The "send me your money and I'll send double back" scam is a staple among kids playing MMOs since at least the days of Runescape. Doubtless it goes a lot further back.
I can see how it works in the short term e.g. you give me money, I give you double, you give me lots of money and I disappear with it. But it seems he had an ongoing relationship with the Daubi bank manager, how is that possible?
At some point you also have good old fashioned blackmail.
Once the mark has been tricked into giving away a small sum, you can now hold it over their head as blackmail to give you a larger sum - they are as fired/going-to-jail after giving away $X as for $10X, so with the stick of telling their bosses what they've done and the carrot of "maybe I can get you out of this if you give me a little more", the con artist can keep coming back to the same victim over and over.
... Mohammed Ayoub had claimed at his trial that Sissoko had put him under a spell ...
Mr. Ayoub is the person working at Dubai bank. So, I'd guess some form of social engineering, where Sissoko had been convincing enough to repeatedly make Mr. Ayoub wire money to different accounts around the world.
Or maybe there were a bunch of them stealing and Sissoko was laundering for them and Ayoub was the designated fall guy, and this was the best lie the group could come up with.
I'm sure he had no trouble doubling smaller sums (the article stated he also had significant debts), and made up stories about how it would take longer and be more complicated to double larger sums.
Going back to MMOs, scammers in EVE have a jumble of variants on this scam. Typically they'll double your money if it's below a certain amount, but run away with any larger sums. Sometimes they frame the game as a lottery or game of skill: only the first person whose cash transfer shows up in their wallet will have their money doubled. With arbitrary rules like that, it's easier to give excuses as to why they weren't able to double the money. Oh, you didn't read the fine print in my bio: better luck next time! A good rube might fork over multiple donations before he realizes his money won't be coming back. Of course, scamming in that game is perfectly legal, so it's a lot easier to just block and ignore your marks.
Sissoko did this in 1995, which predates Runescape. It's essentially a Ponzi scheme, variations of which are mentioned as far back as the 1800s. I suspect that they are even older than that.
Very interesting story, but disappointing interview with the man in the end. Why didn't she asked him, how he made his money, when he declined, that he was responsible for the theft?
This guy sounds awesome. If there are any aspiring screenwriters out there this would make a great movie. Think Catch Me If You Can but more modern and international.
Reminds me of a great (now-deleted) tweet I saw a few years ago: "Everything is legal if you scale it up." Convert the cash to assets, then convert the assets to political clout---at that point the cash heist is in the rear-view mirror...
The examples that came to my mind when I first saw that tweet were: Napster/Youtube (unauthorized content sharing scaled up to such a degree that the media industry had to shift to streaming business models), Uber, the ongoing US legalization of marijuana (too much of the population uses it for abolition to be effective).
The number of states that do not allow other currencies is vanishingly small. You can have Dollars, Euros, Yen and whatever else your heart desires without any kind of penalty in most places of the world.
Maybe. Maybe not. Sissoko landed in a mansion in Mali. He no longer has his playboy lifestyle, but he's still way better off than most people. He was trying to get legit through his airline, but made a mistake.
Putting wealthy people in jail doesn't normally happen. And even when it does happen, their stays usually aren't half as bad.
I've never believed this stuff. Laws are often only enforced in one section of the country.
This particular dude plead guilty... and his sentence? "The sentence was 43 days in prison and a $250,000 fine". Most states won't even transfer you to prison for a month and a half, they'll just keep you in jail. And not only that, but he was able to get out early because he gave money to charity.
I've known folks get put in jail for not being able to afford child support. Many folks spend that long in jail just awaiting trial.
When and how does this stuff catch up with them in the end?
How did Pelosi get rich? How did the Clintons? Looking back and just Mena and Whitewater makes you realize how institutionalized corruption is in the US. If you are protected politically, you can get away with murder.
Well, that's just how social/cultural norms work (the greater the proportion of the population participating, typically the greater acceptance), but in this case it is literally illegal and believed still by the vast majority of people to be unjust.
Reminds me of: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France
as long as you're becoming a state afterwards, or more precisely - as long as you're a winner. Mandela was taken off terrorist list only very recently. Hamas being practically a state already, not a winner yet and thus is still a terrorist org.
I think you are misunderstanding the idea of monopoly on violence. It's actually most wonderful achievement and state of the art technique in limiting violence between technologically advanced homo sapiens specimens.
This reminds me of:
"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god." - Jean Rostand
I assume if she was a teller and saw, say $100MM, in an account assigned to him, it wouldn't be unimaginable for her to believe whatever story he conjures up.
