Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

straitstimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 180 posts

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#51

Post by jcpst »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #27

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…

This is called 3rd party logistics, a trillion dollar industry.

I work as an SE at one the larger ones.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#52

Post by closewith »

xsmasher wrote: post #46
changoplatanero wrote: post #3

Wait what was the scam how did it work? Was the plan to ransom the container to the owner?

Judging from the anger of the second driver, the scam is to steal the load and resell it on the black market; the driver must not have known what he was picking up? Or maybe they just take an up-front payment and disappear. 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.

> 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.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#53

Post by vharuck »

mikestew wrote: post #22

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. :-(

For anyone looking for a Japanese candy and snack subscription service, I enjoyed bokksu: https://www.bokksu.com/

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#54

Post by Matthias247 »

matsemann wrote: post #35
lawlessone wrote: post #16

>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.” That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,

To me it almost sounds like the scam is to get the goods into a storage facility they own and extort the owner of the goods for a high storage fee to get it released. And also rack up the fees by denying any claim of actual ownership for some period. Aka the scammer wants the victim to know where the goods are. So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.

It sounds like it, but it still doesn't make sense to me. A scammer would want to be anonymous so they can't be prosecuted. But a warehouse owner would be well known.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#55

Post by ChuckMcM »

tristor wrote: post #32
ChuckMcM wrote: post #27

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…

Unless I'm missing something, this already exists. This is basically what the entire LTL freight market is based around. Am I missing something?

I was struck by these two paragraphs in the article:

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.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#56

Post by closewith »

mike_d wrote: post #45
oh_sigh wrote: post #33

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?

The actual scam here didn't play out, so NYTimes does not have the full story. 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…

> 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.

That's an excellent insight and explains the big mystery. Thanks.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#57

Post by Matthias247 »

vharuck wrote: post #53
mikestew wrote: post #22

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. :-(

For anyone looking for a Japanese candy and snack subscription service, I enjoyed bokksu: https://www.bokksu.com/

That's actually the company whose kitkat journey is documented in the linked article

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#60

Post by TheCleric »

Matthias247 wrote: post #54
matsemann wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it almost sounds like the scam is to get the goods into a storage facility they own and extort the owner of the goods for a high storage fee to get it released. And also rack up the fees by denying any claim of actual ownership for some period. Aka the scammer wants the victim to know where the goods are. So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.

It sounds like it, but it still doesn't make sense to me. A scammer would want to be anonymous so they can't be prosecuted. But a warehouse owner would be well known.

That’s the thing. You have the “unassociated” scammer admit to it otherwise they don’t know to come get the shipment (and pay the fee).
Post reply on HN