I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks.
My suspicion is that Danny Tiang may have orchestrated the loss of his valuable Japanese KitKats in order to try to recoup an insurance payment. This may have been simply in response to him doubting an ability to sell the product, or due to a temperature excursion he was notified of en route that made them unsalable, but which he concealed to facilitate their loss and subsequent, admittedly failed, insurance fraud. Is that plausible?
I'm not saying it happened and I feel terrible for the guy to not get his KitKats, but the acquisiton casts a bit of doubt on his story I feel.
That’s another great point. I noticed that too, and the suggestion that it makes.
However, besides the image, in the article they don’t exactly sell the theory that he does anything suspicious at all. I don’t think they even suggested it. It seems he’s painting entirely as the victim.
This seeming contrast raises a fascinating point.
I totally agree with you of the importance of image messaging. Image analysis in the media of different countries is such a fascinating thing.
Like if you look at the representation of how: Black people are portrayed in American media; how Asian people are portrayed in American media; how white people are portrayed in Asian media; how Middle Eastern people are displayed in Anglosphere Western media — it’s very intriguing. By media here here I mostly mean the kind of editorial and advertising photography which you identified, wherever that is carried even in video.
It’s very a fascinating topic, and while it provides a clear window into the racial biases of different cultures it’s not extensively analyzed within the same channels that carry that imagery.
Yet it’s this powerful form of implicit messaging. The messaging functions through the presentation of a photorealistic “life like” (reflection of life) image that presents, programs, propagates and reinforces those racial biases.
Paradoxically, almost all cultures will pay lip service to wanting to do away with racism, while yet also dealing extensively in this imagery that implicitly carries negative racist messages. This creates a strange reinforcement of the stereotypes that, in words at least, a culture commonly says it seeks to reject.
Completely agree! It's hard to pin down intention or suggest coordination. Sometimes it could simply be accidental.
But it's also possible to argue that, in aggregate, the average media expression of a culture would likely reflect its unconscious biases. And I think the evidence of this in media imagery is clear.
Surely there may sometimes be a deliberate agenda carefully projected through manipulations of imagery, but other times the same end effect may occur simply through a "culturally unconscious" process.
Danny Taing does give off an Asian gangsta vibe. It wouldn't surprise me if he is a gangsta of sorts, in terms of business. It's not easy to be in a business that involves high risk international importing and distribution.
Haha that's a good catch! I agree it's funny to spot. I don't know. I wonder why?
It may seem like a small thing but I think you raise a fascinating and important point!
Could you advise on what a possible "correct" capitalization should be? I don't know! Here's what I think:
It would feel weird to capitalize white. I think because I see it as a descriptive color, not an identity. But in English text I've often seen Black capitalized when it's referring to people's skin color, so perhaps I'm just reflecting that.
But I don't think you can not-capitalize "Asian", as Asia is a proper name for a region, same for Middle East, tho probably can lowercase black? Haha I don't know ! :)
Maybe it's my skin color is what people call "white" in these simple distinctions, so using capitalization for other groups is a sign of respect, or a form of difference signaling, which would seem weird to apply to my one.
I suppose you could consider such distinctions as racist, but indeed by that definition then noting any racial distinction is racist.
So even the labels of Black/black or asian/Asian or white would be considered racist, and indeed they are racist because they connote racial distinctions.
However noting distinctions that are factual, descriptive, and not fabricated negatives is not "negative racism". So, while I think it's valid to call any denoting of racial distinctions racist, I think there's further nuance! A distinction between negative racism (using racial differences to send fabricated negativity), and positive racism (respecting and noting differences or positive characteristics).
Perhaps it's possible to think of the capitalization difference in a similar way to addressing others you can use "Mr/Ms/Mrs" or, in Chinese, "nin". Some kind of respect marker, formality signal perhaps, or an extension of common convention in other areas to this one... haha :)
It seems the names we have in english for different racial groups are not exactly consistent, like many "inconsistencies" in English.
Or, all of this might just be my own inconsistency in spelling, a natural variation which is not to be underestimated! haha ! :)
This wouldn't be the first supply chain disruption. Only a short while back Covid disrupted global supply chains. It'd absolutely make sense for this company to get the supply chain in house for a safer supply chain.
