Whipped Cream Difficulties

In the first operation, hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed Indian credit-card processing company that handles Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. Such companies are attractive to cybercriminals because they are considered less secure than financial institutions, computer security experts say.

The hackers, who are not named in the indictment, then raised the withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit accounts issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah, also known as RakBank, which is in United Arab Emirates.

So they raised the withdrawal limits, but shouldn’t it have set off alarms if they tried to withdraw more than the amount on the prepaid card? Or did the people involved change that as well?

…

With five account numbers in hand, the hackers distributed the information to individuals in 20 countries who then encoded the information on magnetic-stripe cards. On Dec. 21, the cashing crews made 4,500 A.T.M. transactions worldwide, stealing $5 million, according to the indictment.

…

After securing 12 account numbers for cards issued by the Bank of Muscat in Oman and raising the withdrawal limits, the cashing crews were set in motion. Starting at 3 p.m., the crews made 36,000 transactions and withdrew about $40 million from machines in the various countries in about 10 hours. In New York City, a team of eight people made 2,904 withdrawals, stealing $2.4 million.

The Times notes this is bigger than Lufthansa. And no guns were involved (at least in the initial heist: one of the people alleged to be behind it was shot dead later on). As a connoisseur of hacks and heists, my hat is off to these guys.

Remember our old friends the Zeta cartel, and their plan to launder money by purchasing quarter horses? Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, not guilty.

Jesus Huitron, an Austin homebuilder and painter, was found not guilty. But José Treviño Morales, brother of two principal leaders within the organization, and three co-defendants were found to have poured millions of dirty dollars from the Zetas cartel into the U.S. quarter horse industry to hide their illicit origins.

Jimmy Savile isn’t the only British entertainer caught up in scandal:

…what surely qualifies as one of the more ambitious, and possibly quixotic, law enforcement investigations in Britain in recent years: Operation Yewtree, a nationwide inquiry into sexual offenses that may or may not have been committed decades ago. In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.

I don’t want to seem like I’m trivializing this. But going on:

The result has been a flurry of arrests, about a dozen involving very public people. But even as women’s rights advocates and others applaud a new era of openness, in which once-cowed victims feel able to speak out, lawyers for the high-profile suspects say that in the current climate, the accusers appear to be going out of their way to opportunistically target celebrities.

Among the people caught up in this:

One of the biggest names on the list is Rolf Harris, 83, an Australian-born artist, singer and children’s television host who, according to British newspaper reports, has been accused by a woman of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Mr. Harris, also famous for his didgeridoo playing, performed for Queen Elizabeth II at her jubilee last year. Channel 5 pulled his two television programs off the air — “Olive the Ostrich” and “Rolf’s Animal Clinic,” which was showing in repeats — pending the investigation.

Once upon a time, there was a man named James Stockwell who lived in Orange County.

Mr. Stockwell led a colorful life. He ran strip clubs on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s. He was also involved in credit card fraud and counterfeiting. Mr. Stockwell went away for a while.

When he came out of prison, he started a chain of hotdog stands called “Cowboy Hotdogs”. He raised a million dollars for his hotdog stands. But “Cowboy Hotdogs” folded; worse yet, Mr. Stockwell admitted that he stole $412,000 from his investors.

Mr. Stockwell, also known as “Jimmy Casino”, also ran the Mustang Topless Theater in Orange County. (Strippers, always with the strippers.) By 1987, he was in a bind: the IRS was going to shut down the Mustang because of “millions of dollars in unpaid taxes”, he didn’t have the money to make restitution payments to the “Cowboy Hotdogs” investors, and he owed other folks money. Serious other folks.

After years of staying a step ahead of the law and the people whom he owed money, Casino, 48, was ambushed at his Buena Park condo Jan. 2, 1987.”We’re getting paid to do this,” one of the two gunmen allegedly said.
They raped Casino’s 22-year-old girlfriend. Then they pumped three bullets into the back of his head with a silencer-equipped handgun before making off with credit cards, fur coats, jewelry and two of his cars.

25 years later, a man named Richard Morris Jr. is standing trial for the murder of Jimmy Casino. The investigators in the case matched DNA from Morris to DNA recovered from Casino’s girlfriend, and arrested him in 2008.

Casino’s death in 1987 was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the Mustang strip club in Santa Ana, which grossed $150,000 a month and had ties to organized crime.
Over the next 15 months, a financial backer of the Mustang was shot and blinded by a Los Angeles mob underboss who was convicted of attempted murder. Mustang bouncer “Big” George Yudzevich — a 6-foot-7 slab of intimidation who also happened to be an FBI informant — was shot to death in an Irvine industrial park; no one was ever charged.

I’m looking forward to the book about this case.