My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his way to the top

https://narratively.com/my-high-flying-life-as-a-corporate-spy-who-lied-his-way-to-the-top/

by aagha • 3 years ago

151 91 3 years ago

From the author's bio

Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level,”

Frank Abagnale is now believed to have lied about most of the cons he supposedly perpetrated. Is there any good reason to believe this Robert guy is more legit?

Either way he's still a con artist I guess.

ip26• 3 years ago

It’s idempotent. He pulled the greatest ruse, convincing you of his exploits as a con artist when in fact he wasn’t the great con he said he was ;)

jnsaff2• 3 years ago

Yet another fiction writer that writes fiction and lies about it being a true story?

Why would one trust a person who advertises themselves as a liar?

Do they suddenly turn honest in order to write a book?

metadat• 3 years ago

To be fair, it's only a memoir. This doesn't invalidate your points, though - only recommended as a pure entertainment read.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical after just the first story in this article. It says it takes place in 2006. Why would this person spend an hour reading these names over the phone instead of emailing them? I could understand plausible deniability, but if the woman with cancer thought this guy was in the compliance office, surely she wouldn't be thinking he wants to sidestep compliance rules.

The whole thing smells extremely fishy, perhaps I'm just jaded be all the ever present grift online these days. And these con artists "coming clean" to write a book so they can bask in the glory of their exploits? STFU, you're a slimy douchebag, and your attempt to write a "true crime" book is even lamer.

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

Because the caller doesn't have a legit email. It's the same reason the tax man asks you to pay your taxes in gift cards

cwdegidio• 3 years ago

It totally screams of another "Confessions of an Economic Hitman." It will be a bestseller, be proven fake, and then quoted a million times.

nocoiner• 3 years ago

I bought that book years ago, it was so stupid. It was like a naive teenager’s uninformed screed about how international trade, development and finance are intrinsically bad. I didn’t know about the fabulistic aspects of it, but that’s not surprising in the slightest.

Come to think of it, I think I still have it on a bookshelf somewhere. I should banish it to the same place I banish books that I’ve read because they seem interesting but are just right/wing agitprop (e.g., books that come to mind in this category were books about the over-expansion of the federal criminal code, the East German stasi and the dysfunctionality of San Francisco - I’m happy to have my perspective changed, but I don’t find that I’m very receptive to arguments that boil down to “your beliefs are stupid and that’s why these things are bad”).

Another notably stupid book that I bought was called “A History of the English Speaking Peoples” - I (foolishly) thought it was going to be about the remarkably resilient political systems and economies of US/UK/Can./Aus./NZ but it was basically a white supremacist tract. No thanks.

ycombiredd• 3 years ago

Well, he names real names. Gardia (Fox) is a real person (and the Hags were a real SoCal punk rock skateboard gang; see https://bust.com/living/18944-hell-on-wheels.html )

I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.

I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.

greatpostman2• 3 years ago

Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank. They were a “quant” and claimed to be using sophisticated algorithms to trade the market. In reality they were making gut based trades with fake software full of complicated derivatives trading algorithms. Fooled some of the most well paid people in the world

supahfly_remix• 3 years ago

Was this person ever found out?

greatpostman2• 3 years ago

They got fired and the whole trading operation collapsed. They never discovered the extent of the facade, but there were suspicions. The whole thing went on for 15 years. A major portfolio. By then he had enough to easily retire

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank.

Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.

He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.

Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).

They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.

He was fired on the spot [1].

I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.

[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.

dmreedy• 3 years ago

Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"

I would propose a slightly more cynical model:

It might not look good if it goes public

jedberg3• 3 years ago

I don't know how they found out? Is that public information?

When I graduated college (UC Berkeley, very large public school in California) I had to go to the registrar to pick up my diploma since I graduated off cycle. In line in front of me was a guy who seemed to know the lady at the window well, and put down a piece of paper and said "got another list to check". The lady went into the back, so I asked the guy what he was doing.

He told me he worked for a background check company and was there about once a month with a list of names to verify graduation dates. He told me a lot of his work comes from government and big companies. He then suggested that if I was going to lie about graduating, make sure it was to a small company that can't afford background checks!