If something like this happens while such an acquisition is still ongoing, that wouldn't be suspicious, it'd just be a sign you made the right call.
Yeah, that's reasonable. Without further information we don't really know what prompted the purchase, but it's reasonable to speculate it is as you say: in response to pre-existing supply chain issues.
Taking it further, it would seem a pretty dumb fraud if the trail could be traced back so easily via ownership, making that suggestion less likely perhaps.
Indeed your defense of Tiang via the alternate interpretation of it being a sign he'd made the right call if the theft occurred during the acquisition, is also plausible.
It's good to keep in mind the different possible interpretations!
It's interesting how much we don't know given limited information. For example, I would never have considered that this kind of strategic theft would be so common a thing that it would touch a guy doing a "subscription box" service. So sad!
But then, we don't really know whether it was fraud or not by him. The timing of the acquisition suggests that as a possibility, indeed, but it's hard to say how likely that is.
I think this interesting discussion has highlighted how inadequate our knowledge of a remote situation really is to be able to judge it at a distance with any surety or authority. None of us are really equipped to make any judgements on this, and hopefully none of us have that intention. Discussing possibilities is okay, as long as we keep in mind our limitations! :)
Haha...I think this highlights the importance of carefully considering the evidence, and withholding judgement until you reach a very clear standard. It seems we have not yet reached that here. You have to consider the possible violations, for sure, but presumption of innocence is also very important!
With enough skill, it's possible to defend or vilify almost anything. That's why it's so important to avoid prejudice and to keep an open mind.
In this case, we don't have enough information to know what happened, but as this comment chain has shown, we can find many reasonable explanations for what might have happened.
It might be mundane rather than nefarious. If your business empire intersected a disaster at multiple points, figuring out which of your many insurance policies should pay out could be non-trivial, and reviewing the various terms, you might lean towards a preferred narrative. I guess that's a bit nefarious, but not as much as he stole his own candy.
That's an interesting point that I didn't consider as well!
On brief reflection I wouldn't consider that really nefarious as long as it was largely true. It's just "insurance optimization", as often unfortunately those terms seem strongly biased against claimants.
I sort of wonder how the Times would have ascertained that the acquisition had been completed in June. I’m wondering if the deal signed in June and closed in September. Maybe they found a merger sub formation doc for “Japan Crate Acquisition Corp.” or something and thought that meant the deal had been completed when the entity was formed.
Still a weird story. And man, that freight broker is either the unluckiest man on earth or not very good at his job.
I know right? The freight broker! It's like: Trust random guy who replied on Craigslist -> seems legit! Haha.
It is weird certainly to interested but uninvolved readers like us. Yet by the sound of it, to insiders in the industry, this strategic theft is surprisingly common! It must not be weird to insiders, but rather than unfortunate reality of logistics. :(
The Times may indeed have been sloppy in their fact checking and reporting, it would be good if they posted the basis for their conclusion. However, it's just as valid to consider they conducted proper due diligence and reported accurately. Without further information, we have to take what they say at the same value as every other fact reported in the story, or if we cast doubt on the fidelity of their reporting and demand further proof, we should do so consistently for every point.
Once we begin to doubt that, we can begin to create alternative facts for every point they make--combinatorially increasing the number of possible story interpretations! Haha :)
Worth noting that it is not Craigslist itself, though - they made an analogy that the freight hiring website was like the Craigslist of that industry (possibly ubiquity, possibly user experience, who knows?).
In a past life of criminality I used to pay the truck driver who picked up all the pallets of Beanie Babies coming off the ship from China to have one pallet a month go missing.
It was roulette what Beanie Babies I would get, but even if they were the most worthless ones I was still getting them below wholesale price, causing much confusion from my competitors as to how I was selling them below retail.
In another comment you mentioned you were in prison when ChatGPT came out. Was this the offense that got you incarcerated? If not, how'd you go from Beanie Babies to hard time?
The thing I was in prison for.. is different. I might be able to talk more soon. Prosecutor called my lawyer today and I have to be in court on Monday morning for all the charges to be dismissed. Thanks for 10 years in jail!
This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember it being about 6ft x 6ft x 6ft. It was a bunch of cardboard shipping boxes with clear wrap around them. I think I was paying £10,000 per pallet. He told me he would just skip scanning a pallet at the docks as they were loaded into his trailer, and then his mate would meet him at a roadside services on the motorway with a van and they would somehow move the pallet off the semi into the van.
