This was fascinating, but also terrible!<p>I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: <i>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.</i><p>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?<p>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.
In a past life of criminality I used to pay the truck driver who picked up all the pallets of Beanie Babies coming off the ship from China to have one pallet a month go missing.<p>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.
>Seemingly on cue, Tristan followed up. “Time for some coming clean,” he confessed. “I’m actually a scammer and the owner of HCH doesn’t have anything to do with this.”<p>That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,
This shows up the difference between a freight forwarder and a freight broker.[1]
A freight broker is just a matchmaker who takes a cut. A US freight forwarder is stuck with end to end responsibility for the shipment.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.penskelogistics.com/solutions/freight-brokerage/forwarder-vs-broker" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.penskelogistics.com/solutions/freight-brokerage/...</a>
There's "kit" in this story but no "kat." Don't storage facilities have a procedure to verify who deposits what. And security cameras. Is Tristan a known client of the storage facility? Maybe Vin Diesel drove the truck. Looks to me the storage facilities are on the take. Keep the load for a few weeks then demand payment to release the load. This way the storage space doesn't go unused.
This sounds like a scam run by the storage companies. Otherwise it is hard to understand what motivation "Tristan" had to drop the product off there instead of just, say, abandoning it on the side of the road. I can imagine a scammer getting upset that their load was a bunch of candy and not laptops or something else of high value, but why take it to a storage unit after accepting the load?
I know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn’t kit kat just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal with the boner these companies have about withholding certain flavors in certain markets?
It's funny how this became a fad because it's really just mediocre chocolate with a bunch of aromatic addatives. I'm guessing they use whatever they can to make those flavors.<p>I have tried one or two when they've been in a local store, but as a chocoholic it's sacrilicious.
For a moment there I thought it was going to be a company by one of HN's users: Candy Japan. Same business: Japanese candy subscription service. But the user profile says Candy Japan is no more. :-(
> 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.<p>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.
This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect them with freight loads that need to move from one place to another. If the company does the vetting and works with an insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture some value from creating a safer market.
So stupid though, we have the technology to solve this problem, why don't truckers have an I'd card that stores a key to "sign" for taking the goods into their possession. There's all sorts of ways this could be solved.
My luggage got "misplaced" in Amsterdam airport, returned 3 days later minus my japanese kit-kats.
I complained to both my airline and the airport but was given the runaround, some bullcrap about removing organic matter, strangely they left the bag of raw onions.
This was exciting storytelling! It felt like reading a fast-paced almost AI-generated turn-by-turn absurdist short novel. Something like Gogol’s Nose.<p>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.
[dupe] of a NYT article<p>More here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889</a>