Catching Up
The Two Step and Worlds Colliding
When we last spoke, I defended my lack of blogging in the guise of productivity help. As much as I want to make a second career as a productivity guru, I need a few more streaks under my belt before hanging out my Life Coach shingle. I do, however, know a lot about open-source intelligence, online research, and the realm of public records. To that end, I have two mini posts for you in the spirit of catching up.
Gardner Worldwide
I once toyed with the notion of changing my firm name to Gardner Worldwide. It seemed a good idea . Catchy and reinforcing the idea that I could go anywhere to get vital information. That is until I reckoned with the hassles around petitioning the bank to change your bank account name. I went back to the say nothing business name of, Robert Gardner & Associates. But let me tell you, those associates are worldwide, and these days, more than ever, clients want information beyond the four walls of my country.
I’ve written before about stretching my research outside the borders. In this post, I talked how Google Translate and Nexis broaden greatly what I could do. This post is a good overview of the issues that arise in international research. Today’s quickie is to cover this: the international two-step.
Nearly every international project involves the two-step.
Rob, do you have a guy in Botswana (or Timor Leste or Estonia or some crossword answer of a country)
Rob sends out various queries, feelers, and emails to see who covers Botswana or Timor Leste or Estonia or wherever.
The problem is that the two-step is never just two steps. For one thing, there is the inevitable, can you give me some details? Which are rarely at hand. For another, the hit rate from “do you have a guy?” to, “okay, go ahead”, is annoyingly low. It’s hard to maintain your network when so few inquiries lead to work.
Still, to be ever so humble, I know a range of people and sources, and there has never been a case where I was unable to find someone qualified to handle it, no matter where.
Have any of you managed the international two-step? What’s best practices?
Scandal in Wine World
There’s enough fraud in the wine world, and I’m not even talking about the fact that wine geeks cannot even tell red from white if you blindfold them, that the first stories to come up when you google wine fraud are not even ones I would want to blog. And that includes a Wikipedia page for a wine fraudster. No, I got another one. A world colliding tale that combines my interests in food, expensive dinners, high rollers, fraud and due diligence.
I love when all my worlds collide like they did in this Grub Street New York article. I read Grub Street New York because I do a lot of eating in New York. Actually, I like to read about eating in places where I do not spend much time. Accordingly, I know way too much about eating in Istanbul and Greece. But I like food and I like reading about food. I also like reading about high rollers, and I like reading about high rollers taken to the cleaners by suave conmen who create personas of free-wheeling wealth (see for instance, the Malaysian international fugitive known as Jho Low). And when the article includes these words, “his private bankers vetted,” oooh boy. That’s what I like reading. It was all there.
Here's the scam as detained in Grub Street:
Khan (not to be confused with Jho Low) pitched a simple arrangement. Staging one of his dinners might cost $100,000 — to reserve a private room at Jean-Georges or another fine restaurant; to source six to ten rare bottles; to pay a sommelier. If Penavić advanced him $60,000, Khan said he would cover the rest, and they’d split the profits 50/50. The exact amounts varied according to location and size. Penavić gave Khan $75,000 for an event in London and $75,000 for another in New Jersey.
In the CFE courses, they call what went wrong an “advance fee scheme”. The scam relies heavily on believing the person, in this case, a Mr. Omar Khan – who “wore tailored suits…talk in a honeyed baritone about literature, business, and travel, sharing lessons he’d learned climbing Mount Fuji or waiting for a cappuccino at the Beau-Rivage in Geneva. His alluring old-world twinkle…” Amongst those roped in, hedge fund billionaire, Krešimir Penavić. Even though, as the article notes, Khan was vetted by Penavić’s private bankers.
It is easy to be dismissive when you read these things. How could they? Fell for the honeyed baritone again…
There can be multiple good reasons why being vetted by private bankers will fail. As with Elizabeth Holmes, often the fraud only becomes known after the fraud is known. There was no track record of her prior scams to collect in database searches. Generally, the bigger problem is that people’s risk tolerance leads to trouble. Too often, various blemishes uncovered by diligent open-source researchers are dismissed. And then bam, the anvil falls. Hard. I mean, it is difficult to second guess the private bankers’ vetting because we do not know the scope of their research, nor what exactly they found. My hunch, however, is they found things but not the exact scheme. Still, the Grub Street article paints a picture of, “really, you fell for that???”
Khan enrolled at Stanford Law, but it’s not clear whether he graduated. In 1993, with partners in Karachi, he started a business, Training 2000, offering life and business coaching based on “neurolinguistic programming,” a pseudoscientific 1970’s self-improvement method.
The company had a few major corporate clients, according to Saleem Lodhia, an employee, but didn’t seem to make anywhere near enough money to cover Khan’s expenses. “He always lived way beyond his income,” and continued to promote himself as an executive leadership coach under a new brand. Sensei International marketed neurolinguistic services as “a radical software that’s installed in your mind” and Khan touted himself as “arguably one of the best global consultants and speakers in the world.”
Back to the scam, exactly how Khan could afford these wines was a mystery. His business credentials didn’t quite square with Dan Rosenheck, who covered management consulting for The Economist. “It was very murky,” he says. “Every so often I would ask him questions about this nominal company, Sensei International, but never in great detail because he was so vague and fluffy about it.” Even though Rosenheck was a business journalist, he chose not to press.
Would this had been enough? Would you, OSINTer, have put the pieces together?
I do feel more productive this week, getting these two blogs done. Is your productivity helped with these, or do you want more Seinfeld based advice?