Criminal investment schemes

June 4, 2004 12:12 AM

In many movies, criminals will invest large sums of money into a scheme (technology, gear, etc.) in order to steal more money. Does this happen in real life?
posted by drezdn to Law & Government (6 answers total)

Wired has published several stories like this, about how the mob is involved in all sorts of high tech scams that involve programmer teams and all the trappings of a startup. They have the money and can make more money with it, there's no reason why they wouldn't get into the technical field.

I know you're probably asking if mobsters really spend $100k on high tech cars and disguises and not just software, but I have no reason to doubt it.
posted by mathowie at 12:35 AM on June 4, 2004

Yes. Tony Soprano might still be involved in peddling Vespas and running the Bada Bing but there are plenty of organised gangs out there involved in the tech field. However, they don't need large sums of money for what they're currently up to. There are plenty of highly skilled coders out in Eastern Europe and Russia not earning much who may decide to work for a gang who are out to blackmail online bookmakers with DDoS threats (happens all the time), crack into databases, or set up some phishing web sites to grab your credit card details and bank accounts. You don't need a lot of money for this... Some, but not a great deal.
posted by humuhumu at 4:54 AM on June 4, 2004

Response by poster: I'm also wondering about setups such as Ocean's 11 and the Italian Job, where the criminals had to buy cars and- in general- put a lot of money into the project.
posted by drezdn at 9:37 AM on June 4, 2004

In the spirit of the link Matt provided, here's a great article from Business 2.0 about South American drug lords' IT--oops, I just went to find a juicy quote and discovered Business2.0 locks up the full text of their articles from non-subscribers. Fortunately, Google and people's propensity to ignore copyright save the day.
$1.5M IBM servers to cross-reference personal info on everyone involved and sift out the narcs, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on encrypted Motorola communicators, a real-life web-based version of the DrugWars game, radar maps, $10M submarines that can travel 2,000 miles, these guys have it all. Choice quote:

The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it
are American-trained. High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs -- and is a major reason that cocaine shipments to the United States from Colombia hit an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998, according to the Colombian navy.

posted by jbrjake at 12:15 PM on June 4, 2004

Lufthansa Heist.

Conrail Boyz.

North Hollywood Shootout [video].

Antwerp Diamond Center Heist.

Enron.
posted by dhartung at 12:33 AM on June 5, 2004

One of the more interesting aspects of efforts like Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia are that the principals would not admit to be criminals or behaving in a criminal manner whereas real mobsters have no such trouble (as long as the admission is not in a forum where it could be used to put them in jail).
posted by billsaysthis at 12:07 PM on June 5, 2004