"A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them," reports the Register: From January 2016 through March 2021, according to the indictment, Talsma rented textbooks from the Amazon Rental program in order to sell them for a profit... His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned. "These gift cards and MyVanilla Visa cards did not contain names or other means of identifying him as the person renting the textbooks," the indictment says. "Geoffrey Mark Talsma made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards."

As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma "recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit..."

The indictment says the four alleged scammers stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5m.
The U.S. Department of Justice adds If convicted, Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses; a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years for interstate transportation of stolen property; and a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years for making false statements to the FBI.

Additionally, if convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, Talsma will serve a maximum term of imprisonment of four years consecutive to any sentence imposed for the other criminal offenses. Restitution and forfeiture of certain assets obtained with the proceeds of the scheme may also be ordered as a result of a conviction.

The Los Angeles Times reports that homemade (usually 3D-printed) "ghost guns" have contributed to more than 100 violent crimes this year, according to a report released Friday by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)." Detectives have linked the untraceable weapons to 24 killings, eight attempted homicides and dozens of assaults and armed robberies since January, according to the report.

And police expect the problem to get worse, the report said. During the first half of this year, the department confiscated 863 ghost guns, a 400% increase over the 217 it seized during the same period last year, according to the report. That sharp jump suggests the number of ghost guns on the streets and such seizures "will continue to grow exponentially," the authors of the report wrote.

"Ghost guns are an epidemic not only in Los Angeles but nationwide," the department said...

Because they are not made by licensed manufacturers, they lack serial numbers, making them impossible to track. Felons who are banned from possessing firearms because of previous offenses increasingly are turning to ghost guns, LAPD officials have said. The LAPD's analysis was compiled in response to a City Council motion, introduced by Councilmen Paul Koretz and Paul Krekorian, that calls for a new city ordinance banning the possession, sale, purchase, receipt or transportation of such weapons or the "non-serialized, unfinished frames and unfinished receivers" that are used to make them.

The LAPD said it is "strongly in support" of the proposed ordinance. "Ghost guns are real, they work, and they kill," the agency said in the report.

Officials from 32 countries "recognize that ransomware is an escalating global security threat with serious economic and security consequences," according to a statement issued Thursday: From malign operations against local health providers that endanger patient care, to those directed at businesses that limit their ability to provide fuel, groceries, or other goods to the public, ransomware poses a significant risk to critical infrastructure, essential services, public safety, consumer protection and privacy, and economic prosperity.

As with other cyber threats, the threat of ransomware is complex and global in nature and requires a shared response.
But the Wall Street Journal also reports the officials (who met virtually this week) blame another factor in the boom of ransomware: "uneven cryptocurrency standards." The representatives pledged to share information about cyberattacks and investigations, push firms to shore up security, and disrupt the financial infrastructure of a criminal hacking economy that has flourished in recent years. Consistent international scrutiny of cryptocurrencies will be key, the officials said, as ransomware groups that extort victims for digital payments can quickly transfer the funds to countries with lax standards for monitoring illicit transactions.

"We are dedicated to enhancing our efforts to disrupt the ransomware business model and associated money-laundering activities," the representatives said in a joint statement Thursday...

Hacking groups have increasingly targeted U.S. critical infrastructure, disrupting the East Coast's largest gas pipeline in May and a major meat processor in June. Law-enforcement officials are sometimes able to track crypto payments made by such victims, which can reach into the millions, across a public ledger known as a blockchain. The Counter-Ransomware Initiative convened by the White House this week called on countries to use such techniques alongside more aggressive enforcement of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer rules that prevent cryptocurrency companies from facilitating such transactions...

Cybersecurity experts say international collaboration will be key to slowing criminal groups that often operate across borders and with relative impunity in countries such as Russia.

Mark Forkner, Boeing's 737 Max chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, has been charged with misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 Max. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, "he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each count of wire fraud and 10 years in prison on each count of fraud involving aircraft parts in interstate commerce." Slashdot reader McGruber shares an excerpt from the press release: A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas returned an indictment charging Mark A. Forkner, former Chief Technical Pilot for The Boeing Company (Boeing), with deceiving the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) in connection with the FAA AEG's evaluation of Boeing's 737 MAX airplane, and scheming to defraud Boeing's U.S.based airline customers to obtain tens of millions of dollars for Boeing.

