[00:00:00] In my research for scams and cons, I often come across stories that are interesting but don't have all the elements needed for a full episode. But that doesn't mean they aren't good stories, so this final episode of season 4 is entitled Bits and Pieces.
[00:00:33] These are three stories with no common thread, except they're interesting and fool thousands. Whiskey in general, particularly malt whiskies and vintage malt whiskies in the last few years at auctions have been getting increasingly more valuable and prices are going up all the time.
[00:00:50] It's a problem now that as more money comes into whiskey then certainly on the secondary market, the auction market, then more fake bottles appear. Now it's common for some genuinely old bottles to fetch thousands of pounds at auction, some even tens of thousands.
[00:01:04] But there are fakers out there buying empty antique bottles and refilling them with a modern liquid. And as a result, collectors up and down the country are getting duped into buying what they think is a bottle of liquid history.
[00:01:18] Turns out to be nothing more than a worthless fake. Imagine you've just spent $7,500 for a bottle of 20 year old Peppy Van Winkle. If you bought it for an investment, what you could have purchased was simply a very expensive bottle of swill.
[00:01:50] Maybe in a few years someone will buy you an open bottle for a higher price but then they could be stuck with a bogus bottle as well. If you open it to test it, it immediately loses its value because it's no longer sealed.
[00:02:08] With the popularity of bourbon and other whiskies, fraud is on the rise. eBay can provide you an ample supply of empty bottles that once contained higher sought after whiskey. Those who trade in expensive whiskies say those bottles are nearly always refilled with a cheap
[00:02:30] liquor covered with a new plastic seal and put up for sale at perhaps 200 times what the scammer invested for the bottle. In New Jersey, investigators for the Attorney General's office found that some bottles of high priced booze was laced with river water or rubbing alcohol.
[00:02:56] The investigators named their sting Operation Swill. More than one dozen of the bars are owned by a TGI Fridays franchisee. Investigators found out about the scheme through informants and customer complaints. Then they used a new piece of technology to scan the booze to find out if it was
[00:03:17] 100 proof. There are 7,200 bars with liquor licenses in New Jersey and there's no telling how many others are pulling this scam. The AG's office tells us the scam could include more than 20 different types of top shelf liquors. So, what's the penalty here?
[00:03:33] This is a regulatory offense, not a criminal one so we're probably looking at lost or suspended liquor licenses, not jail time. That was New Jersey 12 reporting. The problem isn't limited to bourbon. The Scotch industry is also targeted.
[00:03:49] The Voice of America says a university in St. Andrews has come up with a way to determine whether the whiskey or sipping is the real deal. Scientists here have developed a pocket-sized test to see if a particular batch of whiskey is fake. Here's how it works.
[00:04:04] One of the scientists, Praveen Ashok, places just a drop of the whiskey in a tiny ridge on the glass. A laser beam shines through the sample and a computer sensor linked to the glass says immediately whether it recognizes the sample or not. This one is genuine.
[00:04:21] Try it again by diluting it with water and the computer warns it's fake. Whiskey is a multi-billion dollar business. The famous brands are expensive to buy and lucrative to try to fake. Industry representative Campbell Evans says counterfeiting is a big threat.
[00:04:39] Scotch whiskey can only be made in Scotland and it's vitally important to protect the industry so you don't find fakes appearing around the world because somebody buys a fake product and doesn't like it, they may never buy the genuine article ever again.
[00:04:52] We have five in-house lawyers whose job is to stop anybody who puts brown liquor in the bottle and pretends it's whiskey when it's not and we can have up to 70 court cases on the go at any one time. The BBC did its own investigation.
[00:05:05] The good news is that there are ways of uncovering a fake without destroying its value. You give me a couple of examples. We've got here a few McCallums. This one here, we know this is a fake but to the outward eye it looks okay,
[00:05:20] you know the untrained eye might just see that and think yeah it's butler whiskey, it's butler McCallum, it's fine. But for an eagle-eyed auctioneer like Angus there are a few telltale signs that the bottle's been refilled.
[00:05:31] First of all the capsule looks pretty shoddy, it looks like it's been reworked to some extent. That's a really telltale sign because normally on capsules it should be very tight, very clean. The capsule is a piece of plastic or foil placed over the stopper.
[00:05:46] Plastic is tightened with a hot air blow gun. Capsules are difficult but specialized machinery does the job better and more precisely than by hand. Give it a shake, you get this froth that just sits there.
