N. Korea: Bilking the Elderly, With a Corporate Assist(Wachovia pressured to handle NK funds?)

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Richard Guthrie, a 92-year-old Army veteran, was one of those victims. He ended up on scam artists’ lists because his name, like millions of others, was sold by large companies to telemarketing criminals, who then turned to major banks to steal his life’s savings.

Mr. Guthrie, who lives in Iowa, had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information. InfoUSA sold his name, and data on scores of other elderly Americans, to known lawbreakers, regulators say.

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone — surrounded by his Purple Heart medal, photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine years earlier — the telephone rang day and night. After criminals tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account, according to banking records.

strange flurry of nasty press for Wachovia Besides, Wachovia is in hot water for other shady involvements(see editor blog from Foreign Policy.) No wonder it is pretty accommodating to handling NK funds. It is a sort of plea bargain. Bush admin is really disappointing, stooping to a new low.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/4845

Home » blogs » Blake Hounshell

Mon, 05/21/2007 - 12:10pm.

It's been a bad press cycle for Wachovia. First, news broke that the North Carolina-based bank was considering pitching in to salvage the U.S.-North Korea nuclear deal by agreeing to be the transit point for a $25 million hot potato—impounded funds that no bank seems to want to take, but that are crucial for the deal's success. Why would Wachovia want to be helpful, when its reputation could be severely damaged by accepting tainted money?

Interestingly, news broke on Friday that, along with seven other banks, Wachovia has been subpoened as part of what Bloomberg News is calling "the widest criminal investigation ever of the municipal bond market." There is no indication that Wachovia has been accused of wrongdoing yet, but according to the story, there may be some smoke there:

Federal investigators are probing whether Wall Street banks and financial advisers conspired to rig the bidding for the investments that local governments buy with some of the $400 billion raised each year by selling municipal bonds. The regulators also sought information on complex derivatives, financial products that derive their value from underlying bonds, an aspect of the investigation highlighted by the California documents.

Wachovia also got some extremely unfavorable coverage in this infuriating New York Times story about how elderly Americans are allegedly being scammed by thieves who purchase information legally from infoUSA, a company that sell consumer data:

Although some companies, including Wachovia, have made refunds to victims who have complained, neither that bank nor infoUSA stopped working with criminals even after executives were warned that they were aiding continuing crimes, according to government investigators. Instead, those companies collected millions of dollars in fees from scam artists. (Neither company has been formally accused of wrongdoing by the authorities.)

The man in charge of InfoUSA, the company which sold the telemarketing scam lists that targeted elderly people, is named Vinod Gupta.

Here is a photo of Gupta -

He also controls Opinion Research, the firm running the presidential polling for CNN.

See these articles -

CNN Pollster Vinod Gupta donates $1000 to Hillary Clinton - "She'll be our next President"

FR EXCLUSIVE - CNN hires Clinton-controlled Opinion Research Corp. for 2008 Presidential Polling

I found the Bloomberg story you referenced, and then there was this interesting bit "UBS and Bear Stearns both said that investigators sought information on derivatives sold to municipal borrowers as well as information related to guaranteed investment contracts, which local governments frequently buy with the proceeds of bond sales."

Maybe my memory is just weak on this one, but I don't remember "buying investments" as one of the traditional uses for the proceeds of municipal bond sales.

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