Sometimes I would hit the jackpot and get dozens of the really expensive bears. I sold 800 bears once for $250,000 in cash to a guy who flew into the UK from Chicago.
The truck driver found me. He must have seen one of my adverts in the press or maybe someone he knew came to one of my Beanie Baby fairs, or heard one of my adverts on the radio. He lived in this crazy council town near me in Bristol where every house appeared to be of government construction, even the church. I remember sitting in his living room one day and there was a literally constant stream of little kids coming through his front door emptying bags of shoplifted merch onto his floor, and he would pick through and buy a couple of things and then they would go to the next house.
Not a book that glorifies crime. But one that shows us the hidden sides of humanity. The kind of stuff that happens and the kinds of things people do that you will not see on YV, or read about on X. Another window into the true lives of our fellow humans in an age where many of us are occupied with LLMs and project managers.
I'm just bummed I was left out from the recent Beanie Baby movie and the the documentary that came out a while back. I was easily the biggest, most ridiculous vendor in the world. Even Ty (the owner) tried to bribe me out of existence.
I have picked up a lot of stories over the years. Like the time the Secret Service were after me thinking that I was trying to assassinate Bill Clinton o_O
Can’t we do thing where you just tell all these stories to a voice recording app on your phone. And then we use GPT/Whisper to transcribe and convert it into a book. Not gonna win any fiction award. But sometimes it’s better than a thing exists than that it is perfect.
LOL. I'm not sure what you mean? He called me up on the phone and asked if I wanted to buy a lot of Beanies. When I went to meet him at his house it was obvious he was legit. I only paid cash on delivery. I got whatever sealed boxes I got. He didn't have the ability to pick and choose which pallet I got and I don't know if we ever figured out what was in each box from the outside.
>Seemingly on cue, Tristan followed up. “Time for some coming clean,” he confessed. “I’m actually a scammer and the owner of HCH doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,
To me it almost sounds like the scam is to get the goods into a storage facility they own and extort the owner of the goods for a high storage fee to get it released. And also rack up the fees by denying any claim of actual ownership for some period. Aka the scammer wants the victim to know where the goods are.
So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.
It sounds like it, but it still doesn't make sense to me. A scammer would want to be anonymous so they can't be prosecuted. But a warehouse owner would be well known.
Maybe the scammer got stuck on the storage fee and paperwork too while he spent the time searching for a buyer for this unique product. Then when he identified the fence he was into storage fees deeper than his liquidity (beyond merely cutting the scam in half-- his first plan). So he had the broker pay storage, release the product, then targeted the broker a second time with the same scam-- same board, same method, this time laser-focused and with success.
Why does the scammer need to contact them? Why can't the warehouse call and go "Uh, we seem to have your shipment, I don't know why it was off-loaded here, but now that it's here you need to pay us"?
Especially when they hadn’t even made any money on the scam, according to the article. What’s the angle here?
It’s a bit far-fetched I suppose, but the only possible explanation I can see for all of this is that this is an attempted (but bungled) insurance fraud scheme on the part of Bokksu. Especially given the conclusion of the article, where it turns out that a Bokksu subsidiary was in charge of handing off the shipment to the supposed trucking company. I wonder if there were actually Kit Kats in the shipment at all…
A sibling comment mentions why this isn't likely (half of them are still sitting in storage). But I love this theory anyway - with some more creative liberties, you could write a script to rival The Big Lebowski!
It occurred to me though that it could also be a “double-dipping” scam. The fake shipping company supposedly “loses” the merchandise, an insurance claim is filed, then the Kit Kats are quietly retrieved and resold. In that case, even if the insurance company refuses to pay out (as they did) it's not a total loss, as they're only out a few grand in storage fees. It'd be fairly low risk as well, as there wouldn't be any tangible evidence of fraud, and in the worst case it wouldn't be hard to recover the Kit Kats and pretend they were miraculously found.
It still seems sort of unlikely to me that Bokksu was attempting to commit insurance fraud, but it's hard to deny that the facts seem oddly to fit. Why would the scammer take the truckload to a cold storage facility, rather than, say, just abandoning the containers somewhere? Why would he admit to being a scammer, if not in order to provide a basis for an insurance claim? What possible benefit was there to the scammer, when he didn't even get any money for his role in the scheme (at least, not from the trucking broker)? And why would Bokksu not disclose until well after the fact that they owned the company that was responsible for releasing the containers to the trucking company?
