. Does that name sound familiar? For a few cursed months of our lives, we were subjected to millions of television ads featuring the former New York mayor and current billionaire telling us about how he had a plan for America, and that he’d make a great president, for some reason.

After getting humiliated at his first debate, however, his campaign strategy of “buying an election” began to falter. But were his staffers really in it because they believed in Bloomberg, or because he was paying them absurdly well to do hardly any work? Ken Klippenstein of The Nation says it was mostly the latter:

But despite an almost limitless budget, the Bloomberg campaign would learn that money can’t buy loyalty. Staffers described an almost total lack of belief in Bloomberg himself. “Most people knew this was a grift,” one campaign official explained, describing even leadership as being unwilling to fulfill basic campaign responsibilities.

I love it. We may have mostly bad memories of the Bloomberg campaign, but we can still enjoy stories like this:

As one staffer explained, “I would actively canvass for Bernie when I was supposed to be canvassing for Mike. I know of at least one team of ‘volunteers’ that was entirely fabricated by the organizers who had to hit their goals. It was easy enough to fudge the data to make it look like real people put in real volunteer work, when in reality Mike was getting nothing out of it.”

Another staffer told me, “In San Diego, the regional organizers also exploited the campaign’s resources, staff, and infrastructure for local races they either were running in or consulting on.”

Running…in? Like, they were candidates who volunteered on the Bloomberg campaign to use the resources to get themselves elected? Incredible! I hope they won, because that sort of attitude is a perfect fit for local government.

This guy sums it up:

…one [staffer] was more sympathetic, citing Bloomberg’s climate change policies and desire to shrink the Pentagon budget. But he remarked, “The campaign truly made me jaded…. I’m never going to sell my soul again.”

Buddy, what do you think political campaigns are?

Space Fraud!

I missed this story when it first happened last year, but there has been an unexpected twist in the space crime case:

[…] after a lengthy investigation, federal prosecutors said on Monday that the former spouse, Summer Worden, had lied to investigators about some relevant details, and that a federal grand jury had indicted Ms. Worden on charges that could result in up to five years in prison.

The indictment, returned in February but unsealed this week, alleges that Ms. Worden opened the bank account earlier than she had told investigators, and that she had not changed her login credentials until months later than she had claimed.

Yikes! To sum up, Worden had originally accused her now-ex-wife, astronaut Anne McClain, of illegally accessing one of their joint bank accounts from the International Space Station, hence the “space” crime. However! It turns out the feds decided Worden had misled them, and indicted her for lying to the FTC and NASA. I generally do not think lying to the feds should be a crime in and of itself, but falsely accusing an astronaut of doing bank fraud from space may be an exception.

Hopefully no one actually goes to jail for any of this, Worden has learned her lesson, and the two can move on with their lives. The last time an astronaut was in the news for a bitter romantic dispute, it didn’t end well.

Gangass

One of the Rules of Doing Crimes is do not put the crimes in writing. Also, do not put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want read into the court record if you get caught. Also also, do not put pictures on social media that indicate you are doing crimes (more on that in a minute).

Anyone who’s spent time on the Internet has probably made a silly screen name. Whether it’s because JaneSmith1 was taken so you ended up with JaneSmith12837 or you decided to use your dog’s name, whatever. We’ve all been there. Choosing your screen name is important, especially if you want to hang out in chat rooms.

This story is about a guy named Maksim Boiko who was allegedly laundering money for a global network of cyber criminals. Here’s the key portion:

FBI agents accuse Boiko, who goes by the online name "gangass," of being a "significant cybercriminal"

Now imagine prosecutors at your trial reading the word “gangass” into the court record a hundred times over the course of a week. Gangass! Not great. Perhaps your lawyer could tell the jury it’s pronounced differently, but we all know how the government is going to say it. It probably does not help your defense against charges you were part of a criminal conspiracy.

While we’re on the topic of silly things being read at trial, how about this:

FBI agents allege that Boiko worked with a cybercriminal group called "QQAAZZ," which has been in operation since at least 2015

How…do you pronounce that? Kwaz? Kazz? I have no idea. But a bunch of people are going to have to say it out loud, a bunch of times, and I think that’s great. It reminds me of this story about how courts are now having to deal with emojis being read into the record, and they haven’t…really figured out how to handle it yet. Smart criminals - unlike our friend Gangass - should communicate only in emojis to fool the authorities. It’d also make for some delightful court transcripts.

In addition to having a dumb screen name, Boiko was breaking one of the Rules of Doing Crimes:

The FBI was monitoring Boiko's Instagram account, and agents eventually were granted a search warrant for his iCloud account, which contained photographs of Boiko posing with substantial sums of U.S. dollars and foreign currencies

Stop! Doing! This! I know it may feel cool to have large piles of cash since you are laundering money, but it is also evidence! And, it’s tacky to post pictures of money on social media. Come on, Gangass.

Short Cons

Hollywood Reporter - “In Wisconsin federal court, StubHub has been hit with a putative class action from the buyers of those resold tickets. According to the complaint, StubHub has walked away from its longstanding "FanProtect" guarantee of cash refunds upon event cancellation.”

The Hill - “Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. on Wednesday said that arrest warrants had been issued for reporters from The New York Times and ProPublica after both publications wrote stories criticizing his decision last month to partially reopen his Virginia-based college.”

WSJ - “No Borders said in a March 16 news release that it was launching a “Home Specimen Collection Kit” that would allow people to submit samples for coronavirus tests without having to leave their homes. That day, its stock jumped 500% to 6 cents a share, up from 1 cent”

The Wrap - “Two former 21st Century Fox sports marketing executives were charged on Monday in the U.S. government’s long-running FIFA corruption investigation with bribing soccer officials with millions of dollars in exchange for lucrative media and marketing rights to international tournaments and events.”

Justice Dot Gov - “A Georgia man will appear in court today for his alleged role in a conspiracy to defraud federally funded and private health care benefit programs by submitting fraudulent testing claims for COVID-19 and genetic cancer screenings, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito announced.”

Tips, Tiger King acoustic edits, and dumb screen names to scammerdarkly@gmail.com