Okay, someone help me follow this. I understand the whole give me money and I'll double it thing. But how did he end up with $242 million? That seems like and incredible amount for a single person to have the authority to give away.
Also found this article from '98 where a coworker asks the same thing and gets the same answer Ayyoub gave other people: "I asked how he had transferred so much money without approval or authorization," Salim later recalled. "Ayyoub said he had been under the influence of, or pressured by, the rich man to transfer the money."http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/babas-big-bucks-6359873
Given the current state of computers and surveillance, It would seem that we dont know anything about the simplicity required to pull off mass heists in the age prior to computers-in-their-current-form....
It would seem that it was REALLY easy to rob banks in the past.
I wonder what Dillenger's actual networth would have been...
American (and thus international) banking seems to work on the somehow backwads principle of allowing allmost any transaction without any real authorization (eg. credits cards, direct debits, checks and such, where only thing you really need to know for the transaction to happen is some semi-public number) and dealing with possible issues after the fact On the other hand the system is pretty good at finding the party responsible, or in other words whose insurance will be billed for the missing money (for example when you look at it from this PoV the EMV protocols and cryptography used make sense). But for that to work someone has to be actually looking for the issues.
Somewhat tangential but relevant: As I'm currently moving I spent some part of the afternoon by changing periodic payments setup on my bank account and was somehow amused by the "create transaction" menu in my (european) banks' web application. There is menu item which essentially says "Direct debit (this is probably not what you want)".
This problem has long been a "what-if-cuz-that-would-be-nice" service:
Think of a last-pass for all your varied accounts, where the service allows you to update your core information and then select which of your accounts who have subscribed to your profile info should just be updated by the service.
So if you move - with one click, update all your linked account details for zip/billing/shipping/etc...
Obviously provide a diff review opportunity and a MFA heavy confirmation process - but with an easily revertible process as well.
as well as monitoring of logins to all, and alerts for any changes to any...
Still the writer is telling the story as an absolute truth, if he claimed could double money, why that guy kept sending him money without getting back anything doubled?
And 3 years, the sentences, way to little, something doesn't add up, I'm inclined to believe that he actually was some kind of scapegoat, that yes he received money from the bank, but a cover up, also the bank didn't noticed, so much money going out without justification?
I assumed he was giving back doubled amounts at a small scale using borrowed money or whatever, then when he got a large sum he ran. But even if that’s what he did, I don’t know how he jumped from small amounts he could borrow to $242 million. I guess we will never know for sure how he did it.
money doubling is a tried and tested scam. They used to do it a lot in EVE Online. You don't just have one mark and that's how it worked. Likely he was doing lots of money doubling with others that was feeding this one to finally get the $200 million. Its possible he even transitioned this particular mark into a different scam where he just got direct access to their funds and was able to sign stuff off without authorization.
> Then this week, the same bank publicly alleged that the jeweller was among those involved in an alleged $1.8bn fraud - which has led to fears for India's second-largest state-run bank.
Sic doesn't mean "incorrect", it means "as written". You use it anytime a reader might be confused to show that you haven't made a mistake while quoting someone which could potentially change the meaning or context of the quote.
There's no black magic, there is a conspiracy to steal and launder money, a bank that wants to hide the problem, complicit courts and credulous western reporters who will literally believe anything.
The statement that signing off the transfers wasn't the work of one man is probably accurate.
So, what was this? Was Sissoko acting as a mule for getting money out of the bank and transferring it to other places?
One way to launder money is to buy things after all. Luxury goods like food, wine and art are particularly good for this. If I need to give you $1000 with plausible deniability, then if I go to your restaurant and pay $1000 for a $50 meal, that does the job.
So, someone wanted to quietly move millions of dollars out of a bank, and then gave it to someone who possibly laundered it, and did things like running and airline and buying military helicopters (what other military hardware was he not caught buying?).
Then the US diplomatic system went to bat for him in court.
Black magic or black budget?
(Edit: the spies angle is probably a bit of a push, but I think speculating he was laundering for a bigger fish isn't)
I find it much more plausible that Ayoub, the bank agent, simply took the fall for a handful of other people who were also conned. The more elaborate explanations smack of mistaking ignorance for malice.
94 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 88.3 ms ] threadI can see how it works in the short term e.g. you give me money, I give you double, you give me lots of money and I disappear with it. But it seems he had an ongoing relationship with the Daubi bank manager, how is that possible?
Once the mark has been tricked into giving away a small sum, you can now hold it over their head as blackmail to give you a larger sum - they are as fired/going-to-jail after giving away $X as for $10X, so with the stick of telling their bosses what they've done and the carrot of "maybe I can get you out of this if you give me a little more", the con artist can keep coming back to the same victim over and over.