As alleged in the indictment, Forkner provided the agency with materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information about a new part of the flight controls for the Boeing 737 MAX called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Because of his alleged deception, a key document published by the FAA AEG lacked any reference to MCAS. In turn, airplane manuals and pilot-training materials for U.S.-based airlines lacked any reference to MCAS -- and Boeing's U.S.-based airline customers were deprived of important information when making and finalizing their decisions to pay Boeing tens of millions of dollars for 737 MAX airplanes.

On or about Oct. 29, 2018, after the FAA AEG learned that Lion Air Flight 610 -- a 737 MAX -- had crashed near Jakarta, Indonesia, shortly after takeoff and that MCAS was operating in the moments before the crash, the FAA AEG discovered the information about the important change to MCAS that Forkner had withheld. Having discovered this information, the FAA AEG began reviewing and evaluating MCAS. On or about March 10, 2019, while the FAA AEG was still reviewing MCAS, the FAA AEG learned that Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 -- a 737 MAX -- had crashed near Ejere, Ethiopia, shortly after takeoff and that MCAS was operating in the moments before the crash. Shortly after that crash, all 737 MAX airplanes were grounded in the United States.

An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud has been hitting Britain this year. "The country is the global epicenter for such attacks, according to five of the biggest British banks and more than a dozen security experts who said scammers were buying up batches of consumers' personal details on the dark net to target the record numbers shopping and banking online since the pandemic," reports Reuters. From the report: The country's super-fast payments infrastructure, relatively light policing of fraud-related crime, plus its use of the world's most widely used language English, also made it an ideal global test bed for scams, the banks and specialists added. A British record of 754 million pounds ($1 billion)was stolen in the first six months of this year, up 30% from the same period in 2020, according to data from banking industry body UK Finance, and up more than 60% from 2017, when it began compiling the figures. That represents a per capita fraud rate roughly triple that seen in the United States in 2020 [...].

Unlike simple email-based scams of the past purporting to be from princes or oil barons seeking your help to shift their millions, the modern bank scam can be sophisticated, multi-phased and extremely convincing. "We've seen some cases where the fraudster has been talking to somebody for three or four years as someone else before they actually scam them out of a large amount of money," said Brian Dilley, group director for economic crime prevention at Britain's biggest bank Lloyds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Who should police the internet? For some time now the question has tied companies, regulators and campaigners in knots. Social networks spend billions moderating content posted on their platforms, but are still criticized either for not removing enough toxic material or for stifling free speech. They are not the only ones to grapple with the problem. Banks and credit-card companies too are finding themselves playing a bigger role in what is said and done in the public square -- to their, and their customers', discomfort. Now the boundary of censorship is being extended further, into the pornography business. From October 15th adult websites worldwide will have to verify the age and identity of anyone featured in a picture or video, as well as the ID of the person uploading it. They will need to operate a fast complaints process, and will have to review all content before publication. These requirements are being imposed not by regulators but by Mastercard, a credit-card giant. Websites can always choose not to work with Mastercard. But given that the company handles about 30% of all card payments made outside China, to do so would be costly. Visa, which manages a further 60% of payments, is also taking a firmer line on adult sites. And the trend goes beyond porn. In the shadier corners of the web, and in industries where the law is unclear or out of date, financial firms are finding themselves acting as de facto regulators.
[...]
Visa and Mastercard's near-duopoly on card payments makes their decisions more powerful -- and the firms prime targets for protesters. In 2019 SumOfUs, a left-wing pressure group, tabled a proposal at Mastercard's annual meeting meant to stop payments to far-right groups. (The proposal was defeated.) Thirty-four women are suing Visa along with the owners of Pornhub, an adult site which they say hosted unconsenting footage of them. Illegal-porn sites "care a lot more about their finances than they do about the law," says Laila Mickelwait, whose Justice Defense Fund helps sex-abuse victims litigate. And, she adds, when financial firms change their policies it applies globally. Last year Visa and Mastercard cut off Pornhub over its hosting of potentially unlawful material. Payment companies in particular face a philosophical dilemma. "On one hand they try to be very open, accepting, willing to facilitate payments for whomever. They're not taking any sort of political or moral stance," says Lisa Ellis of MoffettNathanson, a research firm. "But on the other hand, they also feel like they have a very strong responsibility in making sure that they're not aiding and abetting any sort of crime."

