The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats
straitstimes.com
straitstimes.com
I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks.
My suspicion is that Danny Tiang may have orchestrated the loss of his valuable Japanese KitKats in order to try to recoup an insurance payment. This may have been simply in response to him doubting an ability to sell the product, or due to a temperature excursion he was notified of en route that made them unsalable, but which he concealed to facilitate their loss and subsequent, admittedly failed, insurance fraud. Is that plausible?
I'm not saying it happened and I feel terrible for the guy to not get his KitKats, but the acquisiton casts a bit of doubt on his story I feel.
But the niggle is that the issue covered in the article occured after the acquisition. What do you say about that? :)
On brief reflection I wouldn't consider that really nefarious as long as it was largely true. It's just "insurance optimization", as often unfortunately those terms seem strongly biased against claimants.
If something like this happens while such an acquisition is still ongoing, that wouldn't be suspicious, it'd just be a sign you made the right call.
Taking it further, it would seem a pretty dumb fraud if the trail could be traced back so easily via ownership, making that suggestion less likely perhaps.
Indeed your defense of Tiang via the alternate interpretation of it being a sign he'd made the right call if the theft occurred during the acquisition, is also plausible.
It's good to keep in mind the different possible interpretations!
It's interesting how much we don't know given limited information. For example, I would never have considered that this kind of strategic theft would be so common a thing that it would touch a guy doing a "subscription box" service. So sad!
But then, we don't really know whether it was fraud or not by him. The timing of the acquisition suggests that as a possibility, indeed, but it's hard to say how likely that is.
I think this interesting discussion has highlighted how inadequate our knowledge of a remote situation really is to be able to judge it at a distance with any surety or authority. None of us are really equipped to make any judgements on this, and hopefully none of us have that intention. Discussing possibilities is okay, as long as we keep in mind our limitations! :)
Haha...I think this highlights the importance of carefully considering the evidence, and withholding judgement until you reach a very clear standard. It seems we have not yet reached that here. You have to consider the possible violations, for sure, but presumption of innocence is also very important!
In this case, we don't have enough information to know what happened, but as this comment chain has shown, we can find many reasonable explanations for what might have happened.
I assume Mr Taing to be a stand up honest person but why the heck did they put a picture of him half smirking in penumbra in a Dr Evil pose?
However, besides the image, in the article they don’t exactly sell the theory that he does anything suspicious at all. I don’t think they even suggested it. It seems he’s painting entirely as the victim.
This seeming contrast raises a fascinating point.
I totally agree with you of the importance of image messaging. Image analysis in the media of different countries is such a fascinating thing.
Like if you look at the representation of how: Black people are portrayed in American media; how Asian people are portrayed in American media; how white people are portrayed in Asian media; how Middle Eastern people are displayed in Anglosphere Western media — it’s very intriguing. By media here here I mostly mean the kind of editorial and advertising photography which you identified, wherever that is carried even in video.
It’s very a fascinating topic, and while it provides a clear window into the racial biases of different cultures it’s not extensively analyzed within the same channels that carry that imagery.
Yet it’s this powerful form of implicit messaging. The messaging functions through the presentation of a photorealistic “life like” (reflection of life) image that presents, programs, propagates and reinforces those racial biases.
Paradoxically, almost all cultures will pay lip service to wanting to do away with racism, while yet also dealing extensively in this imagery that implicitly carries negative racist messages. This creates a strange reinforcement of the stereotypes that, in words at least, a culture commonly says it seeks to reject.
It may seem like a small thing but I think you raise a fascinating and important point!
Could you advise on what a possible "correct" capitalization should be? I don't know! Here's what I think:
It would feel weird to capitalize white. I think because I see it as a descriptive color, not an identity. But in English text I've often seen Black capitalized when it's referring to people's skin color, so perhaps I'm just reflecting that.
But I don't think you can not-capitalize "Asian", as Asia is a proper name for a region, same for Middle East, tho probably can lowercase black? Haha I don't know ! :)
Maybe it's my skin color is what people call "white" in these simple distinctions, so using capitalization for other groups is a sign of respect, or a form of difference signaling, which would seem weird to apply to my one.
I suppose you could consider such distinctions as racist, but indeed by that definition then noting any racial distinction is racist.
So even the labels of Black/black or asian/Asian or white would be considered racist, and indeed they are racist because they connote racial distinctions.
However noting distinctions that are factual, descriptive, and not fabricated negatives is not "negative racism". So, while I think it's valid to call any denoting of racial distinctions racist, I think there's further nuance! A distinction between negative racism (using racial differences to send fabricated negativity), and positive racism (respecting and noting differences or positive characteristics).
Perhaps it's possible to think of the capitalization difference in a similar way to addressing others you can use "Mr/Ms/Mrs" or, in Chinese, "nin". Some kind of respect marker, formality signal perhaps, or an extension of common convention in other areas to this one... haha :)
It seems the names we have in english for different racial groups are not exactly consistent, like many "inconsistencies" in English.
