Thursday, April 16, 2015

When the Lies Don't Even Make Sense: "Bluechip Business Bonds" HYIP

Another HYIP (read: small online Ponzi scheme) that hit the scenes recently is "Bluechip Business Bonds", which obviously has nothing to do with business or bonds. Instead, it's promising up to 4% DAILY interest. Yes, daily. It can't be real, obviously.


But when it writes fiction... well...

Let's take an example, under people: it showed a "Peter Boskin", who allegedly received a MBA from Bowdoin College.


First of all, that is a photo of Pyotr Volkov, head of Department of Stock Exchange Operations of Gazprom, the Russian energy company. The faker trimmed the photo and mirrored it to throw off the image search. Here's the original photo for comparison.





Furthermore, Bowdoin College doesn't offer MBA program. It's a liberal arts college.


And why does it say "Reed served in the Peace Corps"? Who's Reed? That turns out to be "Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix. Here's Crunchbase data on Mr. Hastings:


Exact same wording, except the perp added a "M" in front of BA to embellish it. Tsk tsk tsk. Naughty, naughty, naughty.

Ah, wait, there's more.




Another suspicious profile here is "Kelly Henrietta"


Except this is really a photo of "Cat Fawcett", Gazprom, London office:


Note that again, the image had been mirrored to throw off image search engine.

As for the wording, this happens to be copied from another Netflix employee, Tawni Cranz:


Man, looks like this perp just likes copying stuff from the same companies over and over, eh?

If you fake something, at least make it not so obvious fake... Sheesh.

I have no doubt that the other two "profiles" of officers are similarly faked, probably with photos from Gazprom and bio from Netflix as well.

P.S. The "third" photo is Igor Lipskii, of Gazprom, and "fourth" photo is Julia Elmgren, also of Gazprom.

What to take away: Just because the image didn't come up in Google Image Search doesn't necessarily mean it's "clean". Mirror it and try again. 

2 comments:

  1. Your title should read "When the lies don't even make sense".

    ReplyDelete