Visa and Mastercard both say that, as global companies, their guiding principle is local legality. (This can throw up some surprises: one executive recalls being informed by clients from a Scandinavian country that bestiality was legal there at the time.) Things are not always black and white. In 2017, after a far-right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Mastercard shut down the use of its cards on websites that had made "specific threats or incite[d] violence," but kept dealing with other sites labelled hate-groups. "Our standard is whether a merchant's activity is lawful, even when we disagree with what they say or do," the company said at the time. In grey areas they have reason to err on the side of caution. Payment networks' risk of liability tends to be low, since they operate at one remove from the merchants. But being named in a sex-trafficking complaint or accused of helping Nazis does not look good. In working with a borderline adult site, for instance, there's "not a lot of upside and a lot of downside", says Ms Ellis. And in legally tricky areas it can be cheaper to issue a blanket ban than pick through every difficult case. Banks may steer clear of countries that are not embargoed but which have a lot of people on the banned list, "to minimize the burden of determining whether every transaction is compliant," says Jonathan Cross of Herbert Smith Freehills, a law firm. [...] For as long as legislation lags behind, financial institutions will be left in a difficult position: either accused of being the "moral police," as one executive puts it, or of enabling wrongdoing. As Richard Haythornthwaite, then Mastercard's chairman, told the protesters at the firm's annual meeting in 2019: "If it is lawful, then we need to respect that transaction. If it is something that is swimming against the tide of society, it's for the society to rise up and change the law."

Facebook says it will begin clamping down on the illegal sale of protected areas of the Amazon rainforest on its site. From a report: The social media giant changed its policy following a BBC investigation into the practice. The new measures will apply only to conservation areas and not to publicly owned forest. And the move will be limited to the Amazon, not other rainforests and wildlife habitats across the world. According to a recent study from the think tank Ipam (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambental da Amazonia), a third of all deforestation happens in publicly-owned forests in the Amazon. Facebook said it would not reveal how it planned to find the illegal ads but said it would "seek to identify and block new listings" in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. In February, the BBC Our World documentary Selling the Amazon revealed that plots of rainforest as large as 1,000 football pitches were being listed on Facebook's classified ads service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A gang of car thieves used a handheld device disguised as a Nintendo Game Boy to steal vehicles worth $245,000. Dylan Armer, Christopher Bowes and Thomas Poulson stole five Mitsubishi Outlanders by using the gadget to bypass the cars' security systems. West Yorkshire Police said the device, worth $27,000 could unlock and start a car "in a matter of seconds." The trio, all from Yorkshire, were jailed at Leeds Crown Court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to steal. CCTV footage of the theft showed them unplug the car from its charging point before using the device to unlock and start it. When officers stopped the three men they found the Game Boy-style gadget hidden in a secret compartment of their car. Police said footage recovered from Poulson's phone showed him demonstrating "how quickly and easily the gadget gave them full access to the vehicles, accompanied by a commentary in mocking tones." The force added that the "significant investment required to buy one of the sophisticated devices suggested the thefts were planned and orchestrated crimes."

The US Department of Justice has created a team to investigate cryptocurrency-related crime. The Verge reports: The National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) will handle investigations of "crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and money laundering infrastructure actors," the agency said in a news release. Mixing and tumbling services can obscure the source of a cryptocurrency transaction, by mixing it with other funds. Cryptocurrency is "used in a wide variety of criminal activity," including ransomware demand payments, money laundering, and for the illegal sales of drugs, weapons, and malware, the agency noted. Several high-profile ransomware cases have involved demands in cryptocurrency, including the Colonial Pipeline attack in May, where the company reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to DarkSide.

The DOJ says the NCET, which will provide expertise in blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions for the Justice Department and other US government agencies, will draw team members from the DOJ's money laundering, intellectual property, and computer crimes divisions, as well as from US attorneys' offices across the country. The team will be under the supervision of Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. to start, but the Justice Department is seeking to hire someone who has "experience with complex criminal investigations and prosecutions, as well as the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies and the blockchain," on a more permanent basis.

"Tom Voigt, a Zodiac Killer expert and author who runs ZodiacKiller.com, pulls no punches when commenting on the story picked up by FoxNews that is now being posted at various news outlets including Slashdot," writes Slashdot reader ISayWeOnlyToBePolite. Rolling Stone spoke to Voigt on Wednesday about the bombshell report and why, in his opinion, it's "bullshit." From the article: By now obviously you've seen the news about the Zodiac Killer's identification. What's your take on it? Yeah, I've got about a million people on my website right now. It's all bullshit, by the way, just to get that out of the way. This is hot garbage. I don't know why it got any coverage at all. It was basically a press release.