For a company valued at $100M, $110K does seem like a trifling amount of money to commit fraud over, but stranger things have certainly happened.
It doesn't make sense that the original owner would allow this to go so far as 50% of the load being lost in storage bureaucracy and the mess published by a journalist. The scammer was skimming pennies and generating much bigger losses to everyone else.
One factor could also be the scammer getting bad conscience when realizing they weren't just skimming off a corp but screwing over a small-timer. Maybe they were drunk or high at the time of the call.
Seems like there was more than one independently scheming entity in some way, and at least one scheme didn't pan out as planned. The Big Lebowski reference doesn't seem too far-fetched...
When I was awarded MVP by Microsoft in like, 2004, they sent me a really nice watch by DHL.
I went to DHL warehouse and picked up the shipping box. I opened the box as I walked to my car. Inside was the watch box. I opened the watch box. Inside was no watch. Inside was a folded piece of DHL-headed yellow paper which had the following hand-written on it:
Yes, Microsoft, bless them, sent me another out right away. I don't think anyone followed up with DHL. I went back in the DHL office after I found the piece of paper and showed them and we all had a good laugh, but I think they told me to just call Microsoft to sort it out.
> That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,
Whenever I read stuff like this, I end up feeling like I'm not imaginative enough to scam people.
Also, this isn't the same thing, but ... years ago, when Craigslist was running strong, I responded to a CL post to purchase a used laptop. The CL post was really well done, quite detailed (I remember it had photos and talked about how it was in tip-top shape except for the screen having a dead pixel in the lower left).
But the price was juuuuust a little too good to be true. I eventually emailed the guy and said something like, "This feels like a scam."
To my surprise, he came clean and asked me not to report it to CL!!!
My theory on this - they placed the goods in storage and could not fence them quickly but had found a buyer. Paying the storage fee would kill their profit. So they tell him where the goods are, betting he will 1. Pay the fee 2. Be stupid enough to seek a driver in the same fashion as he found the scammer.
Notice, the person who picked up goods for him after he paid a storage fee was also a scammer. My guess is it is the same as the first scammer or in cahoots.
This shows up the difference between a freight forwarder and a freight broker.[1]
A freight broker is just a matchmaker who takes a cut. A US freight forwarder is stuck with end to end responsibility for the shipment.
There are lots of high-trust interfaces like this in the legacy businesses that make up most of world commerce. It might not be feasible to do much more in the way of background checks.
I mean, how is there no way to authenticate the truckers you charter on that platform, or when they arrive to pick up the load. Presumably the least they can do is identify the person.
There's "kit" in this story but no "kat." Don't storage facilities have a procedure to verify who deposits what. And security cameras. Is Tristan a known client of the storage facility? Maybe Vin Diesel drove the truck. Looks to me the storage facilities are on the take. Keep the load for a few weeks then demand payment to release the load. This way the storage space doesn't go unused.
You’re assuming a level of system coordination that doesn’t exist. The storage facility isn’t going to do a damn thing with security cameras unless the police order it. The police aren’t going to get involved unless there’s a clear shot at convicting someone. And storage facilities hold onto peoples’ goods for nonpayment all the time, that’s literally how the show Storage Wars existed.
This sounds like a scam run by the storage companies. Otherwise it is hard to understand what motivation "Tristan" had to drop the product off there instead of just, say, abandoning it on the side of the road. I can imagine a scammer getting upset that their load was a bunch of candy and not laptops or something else of high value, but why take it to a storage unit after accepting the load?
The actual scam here didn't play out, so NYTimes does not have the full story.
What happens is they truck the load to a yard and open it up. The contents of the trailer are then stolen and dumped into the gray market. If it has no value the load gets dumped into a storage facility and because the goods are accounted for law enforcement won't get involved.
The load was coming from Japan and probably insured for a lot of money, which ticked all the boxes that it would be electronics or household goods of some sort. They were probably shocked when it was just a brunch of weird flavors of candy they couldn't sell.
