Trader Buys $36M of Copper and Gets Painted Rocks Instead
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Can’t wait for the Netflix thriller.
Tim Cook — CEO, Apple
Satya Nadella — CEO, Microsoft
Sundar Pichai — CEO, Google & Alphabet
Katrina Lake — founder & CEO, Stitch Fix
Stacy Brown-Philpot — CEO, TaskRabbit
Jeremy Stoppelman — cofounder & CEO, Yelp
Tony Xu — cofounder & CEO, DoorDash
Jack Ma — cofounder & CEO, Alibaba
Susan Wojcicki — CEO, YouTube
- Apple - Wozniak, Jobs
- Google - Page, Brin
- Microsoft - Gates, Allen
HN's sentiment against MBAs is pretty justified. It's typically some non-MBA ingenuity that kick-starts those uber-succefull companies, not the bean counters.
From the article
It appears that copper was initially loaded into the first shipment of containers, before being surveyed by an inspection company. Seals used to prevent fraud were then affixed to the containers.
The product was real and loaded into shipping containers. After it was inspected and sealed the fraudsters switched out the cargo as it left the port. There was even Insurance fraud with some group providing fake Insurance coverage (one real policy with the rest being forgeries) for the seller.
These firms aren't fools, they do this everyday and understand what to do, shit happens.
To me this screams like an inside job. How is it possible that the thieves can get into the ships at night, spend hours hauling copper and paving stones and nobody notices.
The article also mentions shipment. Does it mean the containers were already on the ships, or just on its way on the back of a truck? It would be "easy" for the truck full of copper in a sealed container to leave a place, and a different truck to show up at the port with a container with a label that says "Copper for Mercuria, destination Qinqdao" and a "good" seal. Or if it's all at the port, just pay off the crane operator to load up your bogey onto the ship, and load up the real stuff onto your truck.
It's analogous to how your bitcoin is safe on a secure network until someone forces you at gunpoint to hand over your private key.
Yes, if indirectly: with well documented chain of custody, we would be able to find the thief. This works as a natural deterrent. Even better, if the copper block were serialized, we would be able to provide relevant information to other copper processors & vendors to avoid that particular batch of stolen goods.
At the moment, he has some containers full of rocks with paper work that says "copper".
Put it on the blockchain, and you'd have some containers full of rocks with paper work on the blockchain that says "copper".
That's not really any worse, but it's sure not better...
What would help is better physical security and a really thorough chain of custody. Unfortunately, those are hard; that's the solution the trader tried to use and got burned. And blockchains aren't going to be any help here. Cryptographically verifiable claims that your container is meant to contain copper don't help if someone took an angle grinder to the lock and swapped it for rocks, and a chain of cryptographically verifiable claims showing it was meant to contain copper at every step of it's journey don't tell you where the thieves struck.
Or in shorter form: You can't put copper on the blockchain; all you can do is put peper work on the blockchain, which is vastly less useful.
I really hope.
But they already seem to have that much, in that TFA says that over a dozen people have been arrested. As much as I'm sure the trader would rather have had the supplies, the next best thing is to ensure that they don't get to do that a second time.
Stupid criminals might be worse for the economy than smart ones. Smart ones are limited in the damage they can cause by restricting themselves to harms that don't also harm them. Stupid ones can do any damage at all, with no limits.
I’ve thought about hoarding older ones for copper but... insufficiently motivated, I’ll let someone in greater need do it.