[00:06:01] The froth or beading as it's known in the trade indicates how strong the liquid inside the whiskey bottle is. But when Angus compares the real one to the fake it's pretty obvious which is which. You give them both a shake and you notice immediately the differences.
[00:06:18] The beading here dies down in concurrence with a 43% alcohol whiskey. This, who knows maybe it's single cast washing up liquid I don't know but it's not the real deal. Being a fake it's worth a couple of quid at most. If it was genuine it would fetch around 700 pounds.
[00:06:35] But the effect is not just on the price of the whiskey. In the last few years Angus has noticed as the number of fake refilled bottles has gone up so has the price for genuine empty bottles.
[00:06:49] Here's an empty bottle of McCallan Private Eye which is being sold online and the price that's being asked is £199. 200 quid for an empty bottle does seem a touch steep but if you scroll through the elaborate photo gallery and description you'll find a rather interesting sales pitch.
[00:07:08] Bottle is empty, £1500 when full, check out Bonham's auction or something. If you click the link, lo and behold you'll find a recent sale at auction where a full bottle fetched £1,500. It's clear that they know what somebody buys it's probably going to do with it.
[00:07:25] Refill it, £199 buys you an empty one and if you've got the means to refill it and reseal it then there's definite motivation there for people to go and fake the bottle and make money on it. Terrible.
[00:07:39] Perhaps the best way to make money on possibly fake whiskey is to have a buyer already lined up before you make your purchase and hope they don't want to test its provenance. There are some blissful times when we don't hear from telephone scammers or
[00:07:54] email trolls then there are times when we just can't get away from them. If the housing market is strong they want to buy your house. If open enrollment for Medicare is coming up they'll drive you nuts
[00:08:08] and if it's tax time, why do they have ways of saving you money? Most of it comes from knowing your age, how housing sales are in your community or some other type of public information that helps them target you. Or you could be on a sucker list.
[00:08:25] What happens unfortunately is when people respond to scam mail so a fictitious lottery or a fake prize draw their details are then sold on to other scam companies. So if you respond to one letter generally what will end up happening is
[00:08:38] you'll start receiving more and more and more posts. So we can't actually track how far and wide it's gone. So it's always a case of don't respond to these letters, don't share your personal details because otherwise they will actually get sold on to other criminals.
[00:08:51] That's Louise Baxter who heads the National Trading Standards Scams Team. Think of these lists like catalog companies think of you as a customer. The more you buy the more catalogs they send you hoping you'll buy more.
[00:09:05] If you don't buy anything for a period of time the number of catalogs decreases but you'll still get one occasionally just to see if you're still interested in their products. But what about those phone calls and emails you get from people or companies you've never done business with?
[00:09:20] What's that about? It means at some point you were a sucker. CBS 11 and Fort Worth explored how sucker lists work and how people on them increase their chances of being scammed. The alleged Amazon agent acted as if he wanted to help her get her money back.
[00:09:39] He said I need you to download this app so we can get the money transferred back to you. He also asked her to open her bank account app and Western Union. That's when red flags went up. When he realized I wasn't going to download Western Union
[00:09:55] he became very angry, very agitated. Oh no, no, no ma'am don't hang up. Let me get my account manager to talk to you so we can get this transaction completed. Fortunately, Minnify did hang up but unfortunately she also moved up one tier on this pyramid.
[00:10:17] The Federal Trade Commission says this year alone fraudsters have sent nearly 14,000 fake Apple or Amazon emails and phone messages phishing for your personal information. The scammers claim there is an unauthorized purchase or suspicious activity on your account.
[00:10:34] To cancel your order or to connect with one of our customer support representatives. Consumers who call back or press 1 confirm their email or phone number and move up one step. But in a stroke of poetic justice it appears the scammers are scamming each other
[00:10:52] and are selling fake lists among themselves. Fake websites on the dark web offer scammers a chance to buy sucker lists, lists of credit card numbers, phone numbers and more. If scammers discover they purchased a fake list
[00:11:20] there isn't much they can do about it because what they were doing was illegal to begin with. But even thieves seek justice. They have organized their own forums to call the fraudsters out and warn other scammers.
[00:11:36] Sophos, a cybersecurity firm, did a search of the dark web to see what techniques were being used. The company followed three separate cybercrime forums, two Russian speaking ones and one English speaking. Sophos found all three have arbitration rooms
[00:11:57] some of the world's most infamous ransomware groups are being mentioned suggesting even the superstars of scamming could be scammed themselves. The company found roughly 600 scams that cost scammers more than $2.5 million. Some claims were as much as $160,000.