Or, all of this might just be my own inconsistency in spelling, a natural variation which is not to be underestimated! haha ! :)
And The Atlantic wrote an interesting article on capital-Black, lowercase-white in 2020, when Blackness was particulary under the microscope as BLM took root: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-ca...
They don't always perfectly align on big nor small.
But it's also possible to argue that, in aggregate, the average media expression of a culture would likely reflect its unconscious biases. And I think the evidence of this in media imagery is clear.
Surely there may sometimes be a deliberate agenda carefully projected through manipulations of imagery, but other times the same end effect may occur simply through a "culturally unconscious" process.
Still a weird story. And man, that freight broker is either the unluckiest man on earth or not very good at his job.
It is weird certainly to interested but uninvolved readers like us. Yet by the sound of it, to insiders in the industry, this strategic theft is surprisingly common! It must not be weird to insiders, but rather than unfortunate reality of logistics. :(
The Times may indeed have been sloppy in their fact checking and reporting, it would be good if they posted the basis for their conclusion. However, it's just as valid to consider they conducted proper due diligence and reported accurately. Without further information, we have to take what they say at the same value as every other fact reported in the story, or if we cast doubt on the fidelity of their reporting and demand further proof, we should do so consistently for every point.
Once we begin to doubt that, we can begin to create alternative facts for every point they make--combinatorially increasing the number of possible story interpretations! Haha :)
It was roulette what Beanie Babies I would get, but even if they were the most worthless ones I was still getting them below wholesale price, causing much confusion from my competitors as to how I was selling them below retail.
Sometimes I would hit the jackpot and get dozens of the really expensive bears. I sold 800 bears once for $250,000 in cash to a guy who flew into the UK from Chicago.
The truck driver found me. He must have seen one of my adverts in the press or maybe someone he knew came to one of my Beanie Baby fairs, or heard one of my adverts on the radio. He lived in this crazy council town near me in Bristol where every house appeared to be of government construction, even the church. I remember sitting in his living room one day and there was a literally constant stream of little kids coming through his front door emptying bags of shoplifted merch onto his floor, and he would pick through and buy a couple of things and then they would go to the next house.
Not a book that glorifies crime. But one that shows us the hidden sides of humanity. The kind of stuff that happens and the kinds of things people do that you will not see on YV, or read about on X. Another window into the true lives of our fellow humans in an age where many of us are occupied with LLMs and project managers.
I have picked up a lot of stories over the years. Like the time the Secret Service were after me thinking that I was trying to assassinate Bill Clinton o_O
The thing I was in prison for.. is different. I might be able to talk more soon. Prosecutor called my lawyer today and I have to be in court on Monday morning for all the charges to be dismissed. Thanks for 10 years in jail!
That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,
So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.
It’s a bit far-fetched I suppose, but the only possible explanation I can see for all of this is that this is an attempted (but bungled) insurance fraud scheme on the part of Bokksu. Especially given the conclusion of the article, where it turns out that a Bokksu subsidiary was in charge of handing off the shipment to the supposed trucking company. I wonder if there were actually Kit Kats in the shipment at all…
It still seems sort of unlikely to me that Bokksu was attempting to commit insurance fraud, but it's hard to deny that the facts seem oddly to fit. Why would the scammer take the truckload to a cold storage facility, rather than, say, just abandoning the containers somewhere? Why would he admit to being a scammer, if not in order to provide a basis for an insurance claim? What possible benefit was there to the scammer, when he didn't even get any money for his role in the scheme (at least, not from the trucking broker)? And why would Bokksu not disclose until well after the fact that they owned the company that was responsible for releasing the containers to the trucking company?
For a company valued at $100M, $110K does seem like a trifling amount of money to commit fraud over, but stranger things have certainly happened.
Seems like there was more than one independently scheming entity in some way, and at least one scheme didn't pan out as planned. The Big Lebowski reference doesn't seem too far-fetched...
Whenever I read stuff like this, I end up feeling like I'm not imaginative enough to scam people.
Also, this isn't the same thing, but ... years ago, when Craigslist was running strong, I responded to a CL post to purchase a used laptop. The CL post was really well done, quite detailed (I remember it had photos and talked about how it was in tip-top shape except for the screen having a dead pixel in the lower left).
But the price was juuuuust a little too good to be true. I eventually emailed the guy and said something like, "This feels like a scam."
To my surprise, he came clean and asked me not to report it to CL!!!
Humanity often confuses me.
Sounds like a stoner or kid? (There definitely seemed to be a lot of stoners on CL, at least responding to forsale posts.)
I went to DHL warehouse and picked up the shipping box. I opened the box as I walked to my car. Inside was the watch box. I opened the watch box. Inside was no watch. Inside was a folded piece of DHL-headed yellow paper which had the following hand-written on it:
SORRY I STOLE YOUR WATCH
Notice, the person who picked up goods for him after he paid a storage fee was also a scammer. My guess is it is the same as the first scammer or in cahoots.
[1] https://www.penskelogistics.com/solutions/freight-brokerage/...
Why couldn’t Bokksu skip him and do that directly?
So they may have actually dumped the goods but seeing if they could get any more out of the mark.