Are you familiar with the Case Breakers? First of all, the funny thing is, I've never heard of any of these people that are these so-called experts. I have been doing this for 25 years and I've never heard of any of them. So that there are some red flags right off the bat. And then the funny thing is, they're matching up lines on foreheads. No witness ever described lines on Zodiac's forehead. Those lines were simply added by the sketch artist to fill in the sketch. The amended sketch, which is supposed to look more like Zodiac, according to witnesses, doesn't really even have any lines. So they got rid of them. So because the witnesses were like, "We're not really happy with that sketch that we gave you a few days ago," they got changed. The lines went away. No witness ever described that.

What about their claim that Poste's name unlocks one of the Zodiac's ciphers? A lot of what they're typing and talking about is nonsense. These people, what I've seen, they don't really have any kind of a command of the basics of the Zodiac case. From what I've read, they've gotten their Zodiac information from the comments section at Facebook. They'd skip the main article and they went right to the comments and they think they know everything about this. Maybe they've saw the Fincher movie, but probably not. Or, they turned it off after the two-hour mark or so.

If you had to put your money on one suspect, who would it be? Richard Gaikowski is my best bet. If I was if I was an employer looking to hire the Zodiac, he'd probably have the most impressive resume in my eyes. But the reality is that Allen is the suspect you just can't quit. I just can't quit that "Big Al," especially now I'm going over all these old emails and tips and leads going back 25 years. And some of the stuff that was that was said to me about about how it is just mind boggling. Yeah. If he wasn't, if he wasn't the Zodiac, he might be responsible for some other murders.

The European Parliament today called for a ban on police use of facial recognition technology in public places, and on predictive policing, a controversial practice that involves using AI tools in hopes of profiling potential criminals before a crime is even committed. Politico reports: In a resolution adopted overwhelmingly in favor, MEPs also asked for a ban on private facial recognition databases, like the ones used by the controversial company Clearview AI. The Parliament also supports the European Commission's attempt in its AI bill to ban social scoring systems, such as the ones launched by China that rate citizens' trustworthiness based on their behavior.

The non-biding resolution sends a strong signal on how the Parliament is likely to vote in upcoming negotiations of the AI Act. The European Commission's proposal of the bill restricts the use of remote biometric identification -- including facial recognition technology -- in public places unless it is to fight "serious" crime, such as kidnappings and terrorism. The AI Act's lead negotiator, Brando Benifei and almost all of his co-negotiators from other political groups in the Parliament have called for a blanket ban on facial recognition. This is in stark contrast to policies implemented in some EU member countries, who are keen to use these technologies to bolster their security apparatuses.

Evolved Apes is described on NFT marketplace OpenSea as "a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land." They are "fighting for survival, only the strongest ape will prevail," it says, referring to the project's much-hyped fighting game, which has not materialized. From a report: A week after the project launch, the anonymous developer known as Evil Ape who promised that game, vanished along with the project's official Twitter account and website. But they left traces behind on the blockchain that shows they siphoned 798 ether ($2.7 million) out of the project's funds in multiple transfers. The funds, derived from the initial public sale of NFTs and commissions on the secondary market, were meant for project-related expenses like marketing.

Evolved Ape investors noticed several red flags leading up to Evil Ape's rug pull. After the public sale on September 24, the announcements seemed suspiciously unprofessional and several of the leaders were not around anymore, one investor who requested anonymity due to the ongoing fallout from the scam told Motherboard. But they chalked it down to lack of experience at the time. "I don't think this giant storm was ever what was expected," the investor said. According to Mike_Cryptobull, who did not share their real name due to their standing in the community, the Evolved Apes community discovered that the social-media competition winners (a marketing activity to create buzz) hadn't received their NFT prizes from the project, and the artist hadn't been paid either.

Ukrainian police have reportedly arrested two members of a ransomware gang -- and while some have fingered REvil, no firm details have been published by cops from multiple countries. The Register reports: A round of speculation was triggered when inter-EU law enforcement body Europol declared this morning that Ukrainian fuzz had arrested "two prolific ransomware operators known for their extortionate demands," claimed to be up to [$81.3 million]. One of the two suspects arrested on September 28, according to the National Police of Ukraine, was a "hacker." The other allegedly "helped to withdraw money obtained by criminal means." $1.3m in cryptocurrency was said to have been frozen. A multinational police operation with input from France's National Gendarmerie and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation helped lead the Ukraine cops to their targets, with support from Europol and Interpol.