[00:12:22] There are other forums where scammers can take their complaints about other scammers. Arbitrators there want proof of the fraud in order to ban bad actors. But as with scammers who've been caught by police criminals just come up with new websites and begin work again.
[00:12:42] Sometimes that work includes giving a scammer sucker a fake file with information or secured network links so the data can be downloaded. However, that link often includes malware that now robs data from the client scammers computer. Not even scammers are safe from each other.
[00:13:06] By this point in my life I was supposed to have a jet pack. SyFy predicted this. I would step out of my garage wearing my pack, slowly lift into the sky and be off to wherever I wanted to go.
[00:13:21] Sure there are jet packs but they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and as you just heard they're noisy. Very noisy. Still that doesn't mean there aren't goofballs out there flying around in them. That's how we're American 1997. We just passed a guy in a jet pack.
[00:13:39] Then another jet pack sighting moments later from a Southwest pilot. That was how it was connected to. We just saw the guys pass by us. Jet packs like this one from LA based jet pack aviation are not common.
[00:13:51] Only a handful of companies in the world make them and they are not commercially available. The company says their technology was not involved. Jet pack aviation CEO confirmed to CBS News he has been in touch with the FAA about the technology
[00:14:03] but says their aircraft does not have enough fuel to get a person to 3,000 feet and back to the ground safely. Adding they are loud so it seems unlikely no one on the ground would notice it taking off, flying or landing.
[00:14:16] And then there's this from the air traffic controller. Deplied 23, use custom. Person in the jet pack reported 300 yards south of the LA final at about 3,000 feet. The FAA and the FAA say they believe what the pilot saw was a balloon,
[00:14:31] which is the typical response when no one knows what the heck was in the sky. They said it could also be a balloon designed to look like a person. But about two weeks later,
[00:14:42] the FAA says a China Airlines crew from Taiwan reported what appeared to be a jet pack, flying around 6,000 feet about seven miles from LAX yesterday. Other planes in the area did not spot the unknown object,
[00:14:54] but the FAA and FBI are investigating similar sightings near LAX in late August. There, two pilots on separate flights saw what they described as a person wearing a jet pack, flying near their airliners. It's not clear what was actually seen or if there's any link between these incidents.
[00:15:10] Jet packs are actually a real thing, but only a few companies make them. After the first reports, the CEO of Jet Pack Aviation in LA told us it would be nearly impossible for someone to fly a jet pack thousands of feet up and get back down safely.
[00:15:23] They're also not commercially available, very expensive and very noisy, so it's unlikely somebody could take off and land in densely populated Los Angeles and no one would see it. And of course, Iron Man zipping around LA would certainly light up social media.
[00:15:35] Then Fox 11 in Los Angeles thought it stumbled upon the answer. A mystery in the skies one step closer to being solved. Fox 11 has obtained a photo and video from the LAPD of one of the sightings that sparked an FBI investigation.
[00:15:51] Now a year later, police say what was thought to be a man flying in the flight path of LAX was actually floating and was a Jack Skellington balloon, the character from the kids movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. Whatever it was, it made for great TV
[00:16:07] and the story reached tens of thousands of people through reporters who know a good story when they hear one, even if they never see it for themselves. If you enjoy the podcast and want to support it, please consider doing so via Patreon.
[00:16:23] For just $10 a month, you'll help us keep the light song so we can continue to create great content for you. You can sign up at patreon.com, that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com, then search for scams and cons. There'll be a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
[00:16:42] Hi, this is Amy and Vanessa from She Goes By Jane where we shine light on the stories of missing and unidentified women. On November 7th, we're sharing Nahida's story for the first time in a podcast. And this is a story that I thought I knew,
[00:16:54] but after reading police reports, became more complicated than I thought. When investigators are called to Nahida Koteb's house, everything looks fine. Her purse is on the kitchen table, her cup of coffee is on the counter and her two-year-old niece is in her playpen.
[00:17:06] The only thing I miss, Nahida is missing. Every week we feature a poem written in honor of the person we're talking about. This week we're joined by one of our favorite actresses. You might know her from Sister Act or King of the Hill or The Descendants.
[00:17:18] But if you're like us, you'll know her from Hocus Pocus. She's the much-beloved Kathy Najimi. Join us November 7th to hear Nahida's story.