He also told me that almost every month there is at least one person who fails to have the degree they claim to have.

astura• 3 years ago

I don't know how they found out? Is that public information?

Verifying degree is extremely easy in most cases - the background check company will just call the registrar. It's probably done through an API nowadays.

vsareto• 3 years ago

To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.

Personally, if I found out and they could actually do the work, I would let it pass. I'd consider it a white lie in that case.

I think it's more of a harm to society to use degrees as requirements when they aren't actually required. This too is lying, but you won't see companies facing penalties for putting a degree requirement when one isn't necessary for the job.

LandR• 3 years ago

For my current job I had to get proof of my degree, institution and grade.

Thos was for a degree between 1999 and 2003.

They wanted info down to the month I started... I had no idea so just guessed a month in 1999... They got back to me to check what was up as they had determined I actually started in some other month...

They even wanted proof of what High school I went to.

Some companies are super thorough!

gunshai2• 3 years ago

So they fired someone for lying, despite 10 years of work history.

Seems like there's more to that then just not having the degree.

Your college degree is not correlative to your ability to actually do a job. He probably did a lot more than just that.

inafewwords• 3 years ago

Sounds like a liability to tell the previous company. I know it can happen and not even rare, but why even open that liability up

If they are competitor companies they just got someone fired to cause internal conflict. I assume Company 2 acts greedily and not through goodwill

howmayiannoyyou• 3 years ago

White collar criminal investigations and prosecutions have declined as counter-terrorism, drug, counter-espionage and politically motivated investigations have (greatly) increased. Is it reasonable to expect the majority of people to act virtuously when doing so puts them at great disadvantage in an effectively unregulated environment? This is what Liv Boree might call a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish.

The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.

Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

<< has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article

I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.

It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.

<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.

I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.

I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.

joe_the_user• 3 years ago

...a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish

It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.

dymk• 3 years ago

You really think they’re not aware of Marx?

elcritch4• 3 years ago

Will they also redo the massive horrors relewsed on the world that Marxists did? Wait, FTX seems like a prime example.

Capitalism in itself is incomplete, I believe it requires a strong moral principle in a populous to work well. Trying to shoehorn that moral basis into capitalism as Marx did just results in a very destructive system.

rcarr• 3 years ago

This is one of the root problems of Western society today and I think it has its origin in the financial crisis. The perpetrators got off scott free everywhere (except Iceland) and everyone who wasn’t a banker ended up paying the price.

The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.

The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.

godelski• 3 years ago

Most people put their grocery carts back, stop at stop signs and lights at the middle of night on a lone road, and there's plenty of examples where people go out of their way to do the right thing. There's this common misconception that most people are act immorally but in reality the law is only written for the few. For a very clear example, I doubt murder rates would change were it not illegal. Most people don't want to kill and recognize it as intrinsically immoral. The problem is that we ignore normal behavior and this makes us overestimate abnormal behavior.

corbulo• 3 years ago

Your point is parallel to the ideas surrounding the realism of altruism.

People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost. As the cost ramps up the calculation for a 'selfless' act is effectively inverted to bias self interest instead.

This is how you get the current state of the financial sector. Ironically altruism is so cynically dismissed that its actually used as a marketing strategy to pursue self interest, with no one bothering to disassemble it because no one believes thats the motivation anyway (see: subsidizing homeowners with bad credit using homeowners with good credit). Leaving the only people who do believe it functioning out of partisanship and lack of curiosity.

'Abnormal' behavior is exponential in its effects. Much like a fire, it only stops if contained. Thats why total laissez faire deregulation is naïve. Even if most people do the right thing, society is not silo'd from the minority who does the bad things.

QuadmasterXLII• 3 years ago

If murdering was legal, most people still wouldn’t murder. If murdering reliably earned 1 million dollars, then most _people_ still wouldn’t murder but most _money_ would be in the hands of killers

elcritch4• 3 years ago

Jumping from returning shopping carts to murder is a bit of a leap though. Sure most people wouldn't commit murder.