That doesn't quite scan either. Avoiding interest from law enforcement could be a motive for returning the goods, but the moment they actually steal a shipment they're on the hook again. I think the idea only works if the vast majority of the hijacked containers are returned -- but that is an absurd idea.
Sometimes if you can get someone on the hook you can keep extracting money from them. "You need to pay us for storage." "Oh sorry we forgot to mention, you need to pay the customs agent." "We need to cover our gas expenses."
So they may have actually dumped the goods but seeing if they could get any more out of the mark.
But Tristan never got paid anything, and came right out and told the person he was a scammer before telling him exactly where to find his freight and never tried to extract any money from the victim.
So either he's a scammer with a heart of gold and didn't want a bunch of chocolate to go to waste, or he's in on it somehow with the storage facilities.
He paid $2000 but doesn’t seem enough to make the scam worthwhile. Maybe the “happy path” is a multimillion cargo and a disinterest conglomerate that will just claim on insurance. Having a low value cargo and a very interested one man band is not worth the risk of getting caught.
I know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn’t kit kat just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal with the boner these companies have about withholding certain flavors in certain markets?
For chocolate bars and stuff like KitKats I can't think that I've hardly ever seen them use HFCS instead of sugar. Maybe in ones with a more liquid component. Like, I'm pretty sure even the lowly standard Hershey bar uses sugar.
Yes, I wasn't referring specifically to japanese kitkats - I don't know what's in them, been a couple years. But the use of palm oil has become pretty pervasive and (maybe it's placebo effect) the flavour has declined.
That's pretty much true of most overseas candies and chocolates. Some of the best chocolates from Europe use cocoa butter and real sugar. Not Processed Cocoa Powder, HFCS, additives, colorings, preservatives, and then tempered with plastic.
Costco doesn’t sell caseloads of Cocacola shipped all the way from Mexico to the north east because it’s “hipster bullshit.”
I’m in Europe right now and Coke tastes way better, and doesn’t leave a mild bad feeling after drinking it like it does in the US.
There is a significant chemical difference between sugar and HFCS. For one, the molecules in sugar are disaccharides while in HFCS they are free. High Fructose CS also has more fructose, which is the worst type of sugar. There’s a Wikipedia page I’ve been trying to find again for years, but basically fructose is multiple times more reactive in your blood than glucose and creates nasties when it reacts with other things you eat, namely fats.
> Costco doesn’t sell caseloads of Cocacola shipped all the way from Mexico to the north east because it’s “hipster bullshit.”
Costco sells a lot of good stuff but they also sell plenty of stuff because it is hipster bullshit. Case in point.
> There is a significant chemical difference between sugar and HFCS. For one, the molecules in sugar are disaccharides while in HFCS they are free.
And those molecules are enzymatically broken down to monosaccharides early on in your GI tract, long before it ever makes into your blood.
Sucrose is never absorbed into your bloodstream.
> but basically fructose is multiple times more reactive in your blood than glucose and creates nasties when it reacts with other things you eat, namely fats.
Yes and sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose and this dissociation occurs long before anything about the bloodstream enters the picture it happens right in the intestines mixing with all the other fatty Mexican and European garbage you’re eating.
All the bad shit you think happens with fructose will occur with “real” sugar consumption. So your reply or Wikipedia article would make no sense in this context hipster.
Being downvoted by the HN moron brigade (and I’m more referring to the parallel comment rather than mine) doesn’t change any simple scientific and physiologic facts.
By your logic eating sugar is the same as eating brown rice, since they’re both broken down before going into your blood. Sugar isn’t healthy, but HFCS is even worse, with measurably higher glycemic index. And as mentioned, it has more fructose (5%.)
“Compared with sucrose, HFCS leads to greater fructose systemic exposure and significantly different acute metabolic effects.”
No that is not by my logic, that is something you’re making up, I never brought up any completely different foods. Rice and refined sugar products are not the same. Try again.
Again because you are obviously slow (too much sugar?): sugar (like HFCS) is a refined product, it will have similar glycemic index to HFCS. The enzymatic breakdown of sucrose is fast enough not to matter.
Rice is not, stop muddying the waters with irrelevant bullshit.
There is no evidence that the 5% difference in fructose content between usual HFCS and sucrose is of any consequence for health outcomes.
Costco selling caseloads is a pretty strong argument that it might be hipster bullshit given Costco’s market demographics.