The 25-year-old suspect allegedly deployed "virus software," compromising remote-working software, with one attack vector being "through spam-mailings on corporate e-mail boxes of malicious content." "In total, the hacker attacked more than 100 foreign companies in North America and Europe," said the Ukrainian police, adding that they blamed the 25-year-old arrestee for causing $150m of damage to Western organizations. [...] Numerous people speculated on Twitter that the latest Ukrainian arrests were members of the REvil ransomware gang. This was based solely on Europol's claim that the two main accused had once issued an "extortionate" [$81.3 million] ransom demand, which has not been repeated by cops in Ukraine. REvil once issued a ransom demand for $70 millionagainst managed service provider Kaseya) but that is not the same sum...

The Guardian reports on "a new breed of scambaiters...taking over TikTok and YouTube."

And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. "Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds," reports the Guardian: For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on — scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you've recently been in a car accident you somehow don't recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. "I waste their time," she explains, "and now they're not stealing from someone's grandma...."

Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500... Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother's account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she'd called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer's time. "My computer's giving me the worst vibes," she began in Kim Kardashian's voice. "Are you in front of your computer right now?" asked the scammer. "Yeah, well it's in front of me, is that... that's like the same thing?" Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

"A lot of it is entertainment — it's funny, it's fun to do, it makes people happy," she says when asked why she scambaits. "But I also get a few emails a day saying, 'Oh, thank you so much, if it weren't for that video, I would've lost $1,500.'" Okumura isn't naive — she knows she can't stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. "I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail...."
The Guardian also describes Jim Browning, a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who's been posting scambaiting videos for seven years. "Browning regularly gets access to scammers' computers and has even managed to hack into the closed-circuit TV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the 'relevant authorities' including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers...."

And they also tell the story of an American software engineer who joined with friends to convince a scammer he'd been offered a high-paying job — only to end up stranded in Laos after paying for a 600-miles flight.

"He was crying... that was the one where I was like, 'Ah, maybe I'm taking things a little too far.'"

"Cyber criminals using a ransomware-as-a-service scheme have been spotted complaining that the group they rent the malware from could be using a hidden backdoor to grab ransom payments for themselves," reports ZDNet: REvil is one of the most notorious and most common forms of ransomware around and has been responsible for several major incidents. The group behind REvil lease their ransomware out to other crooks in exchange for a cut of the profits these affiliates make by extorting Bitcoin payments in exchange for the ransomware decryption keys that the victims need. But it seems that cut isn't enough for those behind REvil: it was recently disclosed that there's a secret backdoor coded into their product, which allows REvil to restore the encrypted files without the involvement of the affiliate. This could allow REvil to takeover negotiations with victims, hijack the so-called "customer support" chats — and steal the ransom payments for themselves.

Analysis of underground forums by cybersecurity researchers at Flashpoint suggests that the disclosure of the REvil backdoor hasn't gone down well with affiliates. One forum user claimed to have had suspicions of REvil's tactics, and said their own plans to extort $7 million from a victim was abruptly ended. They believe that one of the REvil authors took over the negotiations using the backdoor and made off with the money.

Mexico's scientific community has reacted with outrage after the country's chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for 31 scientists, researchers and academics on accusations of organised crime, money laundering and embezzlement -- charges that could land them alongside drug cartel kingpins in one of the country's most notorious lockups. From a report: A judge at the maximum security Altiplano prison -- from which Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped in 2015 -- denied granting the arrest warrants on Wednesday. But the federal prosecutor immediately announced plans to pursue arrest warrants for the third time. The university professors have been accused of violating a law that prevents members of an advisory board from receiving money from a government science fund. But that law was passed in 2019, and the scientists got the $2.5m years earlier when it was apparently legal. Those involved have denied the funds were illegal or misused. The National Council on Science and Technology (Conacyt) has described the reaction to the arrest warrant applications as "a concerted wave of disinformation," which was spreading "terror" in the scientific community.

Federal prosecutors allege that Elizabeth Holmes and the No. 2 at Theranos, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, "broke the law by deceiving investors about how well the business was doing and the capabilities of its testing machines, in addition to allegedly providing false or flawed test results to patients," reports NPR.

