White collar criminal investigations and prosecutions have declined as counter-terrorism, drug, counter-espionage and politically motivated investigations have (greatly) increased. Is it reasonable to expect the majority of people to act virtuously when doing so puts them at great disadvantage in an effectively unregulated environment? This is what Liv Boree might call a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish.<p>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.<p>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.
Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank. They were a “quant” and claimed to be using sophisticated algorithms to trade the market. In reality they were making gut based trades with fake software full of complicated derivatives trading algorithms. Fooled some of the most well paid people in the world
Yet another fiction writer that writes fiction and lies about it being a true story?<p>Why would one trust a person who advertises themselves as a liar?<p>Do they suddenly turn honest in order to write a book?
From the author's bio<p>> <i>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,”</i><p>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?<p>Either way he's still a con artist I guess.
Maybe this guy did some social engineering at one time or another but the idea that he could get any employee at a Wall Street firm to spend an hour reciting the cell phone numbers of all their executives is a load of bullshit.
Well nowadays they might come as <put your favorite db/os/tool> account managers out there. I have seen one and then realized they are probably not account managers.
Honest question - is bonding over the nationality of ancestors really that big a deal in the US?<p>It seems to be a solid theme in this.<p>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.
> until some tech industry folks created a little thing called LinkedIn that made publicly available much of the information I charged a lot of money for.<p>TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks
I'm still reading the article, but "Rabbit Hole" is an interesting recent series on Paramount Plus if the idea of a show featuring corporate espionage is interesting to anyone. I think it's an under-featured mini genre given how many people work quite boring corporate jobs who could use something thrilling to fantasize about.
reminds of the husband on The Americans.<p>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.<p>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.
it's pretty unbelievable that someone would be pulling in 7 figures just for providing a list of people that worked at a company. all of that information feels so public. his clients were really willing to pay so much to... poach the employees?<p>this really <i>really</i> doesn't ring true for me.