131–140 of 180 posts
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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.
‘Falls off ships’ is a pretty convenient excuse.
This was fascinating, but also terrible! I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: 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 fraud…
Or, much more likely, to prevent further issues in the supply chain he decided to acquire the supply chain.
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...
There are lots of high-trust interfaces like this in the legacy businesses that make up most of world commerce. It might not be feasible to do much more in the way of background checks.
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Sounds like an interesting story! How big was a pallet? How does one come to know the specific truck driver?
This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember it being about 6ft x 6ft x 6ft. It was a bunch of cardboard shipping boxes with clear wrap around them. I think I was paying £10,000 per pallet. He told me he would just skip scanning a pallet at the docks as they were loaded into his trailer, and then his mate would meet him at a roadside services on the motorway with a van and they would somehow m…
Not a book that glorifies crime. But one that shows us the hidden sides of humanity. The kind of stuff that happens and the kinds of things people do that you will not see on YV, or read about on X. Another window into the true lives of our fellow humans in an age where many of us are occupied with LLMs and project managers.
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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).
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. :-(
His user profile is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu. It now says it was shut down, so I guess it's official. Weird that he wouldn't update the site, though, which just says it's temporarily paused.
I'm not surprised that decided to shut it down; it seemed like a lot of work, and there are now a number of competitors doing the same thing at a much higher volume, with free world-wide shipping, glossy packaging, and so on.
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.
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.
‘Falls off ships’ is a pretty convenient excuse.
It’s not worth retrieving them from the sea, but anytime they get damaged on land the insurance company ends up owning the remains and auctions it off.
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> By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?
> Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare. Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms. https://www.ne…
Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.
>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,
Notice, the person who picked up goods for him after he paid a storage fee was also a scammer. My guess is it is the same as the first scammer or in cahoots.