IIRC there have been a few studies on the Coca Cola and the biggest thing is being told it’s Mexican coke and having it be in a cold glass bottle - real sugar coke in a can or glass ranked lower than HFCS coke in a glass bottle and misidentified.
Of course the cognoscenti know that the real deal is Coke in returnable bottles that are probably older than you are. No retornable is export shit.
I hadn’t heard about this origin story of Japanese KitKat before and looked it up.
Kitto katsu! means "you will surely win" or "you will surely succeed".
So it is given as tokens for success in exams and the like.
Katsu for winning/succeeding also can be seen in Tonkatsu = pork cutlet (katsu is the Japanese "shortening" of cutlet), which is also offered as a success token.
It's a reduced sugar bitter dark chocolate kitkat that they know kids won't like. Hence "Otona No Amasa" or "sweetness for adults" marketing. They have a bunch of flavors under that subbrand.
The manufacturers likely don't want to deal with additional SKUs and logistics for what is a low volume item in those regions. Allergies/ingredient disclosure might present challenges as well.
I don't think it's a boner over withholding flavors.
It's likely a profit boner. Margins on obscure flavors aren't projected to be high enough in whatever market, so they don't offer it. But in some other market, projections look good, so they offer it.
The untold thing here is that the KitKats are honestly not that good. The best ones are basically "huh, kinda intersting odd flavor", but especially in Europe I've only basically been met with disgust at the flavored kitkats.
They're good flavors, but not quite mass market compatible outside Japan I'd presume. I used to live in a city with a large japanese enclave and they were pretty well available from local asian grocery stores, though still 5 times as expensive as regular.
It certainly seems strange. But maybe the demand from a relatively few Japanophiles doesn't outweigh the adminstrative costs of maintaining a much larger number of SKUs (including regulatory requirements) and they'd send boxes of green tea chocolate to go out of date on shelves. I'd have thought a big corporate would have pretty scalable product range management but maybe it's just cheaper to hand that off to importers. Some calculation must presumably be involved.
Though I like to think the Nestlé/Hershey executives have been threatened by immaculately-suited Pocky-toting enforcers of the importers making profits on the novelty arbitrage.
Presumably in this case it has something to do with how Hershey owns the rights for Kit-Kat in the USA, but Nestle everywhere (at least as far as I know) else.
It does seem like Japanese brands are more optimized for smaller size and number of batches. Could be due to accommodating logistics, media hype culture, denser population, omnipresent convenience stores, etc.
It's also hard to understand just how popular KitKats are in Japan and how their products and limited time offers cater uniquely to the Japanese audience.
KitKat has a lot of competition in the UK where caramels are way more popular than weird KK flavors.
KitKat are already full of wafer so Mondelez wouldn't be motivated to 'put anything in the chocolate bar at all so long as it's not chocolate'. What's cheaper than wafer? I guess if they can make more of the inside wafer, so there's less chocolate coating?
Perhaps you can make wafer bubbly, so it's more air? Although it's cheaper to just put it in a plastic wrapper and fill the wrapper with nitrogen...
It's funny how this became a fad because it's really just mediocre chocolate with a bunch of aromatic addatives. I'm guessing they use whatever they can to make those flavors.
I have tried one or two when they've been in a local store, but as a chocoholic it's sacrilicious.
It's true it's not high-quality chocolate. The appeal seems to be to people who get into hobbies like this for the exclusivity or exotic nature of the items. The same kind of people who used to buy "limited edition" Supreme bling and then post it to Insta. Essentially hypebeast kiddies.
Judging from the anger of the second driver, the scam is to steal the load and resell it on the black market; the driver must not have known what he was picking up? Or maybe they just take an up-front payment and disappear.
Why Tristan bothered taking the loads to the storage facilities instead of just throwing them out the back is a mystery. Or why the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of payment.
The key to the whole scam is that the shipments are cross-continental and that there's no observability into where the shipment is during that time. The scammer immediately drops off the load at a storage facility, which begins to bill for storage time, several days later, when the load is supposed to arrive on the other side of the country, the owner comes looking for it and the storage facility presents the owner with an invoice for storage time that wasn't originally needed. The owner pays the storage facility, which sold storage space that would have gone unused, and the storage facility pays the driver a finder's fee kickback.
