
Fake sultan was scamming a Miami billionaire. Then he ate pork - danso
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article214370529.html
======
danso
I always thought stories like "Clark Rockefeller" [0] or Frank Abagnale (of
_Catch Me If You Can_ ) would become more or less extinct in the era of
Internet and Google. Maybe such scams have become easier to perpetuate,
whatwith the ability to fake your lifestyle and credentials with social media
(and eBay, apparently).

[0]
[https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/01/fake_rockefeller200...](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/01/fake_rockefeller200901)

~~~
tzs
> Maybe such scams have become easier to perpetuate, whatwith the ability to
> fake your lifestyle and credentials with social media (and eBay, apparently)

If you make your fake name distinct enough, you could also get legitimate
sounding domains and put up articles about yourself, and they will show up on
the front page of a search on your name. Barney on "How I Met Your Mother" did
this:

[http://www.lorenzovonmatterhorn.com/](http://www.lorenzovonmatterhorn.com/)

[http://bigbusinessjournal.com/](http://bigbusinessjournal.com/)

[http://www.balloonexplorersclub.com/](http://www.balloonexplorersclub.com/)

[http://www.extremitiesquarterly.com/](http://www.extremitiesquarterly.com/)

Of course, he also did social media:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzovonmatterhorn/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzovonmatterhorn/)

I had not realized that LinkedIn allowed fake people. In this case, not only
is it a fake person, it is a fake person made up by a fictional person!

And that fictional person is also on LinkedIn [1], which is also something I
didn't realize they allowed, but looking around I see a lot of fictional
characters, such as Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler from "Big Bang
Theory", Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane from "Iron Man", and most of the staff
of Dunder Mifflin.

Anyway, you could do the fake article thing before the net, but it took some
real effort. There was a con man in the late 19th century who pulled an
investment scam in a western town. He told people to check out the stories
written about his company in leading financial publications from back east. Of
course no one in the town personally subscribed, so they had to go to the town
library, and there they found there were indeed positive articles about him,
and of course those were fake issues he had printed that added articles about
him to the real issues. A nice touch was that on the way out of town with his
victims money, he stopped by the library and replaced the modified magazines
with the originals.

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/barneystinson/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/barneystinson/)

~~~
natecavanaugh
I believe that Frank Abagnale has pretty much said it would probably get
easier. I think it was on the special features section of the Catch Me If You
Can DVD, but I also found an interview with him saying essentially the same
thing [0]

"What I did almost 50 years ago is now 4,000 times easier to do than when I
did it. Technology breeds crime, always has and always will."

All of our technology encodes our own biases and weaknesses, and chances are,
it's the area we are most blind too. And we tend to trust our technology as we
grow dependent on it.

The genius of people like Frank Abagnale, or the people behind Stuxtnet as a
different example is an ability to see these weak spots, and the blatant moxie
it takes to exploit it.

It's kinda scary to think about the power people like that have, honestly.

[0] [http://www.futureofbusinessandtech.com/education-and-
careers...](http://www.futureofbusinessandtech.com/education-and-
careers/catching-up-with-frank-abagnale-technology-breeds-crime)

