The Wire - Updated
Anchor Books has re-released David W. Maurer's classic "The Big Con", parts of which were used in the movie "The Sting". In the late 1880's and 1890's unemployed telegraph operators would travel the country touting their ability to tap telegraph wires for horse race results, "hold-up" or "delay" those results allowing a bet to be put down before the results were then "released". Maurer is of the opinion that some operators were able to perform this technical wizardry, but that the real money was in the selling of complicated equipment to the local rubes.
Of course these days who could believe that that it was possible to obtain the horse race results before anyone else with sufficient time to lay down a large bet? Real time and technology would make it impossible, would it not?
No.
Technology makes it less likely that the results could be intercepted: therefore the horse race ticket has to be doctored after the race is run. The modern version of this scam is called "backdating options". Senior officers of companies are given options with a "fair market value" strike price. But stock prices which fluctuate widly can have a wide range of fair prices. Obviously by picking the lower fair price, a profit can be locked in.
Curiously, one expert believes:
"To get the large aggregate effects that Prof. Lie found, he said, hundreds of companies would need to have been engaged in what amounts to “criminal activity.”That would “require systematic stupidity in the corporate world, which I find hard to believe,” he said. “I’m assuming they have lawyers.”
How about a lust for larceny combined with shrewd lawyers?
