My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his way to the top
narratively.com
narratively.com
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.
It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.
<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.
I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.
It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.
Capitalism in itself is incomplete, I believe it requires a strong moral principle in a populous to work well. Trying to shoehorn that moral basis into capitalism as Marx did just results in a very destructive system.
Much less there's no way we can accurately predict the death toll of something a century out -- in the 1960-70's it was "obvious" there would be billions dying of starvation. We could crack fusion power in a decade and use direct CO2 capture to reverse CO2 levels to pre-1850's level.
It’s like saying that Math kills people because Math is used to build bombs. Capitalism is an economic system, not a social system. There are human beings in charge of corporations doing the killing, polluting, and so on. Those individuals are responsible.
The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.
The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.
People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost. As the cost ramps up the calculation for a 'selfless' act is effectively inverted to bias self interest instead.
This is how you get the current state of the financial sector. Ironically altruism is so cynically dismissed that its actually used as a marketing strategy to pursue self interest, with no one bothering to disassemble it because no one believes thats the motivation anyway (see: subsidizing homeowners with bad credit using homeowners with good credit). Leaving the only people who do believe it functioning out of partisanship and lack of curiosity.
'Abnormal' behavior is exponential in its effects. Much like a fire, it only stops if contained. Thats why total laissez faire deregulation is naïve. Even if most people do the right thing, society is not silo'd from the minority who does the bad things.
Apparently in some communities (such as Germany) it is believed that people cannot be counted on to return the shopping cart properly unless the cart holds a small value coin hostage. So the tolerated cost of selfless acts isn't some human constant, even in developed societies like Germany where people have their basic needs met.
In fact it's even more complicated than that, because specific kinds of selfless acts have different degrees of perceived importance in different cultures. In some cultures, it's considered very important to feed your guests, even if that means the host has to go hungry. In other cultures, feeding your guests isn't important or expected, even from hosts with comfortable abundance.
However, its much much easier for things like returning shopping carts become less common. How many stores have left San Francisco and Portland downtowns due to unabashed theft?
I agree that much of it also starts with leaders. If the top eschelon is busy with NIMBYism and gaming share prices to get theirs, it won't be long before normal folk start questioning doing the moral thing in order to get ahead.
Most people wouldn't kill, but the rest would kill enough for rates to change.
If we were in a society where values were held to a high regard, you might see different headlines like:
"Failed actor takes on new role of regulating officials for financial gain".
or even a few years earlier:
"Selfish man vilifies volunteer firefighters in California for not doing enough to save his house".
(I may have misunderstood your first comment. If so, please let me know.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster
The thing that would concern me more is the pattern of dishonesty than that the person did well over a long time by just going with their gut.
Is there any good documentation on superforecasters efficacy? Like with actual statistical measurements? Because the Wikipedia article is really dumb.
If someone showed me airtight, verifiably top tier calls over 15 years (especially the last 15) I'd probably rub whatever rabbit's foot they asked.
You get some huge list of fax numbers. You pick some random penny stocks and fax each one a different random pick, telling them it's going to explode. Then you look and see which picks fail and you discard those numbers.
Eventually you get down to a small list of numbers they you've been consistently making amazingly prescient stock picks to for the last weeks/months... then you tell them all to invest in some dogcrap that you've cornered or ask them to buy your latest picks, or some other story to extract a lot of money from them.
The victims rubs your rabbit's foot and you cash in.
Thing is that the same scam can be performed in a decentralized manner, even by accident, just by having a lot of investment advisors some of whom get a consistently lucky run.
You watch all the players for a while and see that 1 player has won every single bet they've made 10 times in a row.
How much money would you be willing to give that person to bet for you?
Now imagine that you talk to this player and they reveal to you that actually they work for the company that made the roulette wheels and that they can control where the ball lands 99% of the time with the computer hidden in his shoe. They even show you the computer and do some example bets to prove it.
How much money would you give them now?
I can tell she is going to say something else, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. She’s going to share with me how much time she has left. I can hear it in her pauses. After so many years working the phone, I’ve learned to pick out the nuances, the things being said behind what’s being said, entire life stories even, in a hesitation or vocal inflection, in blank moments in time.
It's difficult to explain what makes a pause have meaning or nuance, and yet, this guy may be able to interpret them consistently in a simple phone call without seeing facial expressions and body language. Tacit stuff is really tough to define and nail down. So it's easy to say gut feeling instead. But as tacit stuff finally gets clarified, defined, and explained, we're often able to see that tacit stuff is anything but a gut feeling.
Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.
He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.
Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).
They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.
He was fired on the spot [1].
I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.
[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
I would propose a slightly more cynical model:
It might not look good if it goes public
People with college degrees act as a group. By enforcing the educational cartel they prevent poorer upstarts from competing with them.
When I graduated college (UC Berkeley, very large public school in California) I had to go to the registrar to pick up my diploma since I graduated off cycle. In line in front of me was a guy who seemed to know the lady at the window well, and put down a piece of paper and said "got another list to check". The lady went into the back, so I asked the guy what he was doing.
He told me he worked for a background check company and was there about once a month with a list of names to verify graduation dates. He told me a lot of his work comes from government and big companies. He then suggested that if I was going to lie about graduating, make sure it was to a small company that can't afford background checks!
He also told me that almost every month there is at least one person who fails to have the degree they claim to have.
The general difficulty in checking such things is part of why that form of fraud is so ubiquitous.
>Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them.
Doing a background check is the same thing. It’s authorized by the student.
So it looks like your mileage may vary.
IIRC, providing false information about a diploma in California is a felony.
Verifying degree is extremely easy in most cases - the background check company will just call the registrar. It's probably done through an API nowadays.
Personally, if I found out and they could actually do the work, I would let it pass. I'd consider it a white lie in that case.
I think it's more of a harm to society to use degrees as requirements when they aren't actually required. This too is lying, but you won't see companies facing penalties for putting a degree requirement when one isn't necessary for the job.
If someone were to lie to my face and waited until I caught them before owning up to it, then giving them a pass tells the world that I'm A-OK with deceit as long as they deliver results.
If you don't have a degree, don't claim it. If you can still walk the walk, you've still got a chance. If you fail basic due diligence, you're telegraphing your integrity is in question.
No one can afford that.
Let's be honest, I don't think you would ever actually do that in real life ;)
Thos was for a degree between 1999 and 2003.
They wanted info down to the month I started... I had no idea so just guessed a month in 1999... They got back to me to check what was up as they had determined I actually started in some other month...
They even wanted proof of what High school I went to.
Some companies are super thorough!
Seems like there's more to that then just not having the degree.
Your college degree is not correlative to your ability to actually do a job. He probably did a lot more than just that.
What you said and what I said can still both be true.
If they are competitor companies they just got someone fired to cause internal conflict. I assume Company 2 acts greedily and not through goodwill
Why would one trust a person who advertises themselves as a liar?
Do they suddenly turn honest in order to write a book?
The whole thing smells extremely fishy, perhaps I'm just jaded be all the ever present grift online these days. And these con artists "coming clean" to write a book so they can bask in the glory of their exploits? STFU, you're a slimy douchebag, and your attempt to write a "true crime" book is even lamer.
Come to think of it, I think I still have it on a bookshelf somewhere. I should banish it to the same place I banish books that I’ve read because they seem interesting but are just right/wing agitprop (e.g., books that come to mind in this category were books about the over-expansion of the federal criminal code, the East German stasi and the dysfunctionality of San Francisco - I’m happy to have my perspective changed, but I don’t find that I’m very receptive to arguments that boil down to “your beliefs are stupid and that’s why these things are bad”).
Another notably stupid book that I bought was called “A History of the English Speaking Peoples” - I (foolishly) thought it was going to be about the remarkably resilient political systems and economies of US/UK/Can./Aus./NZ but it was basically a white supremacist tract. No thanks.
I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.
I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.
> Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level,”
Frank Abagnale is now believed to have lied about most of the cons he supposedly perpetrated. Is there any good reason to believe this Robert guy is more legit?
Either way he's still a con artist I guess.
It seems to be a solid theme in this.
It just strikes me as odd that a nation with such a patriotic mentality define themselves as Welsh, Irish, Scottish etc because their great grandparents came from there. Besides, it’s a well established fact that if you can’t sing Yma o Hyd from start to finish, your Welsh credentials are confiscated.
Alexandria, Virginia, used to have Highland Games, in which descendants of (generally lowland) Scots will toss cabers and so on.
There are big Italian-themed feasts in New York.
The Germans I think were a bit daunted by a couple of world wars in the last century.
TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks
These days, it would seem that simple training of employees that requests such as these (if they are ever legitimate requests), should only come in over internal communication systems that effort is presumably put into keep only employees access to and would identify the employee using it.
Wouldn't be full proof, but would raise the bar significantly and increase the crime committed thereby reducing those who are willing to do it.
this really really doesn't ring true for me.