On Demand

I was scrambling at the end of my work day. I had some data testing to finish up. It was taking me longer than necessary. This exaggerated timeline was purposeful. It allowed me to finalize the data for Mother.

I was finally able to aggregate the Bulgarian data Mother was looking for. I saved it to disc, sent an email to my boss, and headed out the door.

I had to get to Blockbuster. Mother placed a contact there. Between 5 and 5:15, the contact’s co-worker would be out on break. Given her pack a day habit, it was a pretty safe bet they’d be out back.

I pulled up a few minutes after the turn of the hour, and dropped off season 6 of 24 in the return bin, and left without talking to anyone. The third disc of the season, to an outsider, would look like any other burned compact disc. It will even play a forty five minute mix if someone played it. Encrypted, though, was a dossier detailing the ins and outs of the Bulgarian operation. It looked as if someone had mistakenly returned the wrong disc. My contact would swap this out with an actual 24 DVD and forward the information to Mother later on.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Majenta Feeling Taken Shelter In Base Of My Spine

This corporate gig has kept me working pretty hard recently. The only positives I see from this whole work thing are the pay check and the fact that the café stocks Cherry Coke Zero.

I’ve managed to profile our customer population into groups that may have been impacted by the Bulgarian credit card squeeze. Of the millions upon millions of accounts we have, I could immediately dismiss the ones that don’t owe anything. From there, it was a matter of modeling transaction behavior to determine who is involved in the Bulgarian scheme.

I segmented the population into buckets of accounts based upon the modeled probability that they were impacted. Before sending the file of leads to Mother for review, I discussed the separation logic I used to create the statistical stratification. Because some of the variables I incorporated weren’t the most operationally identifiable, I need to go back in and tweak it a bit.

More snow is expected again tonight. Next time I’m requesting assignment somewhere significantly warmer.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Top Of The List

As you know, because I mentioned it, everything you do within corporate walls is being monitored. They may not necessarily be actively monitored, but there’s a good chance if you do something quirky it’ll ring a few bells in corporate security or wind up on some monthly report. These are good ways to draw attention, and attention is not good.

But, one of the attributes that makes many banks strong also opens up holes in their information defenses. The banking industry has been consolidating recently. Often the newly acquired institutions are more likely to be Velcro’d on to the mother ship then they are to be assimilated. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the technology cost, in both dollars and human capital, required to reconfigure the entire IT infrastructure each time another chip is added to the stack.

This means that analysts, like yours truly, are forced to navigate through a myriad of differing types of servers and databases to get to the information we need to make business decisions. While this is cumbersome when completing day to day tasks, it makes it easier for someone to run database queries and hide their covert data gathering agendas. One of easiest ways to do this is to have your code reference a macro located on your desktop. When your code finishes, erase the macro and it becomes very, very hard for someone to go back into your query and figure out what it did. They’ll see the macro referenced, but have no idea what its function is. This is akin to reading a novel’s sequel without reading the predecessor. Sure you can generally follow what’s going on, but you’re definitely not getting as much out of the story as you could be.

This morning Mother sent me a partial business name: ‘Pinnacle.’ This company had become involved the Bulgarian extortion scheme. All I knew was that the company’s name started with Pinnacle and it was located in Florida.

Here’s the short version:

