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The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

straitstimes.com

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Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#71

Post by zoky »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #62
zoky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when they hadn’t even made any money on the scam, according to the article. What’s the angle here? It’s a bit far-fetched I suppose, but the only possible explanation I can see for all of this is that this is an attempted (but bungled) insurance fraud scheme on the part of Bokksu. Especially given the conclusion of the article, where it turns out that a Bokksu subsidiary was in charge of handing off the sh…

Easy to find out since half are still at the warehouse....

It occurred to me though that it could also be a “double-dipping” scam. The fake shipping company supposedly “loses” the merchandise, an insurance claim is filed, then the Kit Kats are quietly retrieved and resold. In that case, even if the insurance company refuses to pay out (as they did) it's not a total loss, as they're only out a few grand in storage fees. It'd be fairly low risk as well, as there wouldn't be any tangible evidence of fraud, and in the worst case it wouldn't be hard to recover the Kit Kats and pretend they were miraculously found.

It still seems sort of unlikely to me that Bokksu was attempting to commit insurance fraud, but it's hard to deny that the facts seem oddly to fit. Why would the scammer take the truckload to a cold storage facility, rather than, say, just abandoning the containers somewhere? Why would he admit to being a scammer, if not in order to provide a basis for an insurance claim? What possible benefit was there to the scammer, when he didn't even get any money for his role in the scheme (at least, not from the trucking broker)? And why would Bokksu not disclose until well after the fact that they owned the company that was responsible for releasing the containers to the trucking company?

For a company valued at $100M, $110K does seem like a trifling amount of money to commit fraud over, but stranger things have certainly happened.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#73

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

TheCleric wrote: post #60
Matthias247 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe the scammer got stuck on the storage fee and paperwork too while he spent the time searching for a buyer for this unique product. Then when he identified the fence he was into storage fees deeper than his liquidity (beyond merely cutting the scam in half-- his first plan). So he had the broker pay storage, release the product, then targeted the broker a second time with the same scam-- same board, same method, this time laser-focused and with success.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#74

Post by jcpst »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #55
tristor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The market is very competitive- capacity can get tight, which makes room for the “little guy” to grab a load. Even at the biggest companies with millions of lines of software, tons of logistics is still driven by email.

Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist.

More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#75

Post by epcoa »

reactordev wrote: post #24
robotnikman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just ended up ordering some myself after finding out about these lol. Another perk I've found about treats from overseas is they use actual sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.

That's pretty much true of most overseas candies and chocolates. Some of the best chocolates from Europe use cocoa butter and real sugar. Not Processed Cocoa Powder, HFCS, additives, colorings, preservatives, and then tempered with plastic.

[flagged]

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#76

Post by Aeolun »

mparkms wrote: post #10

So this guy whose job it is to hire truckers to move goods fell for the same scam twice in a row? Fool me once, etc, etc...

I mean, how is there no way to authenticate the truckers you charter on that platform, or when they arrive to pick up the load. Presumably the least they can do is identify the person.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#77

Post by mike_d »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49
mike_d wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.

So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)

There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines.

If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that.

https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#78

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

zoky wrote: post #71
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to find out since half are still at the warehouse....

It occurred to me though that it could also be a “double-dipping” scam. The fake shipping company supposedly “loses” the merchandise, an insurance claim is filed, then the Kit Kats are quietly retrieved and resold. In that case, even if the insurance company refuses to pay out (as they did) it's not a total loss, as they're only out a few grand in storage fees. It'd be fairly low risk as well, as there wouldn't be an…

It doesn't make sense that the original owner would allow this to go so far as 50% of the load being lost in storage bureaucracy and the mess published by a journalist. The scammer was skimming pennies and generating much bigger losses to everyone else.

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#79

Post by neilv »

busyant wrote: post #68
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,

> That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing, Whenever I read stuff like this, I end up feeling like I'm not imaginative enough to scam people. Also, this isn't the same thing, but ... years ago, when Craigslist was running strong, I responded to a CL post to purchase a used laptop. The CL post was really well done, quite detailed (I remember it had photos and talked about how it was…

> To my surprise, he came clean and asked me not to report it to CL

Sounds like a stoner or kid? (There definitely seemed to be a lot of stoners on CL, at least responding to forsale posts.)

Re: The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats

#80

Post by anigbrowl »

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,

Feels like insurance fraud.
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