Long and Short Business Cons by Singaporeans and their corrupt counterparts

[PNGMK]

Continuing the same vein as money laundering but focusing on commercial cons and not just average street cons. An area that fascinates me. My neighbor is a convicted conman so I'll start with his con:

1. Fake prawn/fish/plantations. You hire a hotel room, get hold of a good mailing list and set it up. Wine and dine the shit out of the patrons multiple times and sell them a prawn farm in Indonesia or Malaysia. Sure it's real but they never own it. According to my neighbor you don't cut and run, you keep claiming issues with it for such a long time your mark gives up and writes it off. He got caught and bankrupted and now his property is in his daughters name but whatever.

2. Fake invoicing. This method was pretty common in the 80's when I moved here. ACRA and MAS have wiped it out. You send invoices in company names similar to real ones ("Singtal") hoping a % get paid, as bank account control was not that strong in the 80's you have a company account set up the same. A variation is to create fake business services (like a yellow pages) but it never gets printed. I swear I think this is how "Green Book" started.

3. Agency remuneration. This is a classic. You come across a legitimate business field that needs equipment from a company overseas. You get the agency. You work it fine but you gradually convince the supplier to send the goods unpaid (back-back financing) while you wait for the payments. You work the buyer end to convince them to place a HUGE order in one shot (say 500 fire trucks instead of 50) for a discount. You then take their payment, get the firetrucks shipped but never pay the manufacturer for them. You duck and run. Worse still if you can double sell the fire trucks on to someone else. I know someone several million better off for that deal.

4. Bunkerage siphoning. A business I came across here claims that ships routinely lose 20% of their bunkerage to pilferage on a voyage. That's enough to kill their profit margin. The guys interrupt the engine feed and fill drums and dump them overboard to be picked up by their cohorts.

Online research has helped kill a lot of these old schools ones off but of course the internet has brought it's own challenges.

[brian_singapore]

Modern day variation on item 2 and one of the most common types of payment fraud:

Send an account number request change to a large company in the name of one of their suppliers. Then wait for them to make a payment into that supplier (but into your account)....

[PNGMK]

Yes of course Brian. Also insiders at the company giving conmen copies of invoices to cop and submit with new bank instructions. Our Indo agent lost 400k that way a few years back.

[Strong Eagle]

Screw job that happened to me and my company in bidding for complete IT infrastructure cabling for new buildings going up for a local uni:

Prepared comprehensive design, work plan, and costs... a 100 page proposal. Next thing you know, the job is awarded to another company. In reviewing the winning bid we discovered that 85 percent of the bid was an exact duplicate of the proposal we wrote... names changed, $$$ amounts a bit lower... pretty clear that the client passed off our proposal... which they really liked... to their buddies... which they liked even better.

[Barnsley]

Screw job that happened to me and my company in bidding for complete IT infrastructure cabling for new buildings going up for a local uni:

Prepared comprehensive design, work plan, and costs... a 100 page proposal. Next thing you know, the job is awarded to another company. In reviewing the winning bid we discovered that 85 percent of the bid was an exact duplicate of the proposal we wrote... names changed, $$$ amounts a bit lower... pretty clear that the client passed off our proposal... which they really liked... to their buddies... which they liked even better.

You're saying the No.1 business country in the world has some underhand things going on that gets friends of friends a leg up??

Surely not!!

[PNGMK]

Yeah reusing your bid docs suck. We try to watermark them and submit them in printed form (makes it harder to whole sale send them out digitally) but often the tender specs prevent that. We also have our own font and RGB color set which we have used to detect piracy and theft of IP including tender docs, product manuals and the like; smarter thieves check for that (although Chinese company just whole sale cut and paste including the font AND color).

Another way is to insert the occasional fictitious words or specific technical words that only exist in your company (the "fritzensparkermachinen") provided it doesn't risk blowing up the bid.

Even when you have these traps and catch the mfkr thieves will your legal dept take action? No but it gives you reason to call them thieving bastards in the bid meetings.