So either he's a scammer with a heart of gold and didn't want a bunch of chocolate to go to waste, or he's in on it somehow with the storage facilities.
What happens is they truck the load to a yard and open it up. The contents of the trailer are then stolen and dumped into the gray market. If it has no value the load gets dumped into a storage facility and because the goods are accounted for law enforcement won't get involved.
The load was coming from Japan and probably insured for a lot of money, which ticked all the boxes that it would be electronics or household goods of some sort. They were probably shocked when it was just a brunch of weird flavors of candy they couldn't sell.
That's an excellent insight and explains the big mystery. Thanks.
KitKat around the world is Nestle. KitKat in the US is under license to Hershey. Licensing is expensive.
Perhaps you can make wafer bubbly, so it's more air? Although it's cheaper to just put it in a plastic wrapper and fill the wrapper with nitrogen...
KitKat has a lot of competition in the UK where caramels are way more popular than weird KK flavors.
Last time I was there I spent about £100 on sweets that had tiny little train cars in them and the chocolate was terrible and I ate all of it.
KitKat globally is run by Nestle.
That's one reason why.
The second is that in Japan Kit Kat sounds like "good luck" which is why they became popular, and two, why we see such regional variation.
(I have 4 Japanese flavors in my NYC fridge right now -- Sweet Potato, Adult Sweetness, Wheat, and Caramel Pudding (which you bake!)
Another perk I've found about treats from overseas is they use actual sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.
>"Ingredients: Chocolate (Sugar, Lactose, Vegetable Oil(palm)whole milk powder, cocoa butter), wheat flour, vegetable oil, lactose, sugar, caramel powder (skim milk, concentrated milk), yeast extract, cocoa powder, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, emulsifier(lethal, sucrose fatty acid ester, glycerin fatty acid ester), sodium bicarbonate, flavor, yeast extract,(contains wheat, milk, soybeans)"
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/WpsnCaNDw...
Oh my god I have some of these I should have looked at the back of the package more closely!
Kitto katsu! means "you will surely win" or "you will surely succeed".
So it is given as tokens for success in exams and the like.
Katsu for winning/succeeding also can be seen in Tonkatsu = pork cutlet (katsu is the Japanese "shortening" of cutlet), which is also offered as a success token.
I'm sorry, what?
Though I like to think the Nestlé/Hershey executives have been threatened by immaculately-suited Pocky-toting enforcers of the importers making profits on the novelty arbitrage.
It's likely a profit boner. Margins on obscure flavors aren't projected to be high enough in whatever market, so they don't offer it. But in some other market, projections look good, so they offer it.
Much simpler to have a few flavors shipped to millions of stores daily.
The normal ones are fine, but they're not magic
I have tried one or two when they've been in a local store, but as a chocoholic it's sacrilicious.
Why Tristan bothered taking the loads to the storage facilities instead of just throwing them out the back is a mystery. Or why the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of payment.
That part is less of a mystery. The whole industry runs on credit.
The key to the whole scam is that the shipments are cross-continental and that there's no observability into where the shipment is during that time. The scammer immediately drops off the load at a storage facility, which begins to bill for storage time, several days later, when the load is supposed to arrive on the other side of the country, the owner comes looking for it and the storage facility presents the owner with an invoice for storage time that wasn't originally needed. The owner pays the storage facility, which sold storage space that would have gone unused, and the storage facility pays the driver a finder's fee kickback.
It's a variant on the squeegee window washers' scam. Pull up at the stoplight and the scammer starts washing your window, then demands payment for a service you didn't agree to. Victims pay because the amount of money is too small relative to the hassle of being held up, not because they (didn't) freely purchased a service that they got real value out of.
His user profile is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu. It now says it was shut down, so I guess it's official. Weird that he wouldn't update the site, though, which just says it's temporarily paused.
I'm not surprised that decided to shut it down; it seemed like a lot of work, and there are now a number of competitors doing the same thing at a much higher volume, with free world-wide shipping, glossy packaging, and so on.
Reading this story made me happy about no longer having to deal with physical goods.
This sounds like insurance fraud to me. Pure speculation, but if that’s what Bokksu wanted to do, they’d hire a middleman then claim deniability.
Question is if the insurance reads this article or is even interested to recoup their money.
Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.
Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.
Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing?
Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist.
More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that.
https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...
I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?
No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare.
Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-...
Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17qp82w/cargo_ship_ap...
It’s not worth retrieving them from the sea, but anytime they get damaged on land the insurance company ends up owning the remains and auctions it off.
I work as an SE at one the larger ones.
A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page. It was in transit for about 5 minutes, and then marked as "delivered", and the tracking page became unavailable for use. I emailed Apple and they gave me a refund, then I went to the store myself and acted as my own courier. That time I got a laptop.
What I'm saying is, "uber for X" is exactly what already exists. Someone picks up your stuff for a small fee, and if it's good, they just keep it for themselves and re-join the platform with a new name.
Incidentally, Apple no longer offers same-day delivery, at least to me.
I couldn’t predict any of the sentences in this story, it was a really surprising and captivating read. Every new paragraph had a new twist.
On the upside though, it's not paywalled!