High profits and low penalties are behind organized crime’s interest in pirate DVDs, according to the nonprofit RAND Corporation’s report. financed by the Motion Picture Association. Reuters had the story:
Crime syndicates have become involved in the entire supply chain of illegal films, from their manufacture to their street sales, as piracy takes its place alongside such criminal activities as drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion and human smuggling.
"Given the enormous profit margins, it's no surprise that organized crime has moved into film piracy," said Greg Treverton, the report's lead author and director of RAND's Center for Global Risk and Security. "The profits are high, and penalties for being caught are relatively low."
Peddling heroin and cocaine brings chump change compared to the profits criminals can make from pirating films. A pirated Malaysian DVD costs 70 cents to make and sells in
RAND also noted three cases of film piracy benefiting terrorist groups: The IRA,
The LA Times, however, is not buying the terrorism link, mostly because the study was funded by the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The organization, writes the Times’s entertainment blogger…
…in addition to not exactly being an objective source, has a long track record of crying wolf when it comes to piracy claims. (In 2005, for example, an MPAA study that made headlines with its claim that 44% of Hollywood's piracy losses came from college students illegally downloading movies turned out to be full of wildly inflated numbers, as this 2008 story revealed.)
The post, written by Ben Jones, points out that the study acknowledges using the terms "piracy" and "counterfeiting" interchangeably, although they often mean totally different things: "Piracy in this context tends to refer mostly to digitally representable items, while counterfeit goods can run the gamut from aircraft parts to cigarettes." It also questions the actual evidence linking some of the crimes to piracy. And I have to admit that some of the evidence seems, well, shaky, especially in Rand's strangely melodramatic account of 21 illegal Chinese immigrants who "drowned in the rising tide of
At any rate,
ID
Here’s a case from the FBI that shows how an international identity-theft crime ring works.
A certain Mikhail Tuknov in
The proceeds were sent by a variety of means to the Russian sources who paid Mr. Tuknov his commission and sent new numbers to him to generate more cash. Mr. Tuknov admitted that between August 2005 and March 2006, he moved approximately 1044 fraudulent debit card numbers and 1045 related PINS to his associates, resulting in losses to the issuing banks of approximately $371,000.00.
Just one day after Tuknov entered his guilty plea, a senior Russian official told businesses in
Russian deputy prime minister Dmitri Kozak, visiting Ireland as part of the largest Russian trade delegation to that country in 10 years, said the Russian government has done a lot to address the problem.
Serbian Police Arrest 35 in Sting
Serbian police Monday arrested 35 people – including 18 policemen – in connection with a smuggling ring operating between
Police say they were smuggling oil, alcohol and other excise products across the administrative boundary with Kosovo.
The suspects crossed the administrative line in the Ground Safety Zone (GSZ) toward the
The smugglers are believed to have bribed the policemen– who were also arrested today – ahead of crossing the line.
Police directorate head Milorad Veljovic said the operation was part of
UN Vacancies Weaken Corruption Probes
Vacant job posts at the UN’s inspector general’s office have left the agency without the manpower to investigate corruption and other malfeasance, reported the Washington Times last week.
According to an internal audit made available to The
"The committee's main concern is that the high vacancy rate within [OIOS] will have an adverse impact on the capacity and ability of the office to accomplish its program of work," wrote the auditors, members of the U.N. Independent Audit Advisory Committee (IAAC).
The auditors expressed "significant concern" that there is no permanent director of the Investigation Division, which has inherited 175 procurement-related cases from a recently shuttered unit, the U.N. Procurement Task Force, that reviewed contracts for the purchase of goods and services. That was on top of several hundred other open cases being probed by the OIOS.
Italian anti-mafia prosecutors last week urged Australia’s Federal Police to re-open a Rome office they shuttered in 2002, saying that Italian organized crime links to
Last month, the AFP launched a fresh inquiry into allegations that the Liberal Party had accepted up to $100,000 in donations from Mafia-linked businessmen to help alleged Calabrian crime figure Francesco Madafferi get a visa to stay in Australia. Madafferi was arrested last year in connection with a syndicate accused of involvement in the world's largest importation of ecstasy into
The
In other international mafia news, Spanish authorities arrested yet another suspected Calabrian mafia don last week. Guiseppe Utzeri, 48, is suspected of involvement in a large drug trafficking operation in
Corruption Round-up
Spain’s conservative opposition was named and shamed in a corruption scandal last Friday, after a judge formally named senior party officials suspected of taking bribes. Baltasar Garzon identified
In Israel, police recommended last week that outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert be slapped with a third graft charge, after the authorities announced they would indict Olmert on two other charges. The anti-fraud unit recommended that
And in North America, the president of
"The main cause of the problems associated with organized crime is having the world's biggest consumer next to us," (President Felipe) Calderon said in an interview with AFP.
"Drug trafficking in the