Step 1: From database A, pull all records where the first eight characters of the business name were ‘Pinnacle,’ along with some firmographic information. This brought back hundreds of businesses.
Step 2: From database B, pull all business names located in Florida. This brought back thousands upon thousands of businesses.
Step 3: Move the datasets created in Step 1 and 2 into temp space, giving them different names, so they would be automatically deleted when I signed off.
Step 4: Determine which companies are located on both of the datasets. This brought back a handful of companies, six to be exact.
Step 5: Convert this dataset to a comma delimited text file and download it the Recycle Bin on my desktop.
Step 6: Copy the dataset, but rename it when I upload it back to database A.
Step 7: Append a junk dataset, one copied from a coworker’s directory, containing a few thousand records, to the end of it.
Step 8: Download this back to my desktop in the form of a comma delimited text file, renamed to something else of course.
Step 9: From database C, pull all companies that completed a cash advance on their credit cards within the past 12 months.
Step 10: Determine which of these companies matched with the six companies I identified in Step 4. Luckily, there was only one match. Memorize the account number.
Step 11: From database D, pull credit bureau data from the credit card application, but create the search parameters wide enough so that I would capture the one account as well as a lot of other extraneous noise.
Step 12: Move this dataset, in comma delimited text file format, to temp space. Do I even need to say ‘and rename the dataset’ at this point?
Step 13: Import the dataset from temp space into an access database. Sort data by account number, and locate Pinnacle Travel Enterprises by manually scrolling down until the account number is found.
Step 14: Send email on personal BlackBerry to Mother giving, among other things, the name, social security number, home and cell phone numbers, online banking logon ID, and mailing address of the primary card holder.
Step 15: When cleaning up your electronic paper trail, do not just delete your datasets, save over them first with something benign. Then delete them. I'll save my macros for when I really need them.
Step 16: Dial into next conference call and act like nothing happened.

See, pretty easy.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Please Press "0" To Speak To The Next Mobster

I’ve been able to make a few observations about the Bulgarian banking operations. It seems as if they’re collecting a form of street tax from small business owners, but doing it through the financial system as a means of disconnecting the cash flows directly from the victims’ accounts to theirs as well as reducing the short term impact on those they’re robbing.

The crooks are targeting their victims either by brute force, or or by crafting business relationships that they can leverage. Once they have someone to squeeze, they pull cash out of the business. However, instead of directly extracting cash from the bottom line, it looks like they’re forcing the business owners to take cash advances out on their credit cards. Ironically enough, this helps the business owner because they don’t have to fight a large initial cash outflow. Instead, their obligation to the financial institution is the small monthly minimum payment. This keeps the business operational for as long as possible, though saddled with immense debt, so when the credit card balances are paid down, the Bulgarians force the owners to advance more cash.

The economy is both helping the Bulgarians in this regard. From the bank’s perspective, it’s almost impossible to tell which businesses are impacted by the Bulgarians versus which businesses are just increasing debt levels as a result of macro economic conditions. This gives the Bulgarians some additional operational cover. However, to their detriment, banks are protecting themselves from losses by cutting available, unused credit lines. This severely diminishes the amount of cash they can pull from business owners. The Bulgarians are effectively extorting less cash, but they’re doing it without as much risk of getting caught.

Mother’s concern is that if the cash trickles to a point where Bulgarian public officials aren’t being greased enough to continue cooperation, there will be retribution against the business owners.

While I don’t think this is the only angle the Bulgarians are playing, at least I’ve found some activity to investigate.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Shoulders, Toes, Head and Knees

I’m working from home today. This doesn’t mean merely monitoring my emails while watching TV in case I’m asked a question. Rather, I’ve been quite busy – analytical follow-ups from a senior leadership roundtable, ongoing segmentation analysis and an ad hoc data pull to profile a highly performing portfolio segment. Unfortunately, all of this work hasn’t left time to identify and locate the Bulgarian corruption influence. While the delay is necessary to keep my corporate cover story, Mother will not be pleased.

I finally took a shower during my lunch break. I have a ‘shower routine.’ Mine’s not as bad as this guy’s, though. First, it’s shampoo, then body wash, and lastly, a facial scrub. Today, for some reason, I body washed first. This obviously isn’t a huge deal, but it proved to me that I’m not thinking clearly. Routines and checklists save lives. If I let the simple things go awry, what else am I susceptible to?

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

All Of Them, Please

Today was uneventful, which is good because that means no one took a shot at me. Let’s see, there were a few conference calls, marginal progress tracking down the Bulgarian money, and a fresh hair cut, which was free due to one of those ‘buy 9 and get the 10th free’ type deals.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Lunch Specials

I slept in this morning. It felt good. I wouldn’t have thought that sitting at a desk all day for a week would make me so tired. Or, perhaps, it could have been the bourbon.