Or maybe there were a bunch of them stealing and Sissoko was laundering for them and Ayoub was the designated fall guy, and this was the best lie the group could come up with.
Going back to MMOs, scammers in EVE have a jumble of variants on this scam. Typically they'll double your money if it's below a certain amount, but run away with any larger sums. Sometimes they frame the game as a lottery or game of skill: only the first person whose cash transfer shows up in their wallet will have their money doubled. With arbitrary rules like that, it's easier to give excuses as to why they weren't able to double the money. Oh, you didn't read the fine print in my bio: better luck next time! A good rube might fork over multiple donations before he realizes his money won't be coming back. Of course, scamming in that game is perfectly legal, so it's a lot easier to just block and ignore your marks.
When someone got caught, that was the best lie they could come up with.
In a culture of woo, this doubtless makes some kind of sense.
Cf. ICOs, irrational exuberance, etc.
Then you can get a brand new story every time there is a contradiction.
Putting wealthy people in jail doesn't normally happen. And even when it does happen, their stays usually aren't half as bad.
This particular dude plead guilty... and his sentence? "The sentence was 43 days in prison and a $250,000 fine". Most states won't even transfer you to prison for a month and a half, they'll just keep you in jail. And not only that, but he was able to get out early because he gave money to charity.
I've known folks get put in jail for not being able to afford child support. Many folks spend that long in jail just awaiting trial.
When and how does this stuff catch up with them in the end?
This is the same line of thinking that we all apply for things such as "Karma".
Just because we believe we live in a just world, it doesn't make it so.
It is why crucial for people to remain vigilant of legal loopholes and apply political pressure to make any changes.
As citizens, we have more power than we realize.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
How did Pelosi get rich? How did the Clintons? Looking back and just Mena and Whitewater makes you realize how institutionalized corruption is in the US. If you are protected politically, you can get away with murder.
Gun running? Drugs? Slavery?
It also allows for selective prosecution. You prosecute some individuals for something everyone does as a punishment for totally unrelated matters.
It's very effective.
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." - Voltaire
Plenty of current examples from all types of states.
He or she was talking about the deaths in siviet goulags.
Well. That's a bit of a circular argument.
This guy is smooth.
Who could play the man?
How's the drama/comedy split on this one?
Denzel Washington might be a little old for his earlier exploits, but don't count him out.
Also found this article from '98 where a coworker asks the same thing and gets the same answer Ayyoub gave other people: "I asked how he had transferred so much money without approval or authorization," Salim later recalled. "Ayyoub said he had been under the influence of, or pressured by, the rich man to transfer the money." http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/babas-big-bucks-6359873
Also, this 2001 article suggests the transfers "were disguised in falsified bank ledgers" http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/general/jail-sentences-dropped-...
It would seem that it was REALLY easy to rob banks in the past.
I wonder what Dillenger's actual networth would have been...
Think of a last-pass for all your varied accounts, where the service allows you to update your core information and then select which of your accounts who have subscribed to your profile info should just be updated by the service.
So if you move - with one click, update all your linked account details for zip/billing/shipping/etc...
Obviously provide a diff review opportunity and a MFA heavy confirmation process - but with an easily revertible process as well.
as well as monitoring of logins to all, and alerts for any changes to any...
And 3 years, the sentences, way to little, something doesn't add up, I'm inclined to believe that he actually was some kind of scapegoat, that yes he received money from the bank, but a cover up, also the bank didn't noticed, so much money going out without justification?
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43081499
> Then this week, the same bank publicly alleged that the jeweller was among those involved in an alleged $1.8bn fraud - which has led to fears for India's second-largest state-run bank.
Well that's good. We really can't have people going around practicing magic, who knows what could come of it.
You don't need to add [sic] when it's correct (this is a British news site).
So, what was this? Was Sissoko acting as a mule for getting money out of the bank and transferring it to other places?
One way to launder money is to buy things after all. Luxury goods like food, wine and art are particularly good for this. If I need to give you $1000 with plausible deniability, then if I go to your restaurant and pay $1000 for a $50 meal, that does the job.
So, someone wanted to quietly move millions of dollars out of a bank, and then gave it to someone who possibly laundered it, and did things like running and airline and buying military helicopters (what other military hardware was he not caught buying?).
Then the US diplomatic system went to bat for him in court. Black magic or black budget?
(Edit: the spies angle is probably a bit of a push, but I think speculating he was laundering for a bigger fish isn't)