It's a variant on the squeegee window washers' scam. Pull up at the stoplight and the scammer starts washing your window, then demands payment for a service you didn't agree to. Victims pay because the amount of money is too small relative to the hassle of being held up, not because they (didn't) freely purchased a service that they got real value out of.
For a moment there I thought it was going to be a company by one of HN's users: Candy Japan. Same business: Japanese candy subscription service. But the user profile says Candy Japan is no more. :-(
I used to get boxes from them. Candy Japan is/was a one person operation run by a Finnish guy named Bemmu, who also blogged about his life in Japan.
His user profile is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu. It now says it was shut down, so I guess it's official. Weird that he wouldn't update the site, though, which just says it's temporarily paused.
I'm not surprised that decided to shut it down; it seemed like a lot of work, and there are now a number of competitors doing the same thing at a much higher volume, with free world-wide shipping, glossy packaging, and so on.
> In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks.
This sounds like insurance fraud to me. Pure speculation, but if that’s what Bokksu wanted to do, they’d hire a middleman then claim deniability.
This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect them with freight loads that need to move from one place to another. If the company does the vetting and works with an insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture some value from creating a safer market.
A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page. It was in transit for about 5 minutes, and then marked as "delivered", and the tracking page became unavailable for use. I emailed Apple and they gave me a refund, then I went to the store myself and acted as my own courier. That time I got a laptop.
What I'm saying is, "uber for X" is exactly what already exists. Someone picks up your stuff for a small fee, and if it's good, they just keep it for themselves and re-join the platform with a new name.
Incidentally, Apple no longer offers same-day delivery, at least to me.
Ouch! My thought was that the app based model with some sort of vetting of drivers was better than a jobs board with people's names on it. Perhaps not a lot better but possibly better.
According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year.
The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
If you look around you can probably find an outlet store that sells things such as goods from containers that were dropped at port, pallets that were crushed, etc.
It’s not worth retrieving them from the sea, but anytime they get damaged on land the insurance company ends up owning the remains and auctions it off.
> By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year.
Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?
> Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking
No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare.
Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms.
The key is that they can fit way more than 10,000 extra containers a year, and companies like Walmart are perfectly fine paying a fraction of the cost of an internal protected container for one that has a chance of disappearing.
Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.
There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines.
If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that.
Interesting article! This would certainly be amenable to signal processing algorithms if you could get reliable wave height/frequency data. I suspect flying a kite doing SAR above and behind the ship (looking forward) would likely be to complicated.
I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
The containers would be flooded with saltwater. Unless the container was literally full of gold (or similar), the contents are irrepairably damaged and worthless.
I was struck by these two paragraphs in the article:
Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.
Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.
Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing?
Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
The market is very competitive- capacity can get tight, which makes room for the “little guy” to grab a load. Even at the biggest companies with millions of lines of software, tons of logistics is still driven by email.
Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist.
More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
In every industry there are fly by night hucksters that take business from people who have no experience procuring services and don't know how to find legitimate companies. Mr Black seems like one of these. Imagine risking 100k on a craiglist driver, I don't blame Mr Black, he has his business model and customers who take th risk on him, but surely the candy company would spend more time doing due diligence of vendors and insurance when it involves a 100k shipment. A lesson learnt I suppose
A commenter on the thread mentioned that Apple once tried to one-day-ship them a laptop via Uber Eats and the driver vanished with the laptop. Apps don’t magically make things better.
So stupid though, we have the technology to solve this problem, why don't truckers have an I'd card that stores a key to "sign" for taking the goods into their possession. There's all sorts of ways this could be solved.
My luggage got "misplaced" in Amsterdam airport, returned 3 days later minus my japanese kit-kats.
I complained to both my airline and the airport but was given the runaround, some bullcrap about removing organic matter, strangely they left the bag of raw onions.
I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks.
My suspicion is that Danny Tiang may have orchestrated the loss of his valuable Japanese KitKats in order to try to recoup an insurance payment. This may have been simply in response to him doubting an ability to sell the product, or due to a temperature excursion he was notified of en route that made them unsalable, but which he concealed to facilitate their loss and subsequent, admittedly failed, insurance fraud. Is that plausible?
I'm not saying it happened and I feel terrible for the guy to not get his KitKats, but the acquisiton casts a bit of doubt on his story I feel.