Human nature makes it easier to scam?

Our last post about Optin Global pointed to this Spam Kings post noting that there are several aliases used by the members of that company (actually several companies). The names of the people involved are all of Chinese decent - even the lawyer (Chen, Yang, Ho, Ting, etc).

This immediately reminded me of one time I spoke to a man who was making money through illicit activities conducted over the web (not spam related, but when you are outside the bounds of legal business, it might as well be the same). He happened to be of Chinese decent and still had family back in China. When he was explaining to me how he moved money around and hid it, it became clear that he had a distinct advantage being of Chinese decent.

He lived in an area where there weren't many other people of Asian decent - largely "white bread" America. The process for getting a bank account involved talking to an account manager and showing the proper ID to them. He would create a fake driver's license (no matter how good each state makes their cards, there is always a point when someone else can copy them) and then go into a branch and ask to setup an account.
Even though he could speak English as well or better than the average man on the street (this guy went to one of the top universities in America), he would feign a thick Chinese accent (which, since his family was from China, he could actually do quite accurately). During the account sign-up process, if they ever gave him any trouble for not having enough ID (frequently a SS card was the hold up), he would simply push the act a little harder and he would "not understand" what they were talking about and not be able to come up with the English words to help that transaction move forward.

Now banks are simply businesses, and they want to make money. In order to do this, they want more customers - so they are very glad to bring in new customers and will work to try to make that happen. So if they have someone in front of them that looks innocent enough (whatever that means) and is making an effort, but there is a language barrier - nearly always the account manager would ease up the requirements and massage things to allow the account to be created.
So this person would now have a bank account with a legit bank, created with a false identity which had no tax id. With a bank account, he could now go on to do more as that fake entity - including renting/buying houses, which then gave him multiple legitimate addresses through which to conduct business.
Those businesses could then conduct their trade with other companies to further complicate things (and even conduct business with "themselves" through the various entities), as well as contacts in China which were made through the family.

With several layers of this sort of obsfucation, it should be fairly obvious that it makes it hard to track down who it is that you should be trying to take to court when the entities don't technically even really exist.
It should also be fairly obvious that if you follow it further along this path, fake companies could then be setup against these fake entities as well - which could be how these Optin Global people were operating.

When I spoke with this person, at the time he was serving time under house arrest for one activity that he was caught for, but as of that time they didn't even know he was related to any number of other activities under those other names/accounts.

So simply due to human nature, you can see that we have cultural biases and ignorances which can be (and clearly are) exploited for devious gains.

I am in no way implying that this is what the Optin Global people did, and would even venture that they probably did it all on the "up and up" so to speak (other than the spamming part). But I am merely raising a hypothetical scenario in which this sort of activity could be done and might explain how/why some of the spammers out there are able to hide their money and cover their trails (and tails) when they are clearly doing illegal activities.

Posted by Eric at April 14, 2005 09:40 AM | TrackBack