Snuffed & Purloined #1: The Future is Criminal
Hong Kong media mogul pleads guilty, ransomware-as-a-service, and oxygen for sale. Welcome to the future: it's criminal.
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The first story comes out of Hong Kong, where media mogul and free-speech defender — Jimmy Lai — sees HK$500 million in assets frozen. News of the frozen assets broke just as Jimmy, jailed since April 2020 for his involvement in the 2019 Hong Kong political demonstrations, showed up to a court appearance. The media tycoon pleaded guilty to organizing protests, along with 9 other activists.
Jimmy Lai has a long track-record of criticizing the CCP. Now that Beijing has full power to extradite under the Hong Kong national security law, resistance seems futile as Hong Kong is assimilated into the mainland’s ways.
But no fear — I hear a boycott rattling in the distance. A coalition of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongese, and others issued a joint statement calling for a boycott on the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Problem is that Olympic Committees have weighed in saying that boycotts are ineffective and hurt athletes.
China’s chipped in its two cents, criticizing a trend of politicizing sports.
The activists have a strong wind of international pressure on China at their back: last week American, British, and German officials demanded that U.N. experts be given access to China’s Xinjiang province, which has fallen into a vat of controversy in recent months over alleged human rights abuses of Uyghurs.
The Main Streeter is keeping tabs on the Xinjiang situation — but isn’t betting on any boycott panning out. The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing will likely happen as scheduled.
Some corporate IP theft news out of the U.S. — a Ph.D chemist by the name of Dr. Xiaorong You, aged 59, was convicted of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, economic espionage, possession of stolen trade secrets, and wire fraud.
Dr. You stole valuable formulations for BPA-free coatings to be used inside beverage cans while working with Coca-Cola in Georgia and Eastman Chemical Company in Tennessee. The tech cost nearly $120 million to develop.
The chemist used the stolen tech to set up a company in China. Her corporate partner received millions of dollars in CCP government grants to support the new company — including a Thousand Talents Plan Award.
Thousand Talents is right — it takes a hell of a lot of talent to rip-off the work of countless scientists and engineers and get cushy grants from China to set up a business copying that same work.
Let's see how far those talents will take Dr. You as she sits in a federal penitentiary. Maybe she can teach her fellow convicts how to make the canteen's dinnerware BPA free — I'm sure her talents will be a hit.
News of the talents of Dr. You comes on the heels of academic fraud. Song Guo Zheng, aged 58, who most recently worked at Ohio State University, has been ordered to pay $3.4 million in restitution to the National Institutes of Health and over $400,000 to the university.
He'll also be sitting in federal prison for 37 months.
Mr. Zheng's crime? His research group secured more than $4.3 million in grants from the NIH for projects while receiving overlapping funds from Chinese foundations.
The Feds nabbed Zheng in Alaska back in May 2020 as he boarded a private flight headed to China.
How many times must it be said? Don't get caught dipping your hand in the cookie jar — and don't do it twice.
Don't read me wrong — I'm not picking on China. Because the country has its own problems with crime.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime published a research report entitled “China's New Silk Road: Navigating the organized crime risk” — and with that my ears perked up.
As China expands its reach and influence in Asia and Africa through increased trade and economic growth, criminals will likely exploit the boons.
The main three risk areas?
Bribery and corruption; money laundering; and criminal business actors.
The Main Streeter will keep tabs on this theme as China continues its march through the developing world using the Belt and Road Initiative.
The service will help vendors quickly identify stolen cards and ensure the ease of legitimate transactions.
Bouncer will feed data into Stripe's existing fraud prevention system, Radar, which will in turn feed its own data back to Bouncer in a loop of fraud devastation.
The Main Streeter expects cyber security to be top of mind in this week's news cycle after the crippling ransomware attack on Colonial's gas lines.
But what happens when the fraudsters slip on the Mask of Respectability and become corporations themselves?
The web of ransomware actors, which before was messy and unorganized, has taken shape into true corporate structure and hierarchy.
Customer service lines, press releases, and charitable giving underline the push to legitimize cyber-criminality in the public eye.
You’ve probably heard of SaaS — software as a service — but it’s time to welcome RaaS to the family of business acronym: ransomware as a service.
What is RaaS?
From the link above:
Ransomware as a service (RaaS) is a subscription-based model that enables affiliates to use already-developed ransomware tools to execute ransomware attacks. Affiliates earn a percentage of each successful ransom payment.
Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) is an adoption of the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model.
in the past, coding erudition was a requirement for all successful hackers. But now, with the introduction of the RaaS model, this technical prerequisite has been completely diluted.
Like all SaaS solutions, RaaS users don't need to be skilled or even experienced, to proficiently use the tool. RaaS solutions, therefore, empower even the most novel hackers to execute highly sophisticated cyberattacks.
RaaS solutions pay their affiliates very high dividends. The average ransom demand increased by 33% since Q3 2019 to $111,605, with some affiliates earning up to 80% of each ransom payment.
The low technical barrier of entry, and prodigious affiliate earning potential, makes RaaS solutions specifically engineered for victim proliferation.
The Main Streeter reckons that the RaaS market is in its early stages — much like the Internet in 1999 — and its growth is inevitable.
You know the day would come when oxygen itself would be transacted on the black market.
The scam is part of a robust black market that’s bloomed during India’s latest viral wave.
Anything for a quick buck, I suppose.
It’s why we’ve picked a simple theme for this publication, one that we’ll bring up from time to time to focus our efforts as we explore the business of crime —
The Future is Criminal.
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