However, its much much easier for things like returning shopping carts become less common. How many stores have left San Francisco and Portland downtowns due to unabashed theft?

I agree that much of it also starts with leaders. If the top eschelon is busy with NIMBYism and gaming share prices to get theirs, it won't be long before normal folk start questioning doing the moral thing in order to get ahead.

magnuspaaske2• 3 years ago

The problem is that in this case there's an extraordinarily lucrative opportunity for anyone willing to take it, meaning even if most people would see this and think "I don't want to be that person" there'll still be people who will do this line of work, regardless how immoral it might be

closeparen• 3 years ago

I would wager most killings are retribution for some kind of wrong, simply by people who don’t believe in the justice system or whose rage overwhelms their fear of consequences. If murder were legal then that would be a blow to state legitimacy and also remove much of the reason not to take matters into your own hands.

ComodoHacker• 3 years ago

I doubt murder rates would change were it not illegal. Most people don't want to kill

Most people wouldn't kill, but the rest would kill enough for rates to change.

thenerdhead• 3 years ago

This has been the case forever. Society's values ebb and flow.

If we were in a society where values were held to a high regard, you might see different headlines like:

"Failed actor takes on new role of regulating officials for financial gain".

or even a few years earlier:

"Selfish man vilifies volunteer firefighters in California for not doing enough to save his house".

htrp• 3 years ago

until some tech industry folks created a little thing called LinkedIn that made publicly available much of the information I charged a lot of money for.

TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks

markus_zhang• 3 years ago

Well nowadays they might come as <put your favorite db/os/tool> account managers out there. I have seen one and then realized they are probably not account managers.

compsciphd• 3 years ago

reminds of the husband on The Americans.

These days, it would seem that simple training of employees that requests such as these (if they are ever legitimate requests), should only come in over internal communication systems that effort is presumably put into keep only employees access to and would identify the employee using it.

Wouldn't be full proof, but would raise the bar significantly and increase the crime committed thereby reducing those who are willing to do it.

magnuspaaske2• 3 years ago

This is part of the training where I work. Some places even let people know to be careful when updating Linkedin, exactly because people are stalking it to find new people to lure into some ruse

easyTree• 3 years ago

-- More times than I can remember they’d say, “I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you.” And I wanted to respond: “You’re not.” -- lool :-)

rcurry• 3 years ago

Maybe this guy did some social engineering at one time or another but the idea that he could get any employee at a Wall Street firm to spend an hour reciting the cell phone numbers of all their executives is a load of bullshit.

mariojv• 3 years ago

I'm still reading the article, but "Rabbit Hole" is an interesting recent series on Paramount Plus if the idea of a show featuring corporate espionage is interesting to anyone. I think it's an under-featured mini genre given how many people work quite boring corporate jobs who could use something thrilling to fantasize about.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

it's pretty unbelievable that someone would be pulling in 7 figures just for providing a list of people that worked at a company. all of that information feels so public. his clients were really willing to pay so much to... poach the employees?

this really really doesn't ring true for me.

i-use-nixos-btw• 3 years ago

Honest question - is bonding over the nationality of ancestors really that big a deal in the US?

It seems to be a solid theme in this.

It just strikes me as odd that a nation with such a patriotic mentality define themselves as Welsh, Irish, Scottish etc because their great grandparents came from there. Besides, it’s a well established fact that if you can’t sing Yma o Hyd from start to finish, your Welsh credentials are confiscated.

cafard2• 3 years ago

Umm. Well, if you turn up for Mass on April 17 at St. Patrick's in downtown Washington, DC, you will see a number of users wearing sashes of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and when you leave, you will see some young women doing step dances before the door. (And if you continue on to bars with Irish names of one sort or another, you will find persons of many ethnic heritages drinking too much.)

Alexandria, Virginia, used to have Highland Games, in which descendants of (generally lowland) Scots will toss cabers and so on.

There are big Italian-themed feasts in New York.

The Germans I think were a bit daunted by a couple of world wars in the last century.

cafard2• 3 years ago

Not "users", "ushers".

My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his way to the top

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