But they add that in Silicon Valley, the trial has launched this debate. "Since Holmes was following a playbook used by dozens of tech CEOs, why is she the only one to face prosecution when a company becomes engulfed in a scandal?" To Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, who is a vocal critic of gender discrimination in tech, sexism is partially to blame. "When you see which CEOs get to continue to wreak havoc on consumers and the market, it's people who look like the venture capitalists, who are mostly white men," Pao said. She points to Adam Neumann, who drove WeWork into the ground; former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal; and Juul's Kevin Burns, who stepped down amid questions over the company's role in stoking the youth vaping epidemic. There were lawsuits, settlements and more fallout — but notably, Pao points out, no criminal prosecutions.

"That all these people continue to lead their lives and not be held accountable for all the harm that they've caused, it does send a message," she said.

Former prosecutors who have tried white-collar crime say there are several reasons why Holmes stands out among disgraced tech CEOs. First, the allegedly fraudulent behavior was egregious: Holmes told the world she had a miracle machine that would upend laboratory science. Prosecutors say, compared with her claims, the technology barely did anything at all. Mark MacDougall, a former federal prosecutor who focused on fraud cases in the U.S. Justice Department, said Theranos' being a biotech company raised the stakes. "It allows the government to contend, with some evidence, that the health of private citizens, the health of innocent people, was put at risk," MacDougall said. Another reason Holmes was charged, according to former prosecutors, was that the government says it obtained evidence that she acted intentionally, which can be difficult to establish in fraud cases.
Prosecutors now plan to show Holmes "knowingly and intentionally" defrauded investors and patients, "something her defense team says is false," the article points out. "Proving that Holmes is guilty will turn on demonstrating her intent, since exaggerating a product's potential, missing financial forecasts and running a secretive company do not constitute federal crimes."

Pao's argument is that Holmes "was encouraged by the high-risk, high-reward culture of venture capital. That said, Pao said she is not defending Holmes, saying her behavior warranted prosecution."

"At the same time, Pao wants a broader discussion in Silicon Valley about why other CEOs accused of wrongdoing have not faced criminal consequences."

"Federal prosecutors plan to criminally charge a former Boeing Co. pilot they suspect of misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 Max," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."

Mark Forkner, who was Boeing's 737 Max chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, is likely to face prosecution in the coming weeks, these people said... Boeing BA, admitted in a criminal settlement reached with prosecutors earlier this year that two of its employees — unnamed in that agreement — conspired to defraud the FAA about 737 Max training issues in order to benefit themselves and the company.
CBS News offers more details: It would, says the Journal, "be the first attempt to hold a Boeing employee accountable" for conduct before the two crashes. [Forkner] was the lead contact between the aviation giant and the Federal Aviation Administration over how pilots should be trained to fly the planes, the Journal said. According to documents published in early 2020, Forkner withheld details about the planes' faulty flight handling system known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — later blamed for both crashes — from regulators.

The Journal said it wasn't clear what charges Forkner would face... A lawyer for Forkner, David Gerger, didn't respond to requests for comment Thursday from the Journal. Gerger has said in the past that Forkner, a pilot and Air Force veteran, wouldn't put pilots or passengers in danger.

The Guardian tells the story of "a viral sensation in the global underworld," the high-security An0m phones, which launched with "a grassroots marketing campaign, identifying so-called influencers — 'well-known crime figures who wield significant power and influence over other criminal associates', according to a US indictment — within criminal subcultures." An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet.

Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone's calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled...

[U]sers could set an option to wipe the phone's data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker's voice. An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid...

An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 — 19.37m of them — had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.

On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world....
Law enforcement agencies ultimately saw An0m as a creative workaround for unbreakable encryption, according to the Guardian. "Why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?"

The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"

Jay Leiderman, a California defense attorney known for his whistleblower advocacy and defense of political dissidents and hackers, was confirmed dead in Ventura County on Thursday. He was 50 years old. From a report: Dubbed the "Hacktivist's Advocate" by The Atlantic in 2012, Leiderman gained national attention for his pro-bono work for clients accused of crashing corporate and government websites, including members of the group Anonymous. They were rarely good cases.

Leiderman's hacking clients had a nagging habit of openly admitting to the things they were accused of doing. One spent a decade fleeing authorities in several countries, giving interviews, all the while on the lam. (The client was just captured in June.) Still, their causes struck a chord with the Queens-born attorney, who'd long held to a rebellious legal philosophy. After a city in California passed a law criminalizing homelessness, the same client knocked one of its websites offline for half an hour. Where the FBI saw a felony computer crime worth up to 15 years in prison, Leiderman saw a peaceful protest against an unjust law -- a protest, he noted, that caused no perceptible harm.