I met Treasa for lunch. We took a small table near the middle of the restaurant. She selected the seat facing the door. This made me a little uncomfortable so I forced myself to conclude that any threats would have to come from the kitchen.

After lunch, we stopped for a Guinness. I’ll spend tonight researching Bulgarian backgrounds, watching the end of the second season of 24, and watching some football.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

Nine to Five

As of today, I’m a covert banking operative. I’ve been inserted into the corporate office of a large bank. My job is to follow the money and identify key players. Mother has reason to believe that associates of the Bulgarian diplomat I identified about a week ago are involved in some not-so-legal dealings.

My full case background should be coming within the next few days, but here are the highlights:

- Bulgaria ‘s 2009 Corruption Index Score is 71st out of 180.
- Bulgaria’s perception of corruption value is lower than where it was a few years ago.
- A BBC news story discussing the EU’s concern can be found here.

“Tackling corruption and organized crime was supposed to be a pre-condition for Bulgaria's membership of the EU. But just over a year after it joined, three streams of EU funding have been suspended because of apparent fraud, and the EU's investigating agency has 45 cases of alleged Bulgarian malpractice on its books” (C. Miller, BBC News, 18Mar08).

When the police crack down on an illegal activity the perpetrators will need to work harder to maintain that source of income. If the EU is forcing Bulgarian law enforcement to investigate corruption in Bulgaria, the money making crimes will have to shift somewhere else. It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole…which, given the links to corruption and the mafia, is quite a nice play on words if I do say so myself.

Where do you live?


.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...

NJ Turnpike: "What exit are you from?"

The truck is packed and loaded. Based on intelligence, I still have time to pick up a coffee from the corner deli before I head back down the Jersey Turnpike. Traffic on the Sunday following Christmas is bad. After Exit 8 the lanes converge from five to three resulting in a parking lot where a highway once stood. This isn’t good.

I need a visual on an unknown foreign diplomat and I can’t see past the eighteen wheeler three vehicles ahead. When the GPS says you’re almost a five miles behind your target but forward progress is impossible, you start to go a little crazy. At this point, I think I’m singing better than the guy on my Ipod.

When traffic breaks, it’s time to focus on some mental math. It’s about 90 miles from here to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Assuming no rest stops, at an average estimated speed of 70 mph the diplomat will reach the bridge in about an hour twenty minutes. After the bridge, the roads diverge and there are too many exits to monitor alone.

So I want give myself a 15 mile safety net. I can only let the diplomat get 75 miles before I catch up. So I have to go 80 miles in the same amount of time it takes the diplomat to go 75 miles at 70 mph. If I go 74.67 mph, I should reach the diplomat in about 63 minutes.

63 minutes driving about 10 mph over the speed limit on the Sunday after Christmas with out of state plates in a state that has quite the hefty deficit. Nice. At this point, I’m thinking that coffee wasn’t worth the risk of meeting a sworn representative of the New Jersey State Troopers.

Visual contact achieved.

Diplomatic plates, after the prefix “D”, have a two digit code that signifies what nation the diplomat represents. This provides some anonymity. My target’s plate starts with “DQM.” Bulgaria. I snap a few pictures of the license plates and a profile shot of the driver as discretely as possible.

Before I can begin to figure how Bulgaria fits into everything, the non-descript dark colored American made SUV seven vehicles back is now only four. ‘As possible’ must not have been good enough. It is occupied by two thirty something white males.

I use an RV in the adjacent lane to create a block in traffic and proceed the last nine miles to the bridge. Keeping with my cover, I used EZ Pass to pay my exit toll. The SUV picks a cash lane. I take the exit for Rt. 13 N into Wilmington. The tarp covered luggage in the bed allows me to enter parts of town where a clean SUV driven by two white guys would attract some attention.

Satisfied the combination of the space created at the toll and the city detour sufficiently evaded my tail, I head home and contact Mother to let her know I made it back safely.

.-. . ... ..- .-.. - ...